Poll: Americans eager to vote for Catholics, women, minorities in 2016 — but not for atheists or socialists

Hillary Clinton — (Image credit: Ellis/Getty Images)

A Gallup poll released Monday finds that voters are overwhelmingly on board with electing a Catholic, female, or minority president in 2016 — but they're still not so comfortable with ideological minorities like atheists and especially socialists.

The high support for potential Catholic candidates may be correlated with the popularity of Pope Francis, but it has not translated to good poll numbers for the most visibly Catholic candidate in the 2016 race, Rick Santorum. By contrast, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders — though still quite a long shot — is performing increasingly well against front-runner Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.