The Democratic Party is facing a Catholic apocalypse

Sunday, Mar 15, 2015 11:00 AM EST
Patricia Miller

White Catholic voters used to be reliable Democrats, but that's no longer the case—and it foretells bigger problems.

It’s one of the central contradictions of American politics: that there’s no such thing as the “Catholic vote,” yet the Catholics vote still matters.

There’s no “Catholic vote” in terms of Catholics representing an electoral bloc that votes according to what their bishops tell them, or in lockstep with the tenets of their religion. Yet winning Catholic voters has been essential to almost every presidential victory in modern times. And the defection of Catholics voters has played a role in some of the most consequential congressional turnovers in recent history — from 1994 to 2014 — making Catholics the ultimate swing voters. And for Democrats, that could be bad news.

While Catholics have been swing voters since Richard Nixon’s second term, white Catholics are now identifying as Republican by historic margins . According to the most recent polling from the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of white Catholics now favor the GOP, versus 39 percent who favor the Democrats—the largest point spread in the history of the Pew poll. And for the first time, white Catholics are more Republican than the voting group usually considered the ultimate Republicans: white Protestants (a designation that includes both mainline and evangelical Protestants).

These are ominous signs for the Democrats, evincing a new and growing allegiance with the Republican Party that has long-term implications.

So why are white Catholics abandoning the Democratic Party? There are some long-term trends at play. Steve Krueger, head of the group Catholic Democrats, notes that conservative bishops have been beating the war drums since the George W. Bush administration, even going so far in some cases as to argue that “good” Catholics can’t vote for Democrats because of their support for abortion rights and, more recently, same-sex marriage — which has resulted in an increased politicization of the church. “The bishops have gone from pastoral advocates to partisan enforcers,” Krueger said. “It’s gone from the old saying of ‘Pray, Pay and Obey,’ to ‘Obey, Pay and pray’.”

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