Catholics have picked the winner of the popular vote for nine presidential elections in a row. Will they do it again in 2008?

A few years ago, when Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne addressed the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington together with conservative commentator William Bennett, the panel’s moderator noted that both belonged to the same parish. He quipped that their pastor had to be either very good or very vague. When Dionne told his pastor the story, the monsignor smiled and said, “Sometimes I like to believe I’m both.”

Dionne, who lives and breathes politics, enjoys the Beltway culture of the nation’s capital, especially at church.

“I like the fact that in our parish you can run into Bill Bennett over here, Ted Kennedy over there, Henry Cisneros here, and it also was Pat Buchanan’s parish. We are all together in this one place, and that shows me that the word catholic has meaning.”

His newest book, Souled Out (Princeton), examines the currently changing dynamic of religion and politics in the United States, with particular attention to the role of the Catholic Church in public life. The book is a model for the thoughtful, passionate, and productive dialogue that is so urgently needed in the religion-in-politics debate.

While Dionne approaches issues from a self-described liberal Catholic perspective, his analysis and his arguments for a synthesis of social and personal responsibility build bridges across the partisan divides both in Washington and in the church.

Once again in this election year there has been much speculation about the “Catholic vote.” But is there really such a thing as the Catholic vote anymore?
I like to say that there is no Catholic vote, and it’s important. What I mean is that there is no uniform Catholic vote. To some degree there’s always been diversity within the Catholic vote, partly because Catholics of different ethnic backgrounds voted differently.

In our history Catholics were generally more Democratic than Protestants, but less uniformly so than we often think.People often point to the 1960 presidential election, when John F. Kennedy got 80 percent of the Catholic vote, but forget that just four years earlier Republican Dwight Eisenhower received 50 percent of the Catholic vote.

Today Catholics are a 40-40-20 group. It is very hard for the Democrats to get less than 40 percent and hard for Republicans to get less than 40 percent, but there is a large swing vote of around 20 percent, and that’s why Catholics are important. Twenty percent of a group that comprises about a quarter of the electorate is a lot of people.

Are there any specific characteristics of the Catholic voter?
One way you can tell I’m Catholic is that I believe that the church’s job is to make you feel guilty about something in politics. Catholics, in some sense, are the ultimate cross-pressured voters. Liberal Catholics might vote for a pro-choice candidate, but often they still have qualms about abortion.

Similarly many Catholic conservatives know somewhere in their hearts that there is a problem with a totally unregulated market. They acknowledge at least some role for a social safety net. And I know some conservative right-to-life Catholics who have changed their view and have come to oppose the death penalty because of the church’s stance or their own reflections on church teaching on capital punishment.

There is a certain friction that being Catholic creates with the world. It’s disconcerting for some, but it is in many ways healthy. For Catholics there’s no perfect fit within the dominant political ideologies. There’s always a little bit of discomfort, and that’s part of what makes Catholics a swing group.

Another characteristic is our immigrant tradition. Even though Catholics now are very mainstream—and rather affluent on the whole—there remains this sense of some marginalization from the past. As a result, Catholics, even if they’re wealthy, have been more Democratic than other people with comparable income. It’s not that wealthy Catholics on the whole don’t vote Republican, but there’s more resistance to converting to Republicanism simply because of wealth.

And one can’t talk about Catholics without talking about Latinos. Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic group. Catholic Latinos are more inclined to be Democratic than Protestant Latinos. The church’s leadership role in the immigration debate has the potential to be hugely important to the future of American politics because the church is uniquely well-suited to build bridges between Latinos and a vast chunk of the Anglo population.

How have you seen the Catholic vote play out in this election year thus far?
First of all, I’m not sure to what extent either candidate is competing for Catholic voters as Catholics and to what extent the two are appealing to them on other grounds and issues.

I think during the primaries there was an exaggerated sense of Barack Obama’s weakness among Catholic voters. Hillary Clinton’s edge among Catholic voters may have been partly the result of who votes in Democratic primaries. Still, there was clearly a Hillary Clinton appeal to working class voters, older voters, older women, all of which helped her with Catholic voters.

What you’re seeing in the polling since then is that in the states with heavy concentrations of Catholics that Obama lost in the primaries—such as Massachusetts, New Jersey, or New York—he is now doing quite well. He seems to have won back a significant chunk of the Hillary-voting Catholics. At this point he seems to be doing a little bit better than John Kerry did among Catholics.

The Catholic vote started to shift back somewhat to the Democrats with the 2006 election. There was more religious organizing by Democrats that year than in previous elections. But in my mind those gains, as in the general population, were primarily due to the core issues of Iraq and the economy. That trend has continued this year, with most of it a result of dissatisfaction with the last eight years.

Overall I don’t think that either Obama or McCain will carry the Catholic vote overwhelmingly. I don’t think a Catholic landslide for any presidential candidate is possible anymore.

What are Obama’s chances of winning over a majority of those Catholic swing voters?
Much in the way Obama talks about public issues seems very Catholic to me. Doug Kmiec, a conservative law professor who worked in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, came out for Obama and wrote about his Catholic resonances. Obama uses a communitarian, “common good” language that seems very much in keeping with Catholic social teaching.

And even on abortion it’s almost as if he has a troubled conscience. Not that he doesn’t take a pro-choice position, but he has shown a real concern about the moral stakes in the abortion debate and has spoken to pro-life people in a more open way than has been the case in the past for other Democrats. Kristen Day of the Democrats for Life group said her organization felt far more welcome in the party’s platform deliberations this year than in the past.

There are three things that Obama has done recently that seemed to me to be aimed, in part, at the Catholic vote. One was his very strong speech on fatherhood and the importance of family. That speech was straight out of the tradition of the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and that will appeal to a lot of middle-of-the-road Catholics.

Second, he endorsed continuing the faith-based initiatives but doing it a bit differently from how the Bush administration did it. He highlighted the work of Catholic Charities USA in discussing faith-based social action.

And third, he has been talking about the need to reduce abortions and his unease with late-term abortions.

He recently said it was appropriate for states to prohibit or restrict late-term abortion if there were an exception for the health of the mother, and he expressed unease with the “mental distress” exception.