Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Bush's agonizing over stem cell research points up the administration's effort to woo the Catholic vote -- at a time when many say it no longer exists.
Jul 30, 2001 | When Pope John Paul II warned President Bush about the "evils" of stem cell research last week, he heightened the already extreme tension surrounding the administration's protracted decision on whether to federally fund such research. Regardless of the president's final decision on stem cells, the perception that Bush is taking the pope's advice into account laid the foundation for a key component of the president's reelection strategy: wooing the nation's Roman Catholic vote.
Both Bush's meeting with the pope and his caution on the stem cell decision are clearly part of his ongoing effort to court the country's 44 million Catholic voters. Those individual moves won't necessarily pay off politically -- the majority of American Catholics disagree with the pope on many issues, from the death penalty to abortion rights, and they support stem cell research -- but the overall effort makes some political sense. White Catholics have been a key swing constituency in American presidential politics for the past 20 years. Historically, it has always helped to have the Catholics on your side on Election Day: They have voted with the winner in the last eight presidential elections and 11 of the last 12.
"If you were sitting in on a White House strategy session, you'd probably hear Karl Rove say the 2000 election was essentially a tie, and in 2004, we need at least a narrow win," says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who has monitored Catholic voting patterns. "'Where can we move people?' One of the first groups they have to look at is white Catholics."
In fact, Rove has been the brains behind the administration's efforts to woo Catholics. But Bush can't play to a monolithic Catholic voting bloc, because there isn't one. In fact, many political analysts scoff at the notion of a "Catholic vote."
"Let us begin with this simple fact: there is no such thing as the Catholic vote," writes Anna Quindlen in a recent Newsweek column. "Once upon a time there was something like it ... American Catholics are no longer uniformly struggling immigrants, they no longer uniformly attend closely to the pronouncements of the church hierarchy and they do not uniformly vote as a bloc. There has been nothing uniform about most of our lives since parochial school."
For years Catholics were a reliable part of the Democratic New Deal coalition. Clustered in the Northeast and Midwest, disproportionately working class, often the victims of discrimination by the WASP elite, as many as 70 percent of Catholics voted Democratic.
Today, there are several different Catholic votes -- white ethnic Catholics from the Midwest and Northeast, who have trended slightly Republican, and a new generation of Hispanic Catholic voters, mostly in the Southwest, who tend to favor Democrats. A smaller group of black Catholics continues to be a reliable Democratic constituency. And alongside racial and ethnic divisions, pollsters see other splits in the Catholic bloc, most notably a relatively new division between churchgoing Catholics, who are predictably more conservative, and nonobservant Catholics, who tend to be more liberal.
"Now there is a core Democratic constituency and a core Republican constituency among Catholics," says Green, and both parties are courting the Catholics in the middle.
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