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.
You are right. I think the moral and theological decline of mainstream Protestant churches started long before the current controversy over homosexuality. It began with the churches approval of abortion.
Want to be sickened and enraged check out the Religious Coalition For Reproductive Choice website. The justification for baby murder will tear your heart. Especially since they claim to be pro choice because of compassion, faith in God and belief in moral decisions.
But God is not fooled. Nor should those who hear and respond to His word be fooled.
bump
I knew that there would be problems with the Catholic vote when the USCCB issued its guidelines for the elections. The guide, which came out in October and was inserted in parish bulletins, listed abortion as just one of a dozen issues that the bishops were urging Catholics to consider at election time. These issues included things such as the death penalty (which is a life issue), minimum wage, welcoming immigrants, caring for the poor, etc. The net result of all this "guidance" was that many Catholics apparently thought that as long as candidates were good on most of these issues, which all seemed to mirror Democrat positions, their position on abortion was not that important.
The guide also said that churches are not permitted to label particular
candidates as pro-abortion lest they lose their tax exempt status. So another opportunity to inform the faithful was lost.
I wish the bishops would startt censuring pro-abortion Catholic politicians like Nancy Pelosi, but it's not likely.
13% of the Jewish vote is much better than Nixon's 3% but, under the crcumstances of the wars in the Middle East and Ahmadinejad's lunatic regime in Iran, it would be a comfort if as high a percentage of American Jews were voting GOP as of Mexican-Americans and of Catholics. The GOP has to work hard at retrieving lost Catholic and Mexican-American votes which are the remaining key to GOP dominance. Jewish and black voters can be the icing on the cake because they have been so reliably Democrat. We were encouraged when nearly 20% of Ohio blacks voted GOP in 2004 in response to an initiative to ban lavender "marriage."
The GOP has a tapestry of positions on issues with something for most voter groups and yet consistent with conservatism. We do need better performance from the GOP elected officials in following platforms. We can do a lot better with women generally and with married women with kids in particular.
They think that because it's what they've been taught. They've been taught to believe that solutions to all problems come from government. Unfortunately. Homeschooling is the only way to change the dynamic.
Sometimes it seems like we're just spitting in the wind.
Suppose these people really do care about education. The Bush administration has put more Federal money and more Federal effort into education than any other in history. (Unconstitutional, of course, and very annoying.) States and counties are spending more and more per student. And guess what? Results keep declining.
Why would anyone expect better outcomes to occur by electing Democrats to any office?
I can't believe how many people talk about how this administration cut spending for education.
An absolute lie... they did the exact opposite.
Why can't people think?
People seem to believe their lies. They also believe everything Republicans say is a lie, because that's what they are told. I suspect strongly that in my own parish many people voted democratic because they traditionally think that big government is good for them, since the largest industry in our area is government, or else they work for contractors who do government work. The pocketbook plays a big part in any election.
Cicero has it right and it's silly to speak of a "Catholic vote" since Catholics do not vote as a bloc. There are "cultural Catholics," often merely self-described as Catholics but not having much of a clue as to what it means to vote in accordance with Catholic teaching, and there are practicing Catholics. The sad fact is that millions of Catholics are voting about the same way as the rest of the populace and this is why we have nominal Catholics voting for pro-abortion politicians. Reason: There has been a serious failure to teach on the part of the American bishops.
Too true. Most CCD, or Religious Ed. programs have been worse than useless since I started in high school, in 1968 In fact, even though I went to public high school, I only spent three years in CCD. My Freshman and Soph. years were a waste, Junior year was pretty good, and I started out in my Senior year, but it was so bad that even my Mama said I didn't have to continue.
I learned more about my faith as an adult, and only because I went looking for more. It wasn't that I didn't believe, but I wanted to know WHY the Church taught what She did, so I could defend her from others who might ridicule or teach falsely about the Church.
I taught CCD to 5th graders in their first year of Confirmation preparation. Some of them actually asked why they had to attend classes, and I simply asked THEM why on earth they'd want to be confirmed into a faith about which they knew nothing! It was in 1987, a few months before the Pope's visit, and I told them that they would start hearing news stories about what the Church teaches and stands for. I told them not to believe a word of it because Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings know NOTHING about the Church. I told them to ask their parents, and if they didn't know, ask the parish priest! I told them there was no excuse for being ignorant about the Church when there was so much information out there. Of course this was before the new Catechism. It's great that there is a book to which teachers can go to get the answers, or to which they can point for the kids to do their own research.
I guess they believe the MSM - that's all I can figure. Around here, the major newspaper reports nothing but the "need" for more money for the schools. You have to read the independent press to learn how much they're spending, where it's actually going, and how the test scores keep declining.
The misconceptions continue. And even if that were true, why is supporting corporations bad? Considering that they hire the biggest work force in America.
Seems there's not much thinking going on these days.
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