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Those who have believed in a "Catholic vote" as some unified bloc or as a consistent "swing" component of the U.S. electorate should pay close attention to the results of the 2004 presidential election. The failure of John F. Kerry, the first major party Catholic candidate since John F. Kennedy, to definitively win the votes of those in the electorate who share his faith should finally put to rest the myth of a Catholic presidential vote. The research presented here indicates that it was also a myth that most Catholics were primarily motivated in 2004 by "moral values" in making their presidential choice at the ballot box. Using survey data from the 1960, 2000, and 2004 elections, we show that partisanship has grown to trump faith for Catholic voters due to a combination of demographic factors, changes within the Catholic Church, and changes within the U.S. party system. The defining features of anything that one might call the Catholic vote are in its fractures, not its wholeness.
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 F. 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 F. 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...