Democrats Set Their Sights on Winning Back Catholics
Learning from Kerry's loss, lawmakers craft abortion stands
A Roman Catholic nun who leads a social justice advocacy group called Network, Simone Campbell rarely got a phone call from Capitol Hill before the 2006 election. Campbell, based in Washington, D.C., says she "wore her knuckles bare" fruitlessly knocking on lawmakers' doors, particularly those of Democrats who should have been natural allies on issues like raising the minimum wage and comprehensive immigration reform.
Then came last year's midterm elections. Campbell joined a new Catholic voter-turnout operation working to reverse the wilting Catholic support Democrats had seen in 2004. After her efforts helped elect Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Bob Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania, her phone began ringing. Campbell's group is now regularly invited to meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. On a recent conference call about immigration with other religious activists, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York announced at the last minute that she wanted to jump on. Campbell was asked to give the closing prayer at a big Democratic National Committee meeting last winter. "I stopped being a pariah," she says. "Now, I'm value added."
Indeed, having witnessed both George W. Bush's victory among Catholics in 2004 and the Catholic vote's dramatic rejection of Republicans last year, Democrats are now waging a multifront offensive to shore up what was once a bedrock constituency. The Democratic National Committee has hired its first director of Catholic outreach. The DNC is also slated to soon unveil an organizing hub for Catholics on its website, and it's planning to supply state parties with Catholic voter lists before the 2008 election. Catholic Democrats in Congress are introducing legislation to reduce demand for abortion, a top issue for the Roman Catholic Church. And some Democratic presidential candidates are already devising Catholic outreach plans. "You know things have gotten off track when a Roman Catholic candidate has to do outreach to people within his own church," says Senator Casey, discussing his own 2006 outreach effort. "But we're getting it back on track now." With Catholics accounting for 1 in 5 American voters, the mobilization could determine whether Democrats win the White House and keep control of Congress in 2008.
"Catholics are ideal targets" for Democrats courting religious voters, says University of Akron political scientist John Green. Many Catholics are political centrists, unlike overwhelmingly conservative evangelical Christians. Catholics also tend to be less observant than evangelicals and so are less likely to tow the church line politically. What's more, the Catholic Church's promotion of social welfare programs and its opposition to war (including Iraq) dovetails with the Democratic Party platform.
But Catholics face cross-pressures from their church to oppose abortion and gay marriage, pushing them closer to the GOP. In 2004, a handful of Catholic bishops denounced Democratic nominee John Kerry's pro-abortion-rights position; one said he'd deny Kerry, a Catholic, the Eucharist. Kerry lost white Catholics—who make up the vast majority of the Catholic community—to Bush by 56 to 43 percent. By contrast, the only Catholic ever elected president, John F. Kennedy, won nearly 80 percent of the Catholic vote. Analysts blame Kerry's weak showing among Catholics largely on his unassertive response to the bishops' attacks.
As the 2006 election cycle got underway, a Democratic consulting firm called Common Good Strategies emerged, and new liberal religious groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good worked in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Kansas to prevent a few conservative bishops and the GOP from defining the "values" debate. "Before that, religious voters felt they had no place to go that was not right of center," says Network's Campbell, who helped frame affordable healthcare and opposition to the Iraq war as values issues. Common Good Strategies enlisted nuns to do phone banking, while Casey delivered a major speech on faith and politics at the Catholic University of America. He wound up winning 58 percent of the white Catholic vote, even though he was challenging Sen. Rick Santorum, an antiabortion Catholic.
New ideas. The DNC's new Catholic outreach director, John Kelly, is an alumnus of the Pennsylvania and Ohio campaigns. He has already met with scores of Catholic leaders, devising "practical solutions" on hot-button issues like abortion. Those solutions include three Democratic proposals in Congress to reduce the number of abortions. One, cosponsored by Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, seeks to help prevent unwanted pregnancies through education and contraception (which is opposed by the Catholic Church) and to provide counseling and economic assistance to low-income, pregnant women to dissuade them from having abortions. DeLauro says Catholics who support abortion rights must stand up against what she considers the church's attacks: "There are people who have used religion and the Eucharist as a political weapon, and we as Catholics have to speak out to define ourselves."
Of course, DeLauro and other Catholic Democrats run the risk of seeming to be at loggerheads with their own church. Some in the church hierarchy insist that's the case because the church won't accept any position on abortion that falls short of criminalizing it. "The primary issue for the Catholic bishops is the life issue," says one highly placed source in the church hierarchy. "Democrats don't have an openness on that issue, and that will always be the block." Some moderate and conservative Catholics, meanwhile, say the Democrats' Catholic outreach so far has focused almost exclusively on liberal social justice organizations. "I've not heard anything from the DNC," says Raymond Flynn, a conservative Catholic Democrat who was ambassador to the Vatican under President Clinton and now leads Catholic Citizenship, a major lay Catholic group.
Flynn, who supported Bush in 2000, says the only Democrats reaching out to him are presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and her husband. The Clinton campaign is also corresponding regularly with its growing list of religious supporters, tagging Catholics in its database for more specialized outreach down the road.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, meanwhile, is hosting values forums—including five in New Hampshire during one week in June—that are drawing many Catholics. Former Sen. John Edwards's campaign manager, David Bonior, is a onetime Catholic seminarian. Bonior attributes Kerry's loss largely to his failure to articulate antiwar and economic justice positions that would have appealed to Catholics, giving Bush an opening to target them on abortion and gay marriage. "The difference is that John Edwards gives them a place to go on the war and a place to go on economic policy," Bonior says.
And, depending on what happens in Congress, Democrats might have a place for them to go on abortion, too.
This story appears in the July 2, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.