c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) 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.

(Jeff Diamant is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

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