{"id":19,"date":"2008-06-24T10:11:02","date_gmt":"2008-06-24T10:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html"},"modified":"2008-06-24T10:11:02","modified_gmt":"2008-06-24T10:11:02","slug":"the-gops-catholic-freefall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html","title":{"rendered":"The GOP’s Catholic freefall"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is so much to chew over in the latest batch of data from the Pew Forum’s prodigious Religious Landscape Survey<\/a>, but combine the Pew’s numbers on Catholic party affiliation with a lesser-noted new survey from Georgetown’s CARA institute, and the most important and eye-popping shift of all jumps right out: Namely, that the Republican party is losing–in droves–the Catholic voters who are critical to success in November and into the future.
\nThe Pew numbers alone suggest the growing GOP losses among what is considered the biggest religious swing vote: A 2004 Pew survey <\/a>concluded that the historic Democratic dominance among Catholics was at an end, with Republicans “approaching parity with the Democrats among Catholics, who once were a heavily Democratic constituency. The Democratic margin has shrunk from 43%-to-38% in 1992 to 44%-to-41% today,” the 2004 report said. The data released yesterday (June 23) show that just 23 percent of Catholics identify as Republican, and 10 percent “lean” to the GOP, for a total of 33 percent, while 33 percent of Catholics identify as Democrats and 15 percent “lean” Democratic, for a total of 48 percent–a hefty 15 percent differential. Ten percent identified as independent, according to the Pew results.
\nNow check out the June 20 survey, “Election ’08 Forecast<\/a>,” from CARA (the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) at Georgetown, and the shift is even more dramatic: Only 21 percent of Catholic voters (some 47 million adults) either strongly or weakly affiliate as a Republican today compared to 31 percent who identified as Republican in 2004.
\nBy contrast, 38 percent of Catholic voters identify themselves, either strongly or weakly, with the Democratic Party, down just one percentage point from CARA’s numbers in 2004. In fact, even among weekly Mass attenders the Dems have a big edge, though not as large as in the wider Catholic community: According to CARA, 53 percent of weekly Mass attending Catholics are Democrats or lean Democratic, while 43 percent ID with the GOP or lean Republican.
\nBoth Pew and CARA show that stands on like war and peace have hurt Republicans, along with tax policies favoring the wealthy that Catholics do not agree with at all. Moreover, the GOP can’t rely on the usual hot-buttons of abortion and gay marriage, as those issues are finding even less traction among Catholics this year.
\nThe big shift is in those who say they are independent, moving from 30 percent of Catholic voters in 2004 to 41 percent this year. If Democrats haven’t picked up Catholic loyalists, they at least haven’t hemorrhaged like the GOP. But they still need to bring them out on Election Day. As CARA’s director of polling, Mark Gray, concludes: “Even with a clear edge in party identification, Obama and the Democrats will need to do well mobilizing Catholic Democrats to take advantage of this…In the past two presidential elections the Republicans have been noted to be more effective at mobilizing voters using religion and religious organizations–often using the issue of abortion.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is so much to chew over in the latest batch of data from the Pew Forum’s prodigious Religious Landscape Survey, but combine the Pew’s numbers on Catholic party affiliation with a lesser-noted new survey from Georgetown’s CARA institute, and the most important and eye-popping shift of all jumps right out: Namely, that the Republican…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nThe GOP's Catholic freefall - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The GOP's Catholic freefall - 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Pontifications","og_description":"There is so much to chew over in the latest batch of data from the Pew Forum’s prodigious Religious Landscape Survey, but combine the Pew’s numbers on Catholic party affiliation with a lesser-noted new survey from Georgetown’s CARA institute, and the most important and eye-popping shift of all jumps right out: Namely, that the Republican…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html","og_site_name":"Pontifications","article_published_time":"2008-06-24T10:11:02+00:00","author":"David Gibson","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html","name":"The GOP's Catholic freefall - Pontifications","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#website"},"datePublished":"2008-06-24T10:11:02+00:00","dateModified":"2008-06-24T10:11:02+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/122b0877ab87552bb8f14c366dd43e71"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-gops-catholic-freefall.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The GOP’s Catholic freefall"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/","name":"Pontifications","description":"Catholic Faith and Culture","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/122b0877ab87552bb8f14c366dd43e71","name":"David Gibson","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","caption":"David Gibson"},"description":"DAVID GIBSON is an award-winning religion journalist, author, filmmaker, and a convert to Catholicism. He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}