In the last six
presidential elections the candidate who won the Catholic vote has won the
popular vote. Al Gore won the popular vote handily but lost the Supreme Court
case of Bush v Gore. (Held: counting votes is unconstitutional.)
President Obama carried the Catholic vote 50
percent to 48 percent while he won the overall national vote 51 percent to 47
percent. That's the third straight Presidential election where the Catholic
vote has been a near-carbon copy of the overall vote.
Many Catholic voters are Latino, a group that
gave Obama 71% of their votes. Republican attitudes towards immigration aren’t
going to win over many of these voters. Tom Donohue, president of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, said
the GOP shouldn’t even bother to field a presidential candidate in 2016 unless
Congress passes immigration reform this year. Spoiler alert: they are not
going to do it.
The Catholic vote historically was solidly
Democratic, but Richard Nixon undertook to create a “new majority” and enlisted
Pat Buchanan to capture the Catholic vote. Buchanan suggested, among other
things, appointing Italian-Americans to visible positions, going so far as to suggest
that the so-called “black seat” or “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court be given
to an ethnic Catholic when it became available. (He was for quotas before he
was against them.) Today, there are no Protestants on the Court, and the only
Black on the court is Catholic. There are three “ethnic Catholics” – Alito,
Scalia, and Sotomeyor.
In 1972 President Nixon, upon the suggestion
of Buchanan, wrote to Cardinal Cooke expressing his opposition to abortion and
supporting the effort to repeal the liberal N.Y. law. (Interestingly, in the 1970s, conservative
Christian protests against sexual immorality began to surface, largely as a
reaction to the “permissive sixties” and an emerging prominence of sexual
liberties arising from Roe v Wade and the gay rights
movement. Christians began to “wake up” and make sexuality issues a priority
political cause, per Wiki.
I’ll discuss how these voters can be recaptured at a later date.)
The Republican efforts to appeal to Catholic
voters achieved some success. Today, it is still assumed that for many Catholic
voters -- especially white Catholics -- abortion is a key issue, that many of these voters went for Romney, and that
they may go to the Republican nominee in 2016.
I am not so sure that the issue of abortion
has as much salience for Catholics as it once had. In a poll in October 2013,
thirty-nine percent of all respondents — and 42 percent of self-identified
Catholics – felt abortion should be illegal in either “all” or “most”
cases. Catholics are just not that different from Americans as a whole.
Pope
Francis is not going to change church doctrine regarding this issue. But he has
suggested that the church’s focus on abortion can be re-examined. Here is how
he put it:
“We cannot insist only on issues related to
abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not
possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for
that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the
church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not
necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”
It is clear that he prefers to keep the
attention on wealth inequality and concern for the poor. His comments on fairness
very nearly amount to an open rebuke of Paul Ryan, an early contender for the
Republican nomination. For sake of discussion, let’s call the issue of wealth
inequality “fairness.”
This is not the place to discuss the many
reasons that “fairness” as an issue can be embraced by a huge majority of
voters, though they are not necessarily the most motivated. Suffice it to say,
that 2016 has the potential to pit populists against plutocrats and Catholics
are the natural constituency of the populists. Of course, this is true of
Latino Catholics, but it is also true of white Catholics in general, many of
whom are blue collars workers including those who are feeling disempowered by
the decline of labor union power.
Can the issues of abortion and fairness be
linked? It will take more than the formulation that Bill Clinton used, which
has been taken up by Hillary Clinton: “Abortion should be safe, legal and rare.”
In point of fact, abortions are down in the
United States under President Obama. In 2011, approximately 1.06 million abortions took place in the U.S., down from an
estimated 1.21 million abortions in 2008, 1.29 million in 2002, 1.31 million in
2000 and 1.36 million in 1996. The main driver of abortion levels is the
economy. Put another way, improving the economic circumstances of the poor is
the most effective anti-abortion program available in America.
If this point can be driven home to
Catholics, a significant shift in voting patterns can be achieved. “Want to
eliminate abortion? Vote Democratic!” “Access to Birth Control means fewer
abortions.” “Fairness = fewer abortions.”
One hundred, twenty-seven million voters cast
votes in the 2012 election One quarter of the votes (i.e. almost 32 million)
were cast by Catholics.
A 51.1 – 47.2 percentage split of the popular
vote in favor of Obama produced a margin of victory of 1,053,000 votes, and a decisive victory in the Electoral College.
If the next Democratic candidate
can shift just 2% of the Catholic vote in his or her favor, that’s a 1,280,000
cushion that would virtually guarantee a victory for the Democratic nominee.
And, if you are listening, Joe Biden, it wouldn’t hurt if the nominee himself
was a proud Catholic. And, Joe, if you do decide to run …
“… tell ’em Big Mitch sent ya!”
