Camelot only comes but once? John F. Kerry and the Catholic vote.

Before you drift to sleep upon your cot, think back on all the tales that you remember.... That once there was a fleeting wisp.... Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

--Lyrics from the 1960 Broadway musical Camelot

Despite the volume of ink and sound bite noise generated in discussions of the "Catholic vote" during the 2004 presidential campaign, there is but one simple empirical lesson that the election results reinforced: on the long scale of modern U.S. electoral history the Catholic vote, much like the legend of Camelot, was a "fleeting wisp" most evident with the election of John E Kennedy in 1960. (1) However, it ceased to be a cohesive bloc more than forty years ago and, as a group, Catholic voters have not always been the consistent "swing vote" group that they are often portrayed to be.

The election of John E Kennedy was truly an extraordinary and liberating event for U.S. Catholics (Dolan 1992, 422). As Crews (1993) notes, "An invisible barrier had been shattered. Across the nation, Catholics sensed that they had finally achieved unquestioned first-class status as loyal citizens" (p. 139). After enduring more than 170 years of political anti-Catholicism in various forms and degrees, (2) eight in ten Catholic voters supported Kennedy at the ballot box in 1960. At the time, Converse et al. (1961) noted "the vote polarized along religious lines in a degree which we have not seen in the course of previous sample survey studies" (p. 273). Slightly more than 118,000 votes separated Kennedy from Nixon nationally and it would have been a daunting challenge for him to win with anything less than 80 percent of the Catholic vote. Converse et al. (1961) estimate that Kennedy's vote among Catholics was 17 percentage points higher than what an average non-Catholic candidate could have expected (p. 275).

As John F. Kerry's candidacy began to take shape in late 2003, it was an open question as to how Catholics might react if he were to be the first Catholic since Kennedy to win one of the two major parties' nominations. Few expected that Kerry would be able to attract eight in ten Catholic voters, yet most would not have bet that he might lose the Catholic vote. This article puts that latter result--which will likely always be in question--into context by first introducing existing theory and evidence and then proceeding to comparisons of the Catholic vote in 1960, 2000, and 2004.

The U.S. Presidency and the "Catholic Vote"

Although John E Kennedy's election is often considered a breakthrough moment overcoming a long tradition of overt political anti-Catholicism, it is a misconception that Catholics were somehow systematically kept out of U.S. government, even as it began and the Catholic population was very small. (3) In 1790, just 1 percent of the U.S. population was Catholic and as of 1840 it was still only 4 percent (Prendergast 1999, 2). Yet, things began to change in the 1850s as waves of immigration began from many predominantly Catholic countries (4)--first from Europe and then followed by Latin America as well as Asia and Africa in the twentieth century (ongoing)--which would result in Catholics never again being less than 10 percent of the U.S. population.

Although Kennedy was the first Catholic to win, he was of course not the first to run. Al Smith was the first, getting the Democratic party's nomination in 1928 when Catholics still made up less than 20 percent of the population. Smith's Catholicism was the central issue of that campaign and similar to how Catholics would support Kennedy three decades later, he benefited from a huge Catholic turnout. Although Prendergast (1999) estimates Catholics made up only a third of Smith's votes, he concludes that "in no presidential election, before or since, have Catholics been so close to unanimity in their choice of a candidate" (p. 96). (5) However, this is largely an ecological assertion made without the benefit of surveys that might allow for comparison to 1960.

Smith's candidacy is certainly significant in that he broke one barrier in getting the nomination. Yet it was also significant in that the opposition to him was able to evoke the political anti-Catholicism that overtly insinuated a Catholic president would put pope and church before country and constitution. (6) In the years that followed, the disappointment in Smith's failure was stemmed by the continued growth in the number of Catholics in the electorate. In the decade before Kennedy was elected, the percentage of the U.S. population self-identifying as Catholic had crossed the 20 percent barrier and has remained approximately 22 to 24 percent (among adults) ever since. (7) With Catholics making up nearly a quarter of the electorate, the prospect of a Catholic candidate on the ticket was attractive and culminated in Kennedy's 1960 nomination.

To counteract these potential attacks against his religion, the Kennedy campaign engineered a strategy that Kerry would utilize more narrowly in 2004 on the issues of abortion, stem cell research, and same-sex marriages--emphasize the personal and individual importance of faith yet also promise to always govern in a manner entirely independent of any influence from the Catholic Church or its doctrine. (8) As important as Kennedy's eventual election was for many U.S. Catholics, it may have been too important for Kerry and other Catholic candidates of the future. (9) It had mattered for Smith, who won the first nomination, and Kennedy, who won the first election, however we argue here that both of these elections may have created a "shattered barrier" effect, thereby neutralizing the unifying impact of a candidate's Catholicism. (10)

Even as Catholics had showed strong support for Catholic Democrats vying for the presidency in the past, the propensity for Catholics to self-identify as Democrats or to vote for Democratic presidential candidates consistently weakened after 1964. As Table 1 indicates using the most widely utilized surveys, Catholics did not vote in the majority for a Democrat in 1972, 1980, 1984, and possibly in 1992.

Table 1 also shows the often precarious nature of measuring the vote of Catholics as there is not always agreement among Gallup surveys, the National Election Studies (NES), and the major media exit polls. In 1956, 1988, 1992, and 2004, the winner of the Catholic vote cannot be unanimously determined. The Gallup and NES surveys include many fewer Catholic respondents than the exit polls and thus have higher margins of sampling error. However, exit poll methodology and cluster sampling introduce additional complications--especially in more recent years, with greater numbers of voters having access to and selecting absentee or vote-by-mail options. (11) It is unlikely that anyone will ever know whether Kerry actually "won" the Catholic vote given the discrepancies shown in Table 1.

The large number of interviews conducted for the state-level exit polls does allow for more localized explorations of these data that provide some insight into how Catholics voted, however. As Table 2 indicates, Kerry won an estimated 58 percent of the Catholic vote in Western states. Differences in the estimated Catholic vote percentages between Kerry and Bush are 1 percentage point or less in the Midwest, non-swing states, and in states that did not have a bishop make statements about possibly denying Kerry Communion at Mass in their diocese if Kerry did not change his position on some aspect of Catholic doctrine--usually abortion.

Overall, fifteen bishops in fourteen states (see Appendix) made such statements between November 2003 and the election. (12) Within those states, Kerry only won 44 percent of the vote. At this level of analysis there can be no sound argument of causality as it could be coincidental, a function of overlapping geography, or some reverse causality in that bishops in states where Catholics were already predisposed to vote against Kerry felt more able to make these statements.

It is clear that there are both regional variations in the current Catholic vote and some considerable election-to-election volatility in the vote choices of Catholics, with majorities switching back and forth between Democratic and Republican candidates over time. (13) However, as Figure 1 indicates, there has been more stability in Catholic party identification although it has trended slightly away from the Democrats in recent years. Several researchers indicate that there has been a Catholic shift toward the Republican party (e.g., Wattenberg and Miller 1981; Abramson, Aldrich, and Rhode 1994; Wagner 2001). Three pieces of evidence are clear: (1) declining Democratic identification among Catholics from the mid 1960s to the late 1980s, (2) a rather slight decrease relative to Protestants in the likelihood of Catholics voting for Democrats in national elections, and (3) the increasing tendency since 1980 of active regular Mass-attending Catholics to vote Republican in presidential elections. (14)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In 2004, Catholics were still more likely to self-identify as Democrat (including "leaners") than anything else, though this identification has dropped below majority status for the first time in a presidential election year since 1932 (49 percent compared to 37 percent Republican). In 2002, the percentage of Catholics who considered themselves to be Democrats was even lower. These party identification shares do put the 2004 vote in greater perspective. If Bush won a majority, or nearly a majority, of the Catholic vote, he did so by attracting some Catholics who do not consider themselves Republican. This realization led Democratic political consultants (i.e., Democracy Corps) to issue a widely circulated post-election memo entitled "Reclaiming the …