CATHOLIC VOTE STATS

The Catholic Vote
A closer look at a how a lively prized constituency approached the 2004 presidential vote.
Interview by Michael J. Miller

Dec 2004 (CWR) - George J. Marlin, currently the chairman of the Philadelphia Trust Company, has a rich background in both politics and writing. A former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, he was the Conservative Party’s nominee for Mayor of New York in 1993. He is the author of books as varied as: Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party; The Bond Buyer’s Guide to Municipal Bonds; and The Quotable Fulton Sheen. He is the general editor of the 46-volume Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, published by Ignatius Press.

In 2004 George Marlin produced a new book, The American Catholic Voter, tracking the growing influence of Catholics on the national political scene, and the shifting allegiances of the Catholic constituency.

Marlin spoke to Michael J. Miller on November 4, two days after the 2004 elections.

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At the founding of the United States, only a very small minority of the populace was Catholic. When did American Catholics first become a political force to be reckoned with?

George J. Marlin: I would argue, as early as 1800. They were influential in swinging the election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson over John Adams, the incumbent president at the time. Even though there were only 3,000 Catholics living on the island of Manhattan, Aaron Burr, who would later go down in American history as a rogue, organized them through the Society of “Saint” Tammany, which later became known as Tammany Hall. Burr brought them out to vote against Federalist members of the New York state legislature, and he beat fifteen of them. That turned around the control of the legislature, which picked the Electoral College members, and they picked Thomas Jefferson for President.

New York made the difference, electing Jefferson over an incumbent president, so those Catholics made a difference.

But over time, the great influx of Catholics began in the 1840s with the Irish famine; the 1840s and 1850s also saw a large German population coming. The Germans moved out to the Midwest, to the farmlands of Missouri, Wisconsin, and Iowa, while the Irish settled in the inner cities. Later in the century, particularly in the post-Civil-War era, the Irish became the dominant force in those cities and generally took over the political machines, working through their parishes in their neighborhoods. They organized political organizations that took over the center of power in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Chicago, and so became a major political force, particularly in America’s inner cities.

How did American Catholic voters, by and large, become an interest group closely associated with the Democratic Party? Were there any notable exceptions to the rule?

Marlin: Well, in the 19th century in particular—in the time of Jefferson, in the time of Andrew Jackson, in the post-Civil-War era—the immigrant Catholics coming to this country for the most part became associated or aligned with the Democratic Party, primarily because the party of Jefferson and Jackson welcomed these people into their party, gave them a helping hand (not a handout), while the Federalist Party (one of the first political parties in America), the Whigs who succeeded them, and even the progressive Republicans in the late 19th century did not like Roman Catholics; they did not like immigrants.

This trend continued even among those Catholics who came to this country up through the 1920s, until the Nativist movement passed the 1924 Immigration Act, federal legislation that cut off immigration to the nation. In the United States there were “Nativist movements,” which was a code name for anti-Catholic movements—for example, the Know-Nothing Party, the Anti-Masonic Party—which were driven by one issue: anti-Catholicism.

So the Federalists, the Whigs, frowned upon the Catholics, frowned upon their values, and were frightened, believing that the immigrant groups were politically motivated and would install the Pope in New Orleans to take over the nation. There was a great deal of bigotry against Catholics. The Democratic Party welcomed them, and the other parties didn’t like them. So they, as a matter of course, settled in the Democratic Party during that period, through the 1920s.

In your book, The American Catholic Voter, you demonstrate how, thanks to immigration and the inner-city political machines, the minority Catholic vote in the United States began to influence elections, not just locally, but also nationally. After describing the presidential race between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine, you write, “If any lesson was learned by the major political parties in 1884, it was that they could not ignore or offend the Catholic voter.”

Marlin: The height of this influence, of course, was during the period in the late 1920s through 1960. The first Catholic nominee for President, Alfred E. Smith, was nominated in 1928. He was a great governor of New York, a great man, and faced incredible bigotry in that race. When he went on his first train-ride across the country to meet the voters, he was greeted in many stations in Oklahoma and the West by burning crosses. It was an ugly, bigoted campaign.

Even though he lost, it was the first time that the immigrants in the inner cities had an opportunity to come out and vote for one of their own. And it energized those voters—it was not unlike the energy that we saw on Tuesday when President Bush was re-elected.

And Al Smith was the first Democrat to carry the fifteen largest cities in America. He carried them by 38,000 votes. The previous Democratic candidate, John W. Davis in 1924, lost those same cities by 1.8 million votes. Al Smith carried them because it was Catholics coming out to vote for a Catholic.

And here is what was interesting: In the post-Civil-War era, from 1868 to 1924, the average Democrat running for president nationally—even winners like Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson—averaged about 6 to 7 million votes. Al Smith in 1928 lost the election, but he received 15 million votes. It was those inner-city votes.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the importance of those votes, and they became the basis of his coalition. FDR was elected four times with the strong support of Roman Catholics, who were basically supportive of the New Deal programs. In 1948 his successor, Harry Truman, running on an anti-Communist platform, received about 80 percent of the Catholic vote and won with 49.5 percent against Dewey’s 45.2 percent [of the popular vote]. Catholics took great joy in knowing that there was one issue that was their strong issue, the issue of anti-Communism in America; it made them feel more part of the mainstream in America in fighting that battle.

In 1960, naturally, there was Jack Kennedy. After supporting President Eisenhower, a Republican, in the 1950s, Catholics came back [to the Democratic ticket] and voted for him, and he got close to 80 percent of the Catholic vote.

When and why did the Catholic-Democrat connection start to fall apart?

Marlin: Something happened in the post-Kennedy years. The Democratic Party was suddenly being taken over by what was known as the “reform movement.” These were elitist social engineers who frowned upon the values of the inner-city, blue-collar, ethnic Catholics who were the base of the Democratic Party up to that time.

The Catholics in the inner city began to feel unwanted in the Democratic Party, and they started moving toward the Republican Party. Richard Nixon was in 1972 the first Republican to get a majority of the Catholic vote (52 percent); Ronald Reagan got 61 percent [in 1984]; the first George Bush carried the Catholic vote [in 1988]; and George W. Bush carried the Catholic vote [his second time around in 2004].

Why? It had nothing to do with economics. They moved over for cultural reasons. I subscribe to the belief that the majority of Americans, for the most part, vote along cultural lines. In the 1960s it was issues like prayer in the schools, busing to the schools, crime in the streets, and the Vietnam War. In the 1970s the issue became a permissive, irresponsible society: abortion came into play, government funding of abortion, partial-birth abortion, gay rights, same-sex unions….

Catholics moved out of the Democratic Party because the cultural issues that mattered to the Democratic Party were completely opposed to the cultural issues that mattered to the average blue-collar practicing Catholic. So that’s when the break began, during that period, the late 1960s, and culminating in the Reagan years.

With contemporary American Catholics so divided in their opinions on social questions, is it possible to speak any more of a distinctly “Catholic vote?”

Marlin: The Catholic vote was pretty much monolithic until the 1980s, in my judgment, but what happened in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the secular age being what it is, certainly affected the Catholic Church as well and its membership.

Today, any good pollster has to begin by separating out the practicing Catholics from the merely baptized Catholics, the “cafeteria Catholics” who choose what they want to believe. They go home for Christmas and get a gift; they go home at Easter to see Ma and have a nice meal, but after that their religion doesn’t mean much to them for the rest of the year.

To give you some idea [of the statistical significance of this distinction]: four years ago, George W. Bush carried the practicing Catholic vote, with 57 percent, while Al Gore got 59 percent of the cafeteria Catholic vote. In the 2004 election, it looks as if Bush got 62 percent of the practicing Catholic vote. And generically, Bush won about 51 percent of the entire Catholic vote; that’s up 4 percent from four years ago. It’s also because the number of practicing Catholics who voted was up.

In what states or regions do Catholics presently make up a significant percentage of the registered voters?

Marlin: Keep in mind that what made this [2004] election more interesting was that many battleground “swing” states—Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania—are “Rust Belt” states. They have huge Catholic populations, but they are older populations, who tend to be practicing Catholics. When jobs disappeared in these traditionally industrial states, the Yuppie Catholics, the cafeteria Catholics, moved away. They went to Boston, to New York, to Los Angeles, California: areas that John Kerry carried very easily anyway.

So the practicing Catholic was very important to this election, and as we’re seeing from all the results, “moral values” was the number-one concern. The largest group of people looked upon moral values as the number-one issue in this election. That worked in Bush’s favor in these key battleground states where there are large, large subsets of older, practicing Catholics. They have an impact.

But today you have to look at both sides of that coin, because of the way Catholics are [as a group]. About 28 percent of the electorate in the United States is baptized Catholics. Roughly half of them, or about 14 percent of the electorate, are practicing Catholics. There’s also a 3 or 4 percent swing vote that can go either way: basically church-going Catholics who are geared more toward the economic issues. And then there’s about 10 percent of the voting population that is cafeteria Catholics.

What makes the practicing Catholics more powerful is that they’re concentrated in the old Rust Belt states. In Wisconsin, for instance, where 32 percent of those eligible to vote are Catholic, I would venture to say that a significant proportion of them—60-70 percent of them—are practicing Catholics. They’re members of the Great Generation: World War II veterans and their families.

During the past year many Catholic dioceses and organizations sponsored or encouraged voter registration drives. Do you think that Catholics made up an appreciable part of the increased turnout for the 2004 elections?

Marlin: If you look at some of the battleground states, the answer to that question is Yes. There was also a greater turn-out for George W. Bush in those states. Even though he lost Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the margins in those states were dramatically different [when compared with results from election year 2000].

And in the old Rust Belt—the coal country of Pennsylvania, Lancaster County, up in Erie County in northern Pennsylvania, where old-line Eastern Europeans had settled around the turn of the 20th century—George Bush carried those counties quite easily. So, yes, [increased Catholic turn-out] did have an impact. They helped close the margins, which enabled the President to win the popular vote this time.

In addition, there’s one very surprising number in the election: 44 percent of Hispanics voted for Bush. That’s a huge number! It was 31 percent last time [in the 2000 presidential race]. The sheer bulk of them are Catholic.

The Bush campaign had a specific outreach program to Cuban-Americans and Mexican-Americans, who are socially very conservative. The message in their grass-roots approach to these Hispanics was: “Vote your values.” So that was a dramatic jump, both in the number of Catholic voters and in the percentage of them who voted for the President. So yes, Catholics certainly had an impact on this election.

The 2004 national election was the third time in United States history that a Catholic has been a presidential candidate for one of the major political parties. In your opinion, how did the campaign of John Kerry compare with those of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960?

Marlin: Let me suggest the following. As I mentioned earlier, for Al Smith the Catholics came out in huge numbers.

John Kennedy was the only man who was ever elected President of the United States who did not get a majority of the Protestant vote. Richard Nixon got 63 percent of the Protestant vote that year. However, as I contend in my book, it was a victory that night, not for liberalism, but for Catholicism. John Kennedy became President because, in the inner city, there was a tremendous outpouring, in that very, very, very close election, in which Kennedy won the popular vote by only 100,000 votes.

Let me give you a couple of examples. In 1960 John Kennedy carried Missouri with only 50.3 percent of the vote, but in St. Louis, a very Catholic city in that state, he got 66.6 percent of the vote. That put him over the top. In the state of Michigan he got only 50.9 percent of the vote, but in Detroit, back then a Catholic city, he got over 71 percent of the vote. In Pennsylvania he received only 51.2 percent of the vote, but in Philadelphia he got over 68 percent. In New Jersey, he got only 50.4 percent, but in Newark, a Catholic city then, he got 56.5 percent. So it was those Catholic populations in the old inner cities that put him over the top; otherwise he would have lost to Richard Nixon. Kennedy got 80 percent of the Catholic vote nationally, but the key number is that he did not get a majority of the Protestant vote, and that’s the only time in US history that that has ever happened. Now, having said that: During the recent election, with John Kerry as the third Catholic nominee, a very significant event took place. Very few people paid attention to it, in the media in particular, because John Kerry, whom many would describe as a cafeteria Catholic, did not want to make Catholicism an issue. He didn’t want a backlash in these battleground states, where there were large subsets of practicing Catholic voters.

But it tells you something. The premier Catholic dinner annually happens to be held in New York City: the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. (I think that in 2004 it was the 59th such dinner.) It’s a command performance. In 1960 Kennedy and Nixon were there. In 1980, Carter and Reagan; in 2000, Gore and Bush. This year, however, the members of the board of trustees of the Alfred E. Smith Dinner—the dinner honoring the first Catholic nominee for President—did not invite John Kerry to be on that dais. They did not invite the third Catholic nominee. That sends a very strong message that, within the circles of practicing Catholics, John Kerry was not a welcome sight.

What is different from JFK and Al Smith is that on Election Day, 2004, John Kerry, a baptized Catholic, received only 49 percent of the Catholic vote (considered generically), and he received only about 35 percent of the votes of practicing Catholics.

Quite a few states, including the battleground states of Ohio and Michigan, had amendments on the ballot this year that would define marriage in state law as the union of one man and one woman. Is there any statistical evidence that the prospect of legalized homosexual unions prompted more Catholics than usual to go to the polls in those states?

Marlin: Oh, there’s no doubt about it! When you look at some of the numbers … which I have here on my desk [rustling of papers] … When you start correlating things, it could have made the difference in Ohio, and it narrowed the gap in Michigan for the President—in any of those states, in fact. [Measures enforcing the traditional definition of marriage were on the ballot in 11 of the 50 American states.]

There were cross-currents around the nation whereby a political debate in one state could influence an entire region—the Southern States, Midwestern States, Western States—and the issue helped energize those areas. In Missouri, you recall, two months ago, they had a marriage amendment on the ballot on primary day, and 71 percent of the voters came out against [same-sex marriage].

So Yes, it helped the whole strategy of the Republican Party this year, which was to energize voters along cultural lines, and, Yes indeed, that energized Evangelical Christians as well as most practicing Catholics.

Despite the clear and unequivocal teaching of Pope John Paul II (bio - news) and recent statements by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops about the fundamental right to life and the obligations of Catholic politicians and voters in this regard, some nominally Catholic groups are still trying to place abortion on a par with other “life issues” such as war, capital punishment, or even economic policies (e.g. reducing unemployment). Do the election returns or exit polls indicate whether American Catholic voters were guided in 2004 by the Church’s pro-life teaching?

Marlin: I can’t tell right now.

For weeks after September 11, 2001, Catholic parishes in New York and northern New Jersey continued to have funeral services for policemen and firemen who had died during rescue efforts at the World Trade Center. For generations, Catholics in the major cities of the Northeast have been disproportionately employed in municipal services. Do the 2004 election returns reflect a heightened sensitivity to national security concerns among these urban Catholics?

Marlin: First of all, I’m the former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and I used to be the landlord of the World Trade Center. My successor went down on 9/11. I grew up in an old-fashioned neighborhood in New York City, and I’m the son and grandson of New York City cops, OK?

The average parish in Queens and Brooklyn, in my neighborhood in Queens for instance, had 25 dead, so it was an issue that was paramount on our minds at all times. You would have to look at election returns in specific neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, because New York is not wholly a Democratic state. But it’s interesting that, from 2000 to 2004, there’s a narrowing gap [between the two major political parties]. It’s also interesting in New Jersey [where many residential suburbs of New York City are located]: the President lost New Jersey by 16 points, the last time out, and I think this time he may have lost it by only 4 points. That tells you a story: the reason for that gap to narrow was over the security issue.

Ever since the establishment of the Catholic parochial school system in the 19th century, many Catholic parents have been burdened with both public school taxes and Catholic school tuition. In your opinion is the proposal to introduce educational vouchers, or tax credits for families who opt out of public education, poised to become a national issue again in the near future?

Marlin: The voucher system is an issue that they may try to push on the federal level, but it’s really a parochial issue. Vouchers work best in the inner cities, as Milwaukee has proven. In the inner cities the parochial schools can compete.

When it was on the ballot in California a decade or so ago and it went down big, it was because the people in suburbia said: “Wait a minute, I made my choice. I moved to the suburbs and I’m paying $15,000 a year in property taxes.” People in suburbia have first-rate schools. They have no interest in vouchers. So it is an inner-city battle.

In New York and Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, all the great old cities, vouchers will be a factor there. The place where the Roman Catholic Church is growing the fastest is in the South, with the influx of immigrants. For example, the Archdiocese of Atlanta is growing so fast that it has its own construction company to build schools and churches.

The point is, vouchers will become an issue in the South now, with their expanding parochial school system, while they are closing schools in the East. The Bishop of Brooklyn just announced, this past week, I think, that they will be closing 20 schools in Brooklyn. They’re ancient, with an aging plant.

I lived in a neighborhood where, within walking distance, three blocks in any direction from the apartment we lived in, there was a parish. Those were the days when you spoke “parish-ese:” when you introduced yourself you gave your parish, “I’m from St. Cyril’s,” or St. Alphonsus, or St. Stan’s, or whatever the case may be. Because of the shift of the Catholic population away from the cities, those systems aren’t efficient any more. You don’t need a parish every three blocks in the Bronx or Queens. But they’re making up for it by the growth in the South.

So I think that vouchers will become a political issue in cities, where there is still great interest in them because they work, but it’s not going to be a national issue as much as a local issue.

The primary elections in 2004 demonstrated the power of the Internet for the political purposes of nationwide organization and fundraising. In your opinion, have Catholic multimedia and online apostolates such as the Eternal Word Television Network, Catholic Answers, Priests For Life, and the American Life League succeeded in educating more Catholics to vote according to their moral convictions rather than party affiliation?

Marlin: Most Catholics are still Democrats, who vote Republican. They’re called “Reagan Democrats.” I would suggest that, from Mother Angelica’s station to Ignatius Press to a lot of material out there, it’s a world; it’s not a huge world of Catholics who pay attention to them, but there’s probably a couple of million that pay attention to them, and they are energized, and they go out and they do what has to be done. So, Yes. I’ve been fighting these battles in the trenches for thirty years. I know that, growing up in New York and being in the public square in New York, I’ve encountered so many cafeteria Catholics that they are coming out of my ears, and I know that they are embarrassed about our views on abortion and gay rights and same-sex marriage. They want no part of this, since they’re afraid that their friends on the upper side of Manhattan will not talk to them any more.

Then there are practicing Catholics like my father, who is a 78-year-old retired New York City cop, a longshoreman; he was in the Marines in the Second World War and received the Purple Heart. He voted for Harry Truman, he voted for Jack Kennedy, but he has been voting for Republican presidents ever since. He’s not an educated man, so these things that you mention don’t have an impact on him, but he grew up in an old-fashioned parish, an old-fashioned neighborhood. He votes along cultural lines and has done so his entire life. Here’s an ex-cop, longshoreman, voting along cultural lines; It had nothing to do with economics. It was about things instilled in the youth of the old practicing Catholic.

Do Mother Angelica and the other things have an impact on some people? Yes. But for the most part, the practicing Catholic in this nation today is a member of the Great Generation; they’re older and they just live by the things that they were taught as kids in the local parish school.

When I was going to a parish school in Brooklyn, I didn’t know the word “subsidiarity”—not until I was in college—but we lived it. The parish neighborhood was the center of life when I was a kid in Brooklyn.

Based on the 2004 election results, how would you revise the last chapter of your book, The American Catholic Voter, for a second edition? Do you see any patterns that seem to indicate long-range political trends?

Marlin: There may be a revised version, because the first edition, I’m happy to say, is sold out. The revision would be this: Throughout the campaign, John Kerry wanted to avoid the Catholic issue. He didn’t want people to know he was a Catholic; he didn’t want to talk about it. Prior to the second debate, only 23 percent of America knew that he was Catholic, as opposed to 1960, when 90 percent of the people knew that Jack Kennedy was Catholic.

And the reason why he wanted to hide from it was obvious in the second debate, when the candidates were asked the question about funding abortion. He basically said, “Since I’m pro-life, I must be pro-abortion. Who am I to impose my view?” Well, Senator, every time you vote on the floor of the Senate, you’re voting to impose your view. That’s the way it works. You only need fifty other people to impose your view. You want to raise taxes, you want to impose that on the American people. You want to go to war, you vote for war and you’re imposing that on the American people.

So the whole thing is absurd. John Kerry tried to avoid the issue. He was afraid that there might be a backlash if they realized in the key battleground states that the concentration of practicing Catholics can upset the apple-cart. So I would revise it to say that the third Catholic nominee tried to hide from his Catholicism as much as possible because he knew, in his heart of hearts (I can’t judge the man’s soul, but I can judge his public statements), that most people, after listening to him, would begin to wonder whether he is just a cafeteria Catholic. That’s the direction that the final chapter would take.

The highest-ranking Democrat in the United States, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a Catholic who publicly supported “abortion rights,” lost in a race against Republican challenger John Thune, a Baptist with conservative views on cultural issues. Commentators in their state of South Dakota have noted that this mirrors the presidential race, in which an Evangelical Republican defeated a Catholic “pro-choice” Democrat. Is this a coincidence or do you see a pattern here?

Marlin: I think, first of all, that South Dakota is about 22 percent Catholic. Daschle was “Mister Pro-Life” when he went to Congress, and in his first Senate race, but he betrayed everything, and that’s why he became the Senate Minority Leader. He lost touch with the state, lived in Washington, DC, and deserted his constituents on all the issues. So there was enough rope to hang him, and he lost a very close race in a small state where you can almost know every person who votes for you. It was a great victory. I hope that it sends a great message.

They were able to do it because it is a small state. It’s more difficult to do it up in New York. We have people who betray us all the time, people who (like former Mayor Rudy Giuliani) are by anyone’s standards cafeteria Catholics, and they get away with it. But in South Dakota, they’re old-time, older, practicing Catholics, and they threw the incumbent out.

This is one isolated incident of something that we’ve seen throughout the entire 2004 campaign. The webloggers, the “New Media” are setting a new set of rules, which the “Old Media,” as Michael Barone calls them—the New York Times in particular—just don’t get. On the day after the elections I spoke to two-dozen reporters, many of them from the major Old Media newspapers, and they just don’t have a clue. But [the emerging power of the New Media] keeps the system a lot more honest. You can’t get away with the propaganda.

This nonsense about the Dan Rather incident [in which a news anchorman with a major American television network tried to smear the incumbent US president with fraudulent documents]—it’s the bloggers who brought him down. The whole thing in the Times about the bombs [in Iraq] disappearing; it’s the bloggers that brought them down.

The Old Media doesn’t get it, and their ratings are plummeting, but the New Media now reacts with lightning speed.

That’s what happened to Senator Daschle. You can beat the propaganda machine of the old party system by just going the blogger route. So it makes a great deal of sense to me, and the phenomenon is going to grow even more.

[Author ID] Michael J. Miller is a free-lance translator and editor who writes for the Catholic press from suburban Philadelphia.