The Battle for Catholic Voters
Wednesday, Jul. 02, 2008
The Battle for Catholic Voters
By Amy Sullivan
Douglas Kmiec is the kind of Catholic voter the G.O.P. usually doesn't have to think twice about. The Pepperdine law professor and former Reagan Justice Department lawyer (Samuel Alito was an office mate) attends Mass each morning. He has actively opposed abortion for most of his adult life, working with crisis pregnancy centers to persuade women not to undergo the procedure. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and occasionally sends a contribution to Focus on the Family.
He is also a vocal supporter of Barack Obama. Kmiec made waves in the Catholic world in late March when he endorsed the Democratic candidate. But Kmiec insists that while he still considers himself a Republican, his choice is clear this election year. "I have grave moral doubts about the war, serious doubts about the economic course Republicans have followed over the last seven years, and believe that immigration reforms won't come about by Republican hands," he says. "Senator McCain would not be the strongest advocate for the balance of things that I care about."
A new TIME poll of Catholic voters reveals that Kmiec is part of a broader pattern. Although Obama was thought to have a "Catholic problem" during the Democratic primaries, in which Hillary Clinton won a majority of Catholic votes, he has pulled even with John McCain among that constituency — Obama now polls 44% to his G.O.P. opponent's 45%.
There are 47 million Catholic voters, and while they are too numerous and varied to speak of as a monolithic Catholic bloc, they have long been a kind of holy grail for presidential candidates. The winner of eight out of the past nine elections has captured a majority of Catholic votes (they voted for Al Gore in 2000), and there are large Catholic concentrations in key states like Florida, Ohio and New Mexico.
The trick is figuring out what Catholics want. For decades, they were part of the New Deal coalition and were largely concerned with economics and foreign policy. More recently, Republicans have cut into that advantage by appealing to Catholics on social issues, a courtship that culminated in George W. Bush's victory in 2004. The TIME poll confirmed that a majority of Catholics (59%) can be broadly defined as pro-life (opposing abortion except to protect a woman's life or health or in cases of rape or incest). But these pro-life Catholics are actually split into two voting camps.
Many conservative Catholics consider abortion to be the determining factor in their electoral decisions, and as a result they almost always support Republican candidates. But for other Catholics, social issues can be trumped in times of economic and national insecurity. What's interesting about this year is that Catholics like Kmiec are moving from the first group of voters to the second.
Republicans entered this election season from a position of disadvantage with Catholics for the same reasons they face problems with the general electorate: the economy, high gas prices and the ongoing war in Iraq. But they've also failed to embrace the model of Catholic engagement that Bush spent six years putting into place. The Obama campaign is taking advantage of that opportunity. Just as Ronald Reagan brought large numbers of Catholic Democrats into the G.O.P. in the 1980s, Obama is hoping to woo them back and create a new Catholic category: Obama Republicans.
Tending the Flock
When Kmiec was growing up in Chicago in the 1950s and '60s, Catholics ran the city's Democratic political machine. The New Deal had cemented their loyalty to the party, but those ties began to fray in the late '60s and early '70s as many Catholics felt alienated by everything from the Roe v. Wade decision to urban busing initiatives. Kmiec was part of the wave of Reagan Democrats who were drawn to the Republican President's policies and vision.
The Republican Party worked to keep them in the fold. In the late 1990s, the Republican National Committee (RNC) created a Catholic Task Force, and by the end of the 2000 election cycle, the party had compiled a list of 3 million church-attending Catholics. The RNC spent $2.5 million contacting these targeted Catholics with direct mail and phone calls.
But that was just a dry run. Four years later, the RNC recruited some 50,000 Catholic team leaders to conduct parish-level outreach for Bush's reelection campaign; the volunteers were led on the ground by more than 75 field coordinators working for the party. Their efforts were supplemented by a group of outside organizations funded by leading conservative Catholics like Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza. One of these groups, Priests for Life, spent $1 million on television and newspaper ads in the last month of the campaign.
The Catholic initiative was the most ambitious religious outreach effort ever undertaken by either party. And it paid off. Bush might have expected more competition for those votes from his Catholic opponent. But John Kerry found himself the target of stinging criticism from a few bishops who argued that he should be denied Communion because of his support for abortion rights. No one on the Kerry campaign was devoted to Catholic outreach, and Kerry chose not to respond to the attacks. Bush won the Catholic vote that year, 52% to 47%.
Faith of the Democrats
The G.O.P.'s success with Catholic voters in 2004 was an astounding victory born out of Bush's personal appeal to pro-life voters and six years of party organizing at the parish level. But it also sparked a backlash in many Catholic circles that is shaping the current election.
Alarmed that their fellow Catholics were being told that abortion and gay marriage were the only relevant Catholic issues, progressive Catholics have founded several organizations in the tradition of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who preached a "consistent ethic of life." One group, Catholics United, ran radio ads in the fall of 2007 targeting pro-life Republicans who voted against expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, arguing that such votes were not "pro-life."
The American bishops also made an effort to broaden their teaching. In the fall of 2007, they released Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility, an unusual document that counsels against divisive politics and reminds Catholics that "all life issues are connected." Such statements have cleared the way for Catholics like Kmiec to reevaluate what it means to cast a pro-life vote. "It's been 20-some years of trying to get the next vote on the court to overturn Roe," says Kmiec, "and I asked myself, What does that amount to?" He worries that by backing the G.O.P. strategy of holding out for a ban on abortion, pro-life voters have not focused on more pragmatic ways to reduce abortion rates.
In a climate in which Catholics aren't voting based on a rather narrow ideological agenda, the mechanics of how campaigns court them become more important. And it's on that level that perhaps the biggest changes from 2004 can be seen. McCain has a team of Catholic politicians, including Sam Brownback and Frank Keating, who serve as his surrogates, but has few aides within the campaign to coordinate outreach. The lack of high-level religious advisers became obvious earlier this year when McCain accepted the endorsement of Evangelical pastor John Hagee, who has called the Catholic Church "the great whore of Babylon," a phrase unlikely to warm the hearts of McCain's Catholic supporters.
Obama's campaign more closely resembles the 2004 Bush outreach effort. An extensive religious outreach team has focused the bulk of its work on training ordinary Catholics to reach out to friends and neighbors by holding "values" house parties and explaining their support for Obama. The Democrat also has a roster of high-powered Catholic surrogates who have fanned out across swing states — including Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey Jr., whose father, the pro-life former governor, was widely viewed by Catholics as a victim of Democratic intolerance after he was not allowed to speak at the party's 1992 convention.
Obama, whose work as a community organizer was partly funded by a Catholic social-justice group, recently laid out his plan for a new and improved faith-based initiative. It is a policy extension of the phrase he often uses — "I am my brother's keeper" — to express his belief that members of a society are responsible for one another. And it is an idea rooted in the Catholic concept of the common good.
This "bottom-up, personal responsibility" message, as he describes it, appeals to Kmiec, allowing him to be not just a McCain skeptic but also an Obama supporter. That decision has not come without a cost — this spring Kmiec was denied Communion by a priest who denounced his endorsement of Obama. But with Catholics almost twice as likely to name the economy, Iraq and terrorism as their top concerns over abortion and gay marriage, Kmiec has plenty of company. Come November, that priest may be holding on to a very full bowl of wafers.
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