Pope Leo XIV’s Voting History Reveals Clues About His Political Leanings

Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, was a recurrent voter in his home state of Illinois.

The new pontiff, elected on May 8 to succeed the late Pope Francis, voted many times in Will County outside Chicago, Illinois, according to voting records obtained by The New York Times. He last voted in the most recent presidential election in November 2024 via absentee ballot.

Pope Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, voted in three Republican primaries in Will County between 2012 and 2016, and voted in zero Democratic primaries during that time frame. He did not vote in the 2020 presidential election or the 2022 midterm election, according to Will County records.

Illinois voters do not register with a specific party, so the new pope’s political affiliation in the United States has not been formally documented.

Months before he was elected the new pope, Leo took to social media to criticize Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert.

Vance stated in a Jan. 29 interview, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

In response, Leo took to X to share an opinion piece from NCR Online and restate the article’s headline: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

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The new pope has previously made comments apparently discouraging acceptance of LGBTQ+ people. In 2012, he criticized Western norms for fostering “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel,” per a May 2 report by The New York Times, citing the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.”

Additionally, while in Chiclayo, Peru, Leo discouraged education on gender ideology, claiming it “seeks to create genders that don’t exist,” he told a local outlet, according to the Times.

However, in his first public address as pope, Leo emphasized the need for a church that “builds bridges, establishes dialogues,” and the ability to “receive everybody that needs our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”