While a few high profile pundits — notably Fr. Thomas Reese and author Peter Steinfels — have labeled America’s bishops “losers” in last week’s election, a writer over at America’s blog is saying: not so fast.

Mark Stricherz has been digging through the data and reports the following:

Fr. Reese and Steinfels’ conclusion that the bishops didn’t influence the presidential vote is surely too sweeping. It is true enough that a majority of Catholic voters went for Barack Obama, an unwavering supporter of abortion rights; and that dozens of bishops implied that Catholics should do no such thing. But this dynamic seems to have been exclusive to the big cities and suburbs, a large majority of the electorate admittedly. It does not seem to have applied to small towns and rural areas, including those in the North. Mark Silk’s state-by-state breakdown of the Catholic vote seems to support this conclusion.

Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania is another good example. Besides a 2-to-1 registration favor of Democrats, the county had except for 1972 voted for a Democratic presidential nominee from the New Deal until 1996. But that changed. As I wrote in Why the Democrats are Blue, the dioceses’ bishops in the past eight years have been vocal in their criticism of pro-choice Democratic presidential nominees. If the county’s Democratic chairwoman is to be believed, their words affected the county’s Catholics. The county voted for George W. Bush twice and heavily for John McCain (57-41) on Tuesday.

He makes several other compelling points, including the notable success of Proposition 8 in California, which Catholics supported by a large margin. Check out the blog for the rest.