Posted on 11/11/2006 1:41:23 PM PST by Sabramerican
Catholic Vote Swings Democratic in Midterm Elections By Jeff Diamant Religion News Service
Catholics, who compose a massive 67 million-person slice of the electorate, favored Democrats in Tuesday's election by 55 percent to 45 percent, according to National Election Pool exit polls.
That's a marked difference from 2004, when President Bush, a Republican United Methodist, won 52 percent of the Catholic vote and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a Catholic, received 47 percent.
Catholic voting patterns varied by state, but the overall shift helped Democrats in several big states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to John Green, a senior fellow at Washington's Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
For much of the 20th century, American Catholics were loyal Democrats, but in recent elections their voting patterns have been largely indistinguishable from the general population.
And for the last quarter-century, conservative Catholics and white evangelicals have increasingly voted Republican, making opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage their top political issues.
Yet since the 2004 presidential election, liberal religious groups have worked to get the Catholic vote back to the Democratic Party, using the issues of poverty, health care and environmentalism as ways to get voters' attention. A liberal group called Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good credits those efforts for the shifts reflected in Tuesday's voting.
Green says the shift is harder to explain.
"It could be that many Catholics that had voted Republican in the past were not real happy with that vote," he said. "And it's entirely plausible that efforts by religious progressives did move some Catholics to vote Democratic."
For years, polls have shown that people who attend religious services at least once a week are more likely to vote Republican, and people who attend infrequently are more likely to vote for Democrats. Democrats did better this year with both groups than in 2004.
The Rev. Tony Campolo, a liberal evangelist and professor emeritus at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, says that since 2004, when Kerry was widely perceived as uncomfortable talking about his faith, Democratic candidates have tried harder to attract religious voters.
"Democrats have learned that when you want to speak to the religious community, you can't do it simply by saying `I went to church when I was a kid,' or quote a few Bible verses in your speech," Campolo said. "What you have to do," he said, is convince people who are religious that one's views "on things like torture, on things like war, on things like poverty, emerge out of your spiritual convictions."
White evangelicals, who have collectively voted Republican since the 1980s, had been widely expected to sit out the election because of anger over sex scandals and the war in Iraq. But polling indicates they voted in full force, and that Republicans came away with a healthy 70 percent of their votes, down only 8 percentage points from what they gave President Bush in 2004.
Jewish voters, longtime Democratic loyalists as a group, gave congressional Democrats nationwide 87 percent of their vote.
THIS Catholic even voted for Bob Dole (!) instead of voting a RAT in office!
Do you really think that (conservatives sitting home). I know a lot of pissed off conservatives that still voted R. I just don't think there was enough of a conservative sit-out to make the big difference. And the exit polling seems to indicate it was more the swing voters that swung (swinged?) the other way this time. I.e., the catholics who sometimes vote R, sometimes D. Of those, I'm related to a few. And no, I don't understand them.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but isn't a drop from 52 to 45 also only 7%? Doesn't that mean that conservative Catholic and Evangelical turnout dropped about equally?
(78-70) / 78 = 10%. The percentage of Protestant voters that did the same.
Don't blame me, even though I'm more of a CINO (Catholic In Name Only).
As the Chief of Field operations for Catholics Against Kerry I dealt with the question of who is a Catholic for purposes of figureing out whta is the "Catholic vote".
People who go to Church to be Baptized, married and burried. Are not Catholics any more than Frances Kissling of Catholics for Free Choice are Catholics. To trust Pew or anyone else at this point is a little premature. Let's see.
There was an excellent study of the Catholic vote in Crisis Magazine some years ago. As this article notes, almost all Catholics used to be Democrats, because they were working class Irish, Poles, Italians, etc. Also, like Jews, Catholics were discriminated against by the WASP establishment.
Then they started drifting out of the party when it began to represent abortion and perversion more than the little guy. This took decades, but has seen the Catholic Republican vote go up from single digits to a little over 50-50.
Catholics who attend Mass regularly are far more likely to vote Republican than nominal Catholics.
Unfortunately, catechesis has been uneven since Vatican II, so a lot of Catholics really have not been properly educated in their religion unless they have made an effort to do it themselves, or have had the good fortune to belong to a strong diocese or parish.
Apparently, they made some headway with their "Jesus was a socialist" and "neocon cabal" (read: Jews) nonsense.
While Jesus obviously stressed PERSONAL sacrifice, I cannot find where He advocated coerced "compassion".
And Israel is clearly a bulkhead of Civilization in a region stuck in the 8th century.
they are not catholics. they are socialists.
I don't know for sure. Maybe there are just more of them than us again!!!!
Yes, NANNY'S fault!!!!!
If the shoe fits wear it!!!!!
"Bush has been a disappointment these last two years, accomplishing very little except for those two excellent Supreme Court appointments."
The "religious, saintly Demos blocked President Bush at every turn and daily spewed their hatred for him that he did not "do'" anything! And the RINOS HELPED the DEMOS to block him!
The most recent "impartial spin was what Lynne Cheney was talking about - CNN's "Broken Government.!"
And you say President Bush didn't DO anything?
Sounds like the liberal media's mantra!
Please read in this link about ALL the things President Bush HASN'T done for conserbvatives - And this compilation was done 3 years ago.
Guess how much he has done since - even with those saintly Demos BLOCKING him!
* * *
Who says George W. Bush has done "nothing" for conservatives?
WhiteHouse.gov; various news sources ^ | 1/27/04
Posted on 01/27/2004 7:03:00 AM PST by Wolfstar
[ED. NOTE: In the last few months, FReeper Southack put together a list of Bush administration achievements over its first three years in office, and tirelessly posted it whenever an opportunity presented itself. Southack gave me permission to take that list, organize it by topics, and enhance it with further research from whitehouse.gov and other sources. This thread is posted in gratitude to and in honor of Southack.]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1066122/posts
This is how some roman Catholics put it to me: Republicans want the death penalty for murderers but the bishop says no death penalty. Republicans want pro life but the bishop says let us decide by our conscience.
Notice it's the bishop this and that...not the pope.
There's more to the inconsistencies of their beliefs.
With that kind of whacky logic you cannot expect a better outcome.
Many of the Catholics I know are pro-life and anti-gay marriage, but they support minimum wage increases, welfare assistance, medicare and medicaid and are against the war and the death penalty.
Politicians seem to understand this. A lot of folks around here don't.
As much as I hate the policies of the Dims, it's not good for either party to rule the roost for too long.
Well, in my little parish here in Alabama the majority of us voted Republican. Elmore county voted about 70% Republican. Good catholics know not to support pro-abortionists. It really is that simple.
The drive by media (DBM) went well out of their way this year to support the dems. Many, if not most of their stories, were lies, half-truths, innuendos, miss-stated statistics and other fraudulent reports. Why start believing them whole cloth now that the election is over?
I wonder how you even report the voting trends of a subset of the electorate? Fact is, Republicans lost a bunch of squeakers to give control of Congress back to the Dems, but if the dems are so popular (as the DBM is now saying), why wasn't every election a blowout for them?
crickets....
The fact is, we're still a 50-50 nation.
The Neocons brought it on themselves when they pissed off the base.
Another telling sign is the white male vote for the GOP dropped from 60% in 2004 to 53% this year. The GOP needs to get AT LEAST 60% of the white male vote to maintain any majority, and needs to examine why there was such a dramatic drop among this core group.
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