Catholic Swing Voters

There’s a great article entitled “Deciphering the Catholic Swing Vote” available at the Los Angeles Times by Tim Rutten. He discusses how Catholics are the last true swing voters in the U.S.  I urge conservatives to read this and take note. We are losing the battle for voters who are engaged on social issues.

An exerpt: 

The importance of that turnout is amplified by the fact that Catholics now constitute the only true “swing vote” among discrete electoral groups followed by pollsters and social scientists. Though they no longer march in quite so precise a lock step, evangelicals still tend overwhelmingly to vote for the GOP candidate. African Americans and Latinos remain reliably Democratic, as do nine out of 10 Jews.

In the mechanism of American politics, Catholics are the pendulum — and they consistently swing toward the winner. In fact, Catholics have gone for the winner of the popular vote in nine consecutive presidential elections, which means that, since 1972, they’ve supported five Republican candidates and four Democratic ones.