Catholic Voting Behavior Reversed

In our writing class, we have a major research project, and this project has great relevance to the article “Catholics Turned to the Democrat.”My research project aims to assess the significance of the pro-life stance Catholics had prior to and during 1980 and its contributions to Ronald Reagan winning the 1980 election; my research project’s relevance to the article is due to a reverse trend among Catholic voters. In “Catholics Turned to the Democrat,” Michael Luo asserts that the “God gap” has narrowed significantly between Democrats and Republicans, as he compares the past two presidential elections and how each party fared in receiving religious votes. Luo points to statistics of various groups, Catholics and those who attend church (or synagogue or mosque) more than weekly for example, and comments on the increased percentage Barack Obama received from each group. After including a variety of groupings based on either denomination or participation, Luo zeros in on the Catholic vote. While comparing the 2004 and 2008 numbers, Luo adds that the Democrat candidate in 2004, the Catholic John Kerry, received only 47 percent of Catholic voters, while the Protestant Barack Obama received 54 percent of the Catholic vote.
In 1980, Catholics were characterized as “the quintessential swing voters (Winters 155)” for the successful election of the Republican Ronald Reagan. This characterization sharply contrasted with Catholic voting trends prior to the 1980 election, where Catholics typically had been loyal Democrats since the days of the New Deal. This loyalty was more than intensified during the 1960 election with the Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy. This alteration in voting patterns among Catholics in 1980 was due in large part to abortion, and the efforts by church leaders to denounce any candidate with a pro-choice platform, which consistently fell to the Democrats.
The alteration in Catholic voting patterns in the 2008 elections is also due to abortion, but from the opposite angle. Due in large part to lower Mass attendance among Catholics, pro-choice Catholics have increased by 25 percent and “we can observe a general process of Catholics moving out of the middle to the pro-choice extreme.” Since the average Catholic today is not as staunch in his accordance to church teaching regarding abortion, other issues, such as the Iraq war, the economy, and healthcare, have collectively superseded the abortion issue alone for the majority of Catholics. These issues are by no mean trivial either and are acknowledged by Catholic Church teaching as vital components of the protection of life. At one time a pro-life stance was all a conservative needed for the Catholic vote, but things have changed. Today, liberal stances, and the stance of Barack Obama, align more accurately with these issues (with the exception of abortion) than conservative stances. With the greater emphasis Catholics have put on issues such as healthcare and the economy collectively as opposed to abortion alone, their voting trends will continue to transform into the trends present among Catholics during the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency up until the election of 1980. With Catholics making up a quarter of the electorate, will this transformation lead to a Democrat dominance of the presidency for all elections to follow? Will conservative platforms have to adjust in order to garner the Catholic vote, and what such adjustments would be made? In a quarter century, will the Republican Party be altered to the extent that it is unrecognizable to conservatives today?