'08 election brings major shift in religious-political alignments

A Year in advance of the presidential election, as the bishops gathered in Baltimore to hammer out their every-four-year statement on political responsibility, the accepted political wisdom of recent years appeared as fleeting as autumn's colors.

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Who could have imagined, in the heat of the 2004 presidential election, that the Republican front-runner three years later would be the thrice-married, prochoice, progay, antigun former mayor of New York, whose children won't even endorse him?

Or that values voters so ardently and successfully recruited to the Republican cause during the past two presidential elections would appear so divided, if not missing, from the campaign so far?

Who could have imagined the political oddball pairing of the year: the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani by TV evangelist Pat Robertson, the antigay, antiabortion channeler of celestial pronouncements who once blamed 9/11 on the sins of America?

The radically revamped political landscape of this year's presidential politics makes all the more intriguing the perennial question: Whither the Catholic vote? It is an important question for at least two reasons: Catholics number 67 million, roughly a quarter of the population, and Catholics have a knack for picking winners.

"The Catholic vote is the preeminent swing vote," said Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese, who teaches at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. "If you look at most recent elections, they've always voted for the winners." That goes for the two Clinton elections. In 2000, a majority of Catholics voted for Al Gore, who won the popular vote but lost to George Bush in the Supreme Court.

A considerable difference exists, however, between what the bishops consider top Catholic priorities and what ordinary Catholics consider important when they go to vote. This year the bishops have placed the matter of abortion as emphatically as ever at the center of their political responsibility statement, though not to the exclusion of such other concerns as torture, war and poverty. Thus, if the front-runners of today, Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, both pro-choice, are the nominees of 2008, in some respects it could well be a statement in futile search of a candidate. The reality is that abortion is rarely the top concern for the majority of Catholic voters, despite a persistent campaign by the Catholic hierarchy to make it the centerpiece of Catholic politics since the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

In 2004, Catholics voted for George Bush over John Kerry. If some took that as a sign that the faithful were lining up on the abortion issue, it was a short-lived shift, since Catholics joined others, without much regard for candidates' abortion position, in turning out Republicans in the 2006 congressional elections.

In that election, 55 percent of Catholics voted Democratic, according to exit polls.

John Kenneth White, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America, doubts that there is something as distinct as "the Catholic vote." "If you Look at the overall Catholic vote, it looks like the rest of America, it doesn't look that much different," he said. The unsuccessful campaign of John Kerry, the Catholic candidate in 2004, "had everything to do with a lot of other things" than what are usually considered the Catholic hot-button issues, "but not because Catholic identity was brought to the polls."

White believes that the number of Catholics who bring that strong identity to the polls, who define their approach to national politics by a strong agreement with the bishops' teaching on such matters as abortion, stem-cell research and homosexuality, "is very small."

In the same way, he said, Hispanic Catholics are more likely to vote on the basis of ethnic identification than on the basis of their Catholicism. "Take immigration, for instance," said White. "Immigration for Hispanics is far more important than any sense of Catholic identity."

Christine Sierra, professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, would agree with the assessment that much has changed since 2004. "The evangelical right is not finding a candidate they can really strongly get behind and they are a bit fractured right now," she said. "The so-called wedge issues that have been used in the past are really falling down the political agenda behind the war in Iraq and domestic social issues such as health care, jobs, economy and probably education." That's also true of Hispanic Catholics, she said. Except for a small minority of Catholic Hispanics and for some evangelical Hispanics, a growing but still relatively small percentage of the population, issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage are not much of a priority, she said.

She also has a different view of the Latino vote regarding immigration. "In every single survey where Latinos are asked to volunteer their top concerns, they say education, jobs/economy and health care." Immigration is not part of that mix unless it is placed on the agenda and that usually comes from non-Latino, anti-immigration forces, she said.