Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Related: Hussein in trouble with the Jews

Politico:

Barack Hussein Obama’s 11 straight Democratic primary and caucus victories have been marked by continued and impressive gains among women, lower-income workers, Hispanics and virtually every other demographic group.

Yet one potentially critical set of voters remains stubbornly resistant to his appeal—Catholics.

In state after state, with only a few exceptions, exit polling shows Hillary Rodham Clinton is the choice of Catholic voters. Clinton even defeated Obama among Catholics in his home state of Illinois. It seems the more Catholic the state, the more likely she is to have won it.

While Obama has closed the once-gaping gap during his post-Super Tuesday string of wins, even in victory he has underperformed among Catholics. In Virginia, where he won the state 64 percent to 35 percent, he won only 52 percent among Catholics. In Maryland, where he won 60 percent to 37 percent, he nevertheless lost the Catholic vote, 48 percent to 45 percent.

In Wisconsin, where Obama posted his most recent victory of consequence, the Illinois senator carried the state with 58 percent but tied Clinton with 50 percent of the Catholic vote.

Clinton’s strength with Catholics is in part driven by her popularity with Hispanics, many of whom are Catholic. In California, where Latinos made up roughly one-third of the primary vote, she won 70 percent among churchgoing Catholics, compared to Obama’s 26 percent.

Analysts and Catholic politicians interviewed for this story say there’s no singular event or reason that explains Obama’s softness among Catholics. Rather, they agree that it’s more likely a reflection of stylistic differences between the two candidates.

John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron and a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, said that while Clinton’s and Obama’s policy proposals are similar, her personal religious background gives her an advantage.

“Hillary Clinton, probably because of her Methodism and her liberalism, holds teachings that are very closely tied to the Catholic Church. That fits very well with Catholic sensibilities,” Green said. “I think she talks in ways that Catholics can understand. He speaks in the cadences of the black church, with a real Protestant approach.”

Obama, who is a member of the United Church of Christ, has also been dogged by false rumors he is Muslim. The UCC departs from Catholic Church teachings on several important points, notably on the issues of gay marriage and abortion rights.

The Obama campaign doesn’t concede a Catholic gap, pointing instead to recent gains among Catholics in places like Wisconsin and the fact Clinton began with strong familiarity and strength among various demographic groups, including Catholics.

“I don’t think the advantage is that clear cut. He’s done pretty well among Catholic voters,” says Joshua DuBois, the Obama campaign’s national director of religious affairs. “Catholics have found a lot to like about Senator Obama. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of appeal coming out of his organizing work with the Catholic community in Chicago.”

Obama’s inability to seal the deal with Catholic voters could prove troublesome in the next round of primaries on March 4. Rhode Island, one of four states voting that day, is by far the most Catholic state in the nation with more than half the population identifying as Catholic, according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.

Delegate-rich Ohio and Texas, the two states that are central to Clinton’s “firewall” strategy, are roughly 20 percent Catholic.

If the race continues past March 4, the outlook gets even worse for what would likely be a final big-state showdown April 22 in Pennsylvania—a state that is just under one-third Catholic.

“The Catholic vote is absolutely critical in some of the major markets like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. In Pittsburgh it can be as much as 50 percent of the [primary] vote,” said Jon Delano, adjunct professor of Public Policy and Politics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “The question is how much does the religious part play in how they cast their ballot.”

Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), who represents one of the most heavily Catholic metropolitan areas in the nation, said the Catholic vote in his Pittsburgh-based district is still very much up for grabs but Clinton has to be considered the front-runner.

“She’s the person to beat in Pennsylvania. President Clinton is very popular in our neck of the woods,” Doyle said. “This is Hillary’s race to lose.”

Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.), another Pittsburgh-area congressman, said Catholic voters in his district “are a very sizable voting bloc. But it’s still fluid – and they haven’t really started to campaign here.”

Doyle, Altmire and Rep. John Murtha, the other Democrat who represents western Pennsylvania—all Catholics—have not endorsed a candidate for the nomination.

Despite Obama’s struggles to gain traction among Catholics, Douglas Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor and the former dean of the Catholic University School of Law, insists that in a general election matchup with John McCain, Obama would prove popular with Catholic voters.

“Senator Obama has captured better than any of the other candidates a concern that religion has been used as a wedge issue – that there has been a deliberate effort on the part of conservatives to basically try and gain political advantage by pointing out how much Democrats disrespect religion,” said Kmiec, who served as a legal adviser to Republican Mitt Romney. “On the other side, Democrats have been too quick to disregard the significance of faith in people’s lives – that they have been too quick to embrace wholesale secularism.”