Catholics for Bush: it's not just the Evangelicals who bedeviled the Dems.

IF the Democratic party still believed in the power of prayer, it would be appealing to a merciful God to be delivered from committed Catholic laymen like Boston's former Democratic mayor Ray Flynn. This year Catholic voters led the national shift to President George Bush. While besting his 2000 showing among all voters by 3 points, he boosted his share of Catholic voters by 5 points. The state that posted the largest increase in Catholic support for Bush was Ray Flynn's Massachusetts, where it was up by a stunning 17 points over 2000. George Bush's support from Protestants in the commonwealth was down by 6 points. This year, Massachusetts Catholics, 43 percent of the electorate, gave George Bush 49 percent of their vote to their local former altar boy's 51 percent. The first Catholic presidential nominee since 1960 has another former altar boy to thank for imposing this political penance.

John Kerry's liberal allies pin all responsibility for Bush's victory on evangelical Christians, and raise a hysterical alarm with their ridiculous predictions about the coming theocracy. But faithful Catholics were no less important in the Republican victory than Evangelicals; and Democrats should worry that an increase in Catholic defections from the Democratic flock may condemn the party to political oblivion.

In this election, about 23 percent of the national electorate identified themselves as evangelical Christians. Yet Catholics made up 27 percent, and Bush went from losing these voters by 3 points in 2000 to winning them by 5 (52-47) in 2004. His margin among Catholics who attend Mass weekly was 56 to 43. In two-thirds of the battleground states, Catholicism is the dominant religion: and among Catholic voters in Ohio, for example, Bush was up from 50 to 55, winning 65 percent of Catholics who attend weekly services. In Florida, Bush was up from 52 to 57; in New Jersey, from 51 to 58; and up from 42 to 52 in Colorado. In each of these states, Bush's increased margin among Catholics was larger than his increase among all voters. Ray Flynn has no doubt that Catholics added significantly to the number of voters concerned about "moral values" this year.

Flynn explains that many Catholics feel as though they are under assault from a hostile culture; he explains that, because they "want to be left alone, but don't want their values ignored, ... they are a great constituency for the Republican party if they want it."

Republicans definitely want that constituency, as evidenced by the GOP's unprecedented effort this year to woo Catholic voters. The Republican National Committee set up a website (KerryWrongforCatholics.com), hired 30 full-time field coordinators, and mobilized 55,000 volunteers to help build Catholic support for Bush. Seventy-six million voter guides were distributed to active Catholics in twelve battleground states, and ads ran in prime electoral targets like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.

But no Catholic vote effort had a bigger payoff than the one undertaken in Massachusetts. At the request of Boston's Archbishop Sean O'Malley, Ray Flynn secured private funding and launched an independent effort under the auspices of his nonpartisan organization--Liberty, Life and Family--to register Catholic voters and educate them on their moral responsibility to be "faithful citizens." He hired a coordinator for each of Massachusetts's four dioceses, and parish volunteers registered voters. Flynn traveled from parish to parish, meeting his fellow Catholics over coffee and donuts after Mass to urge support for policies consistent with the Church's teaching on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. In Hispanic parishes, where Flynn found an "incredible" interest, an English-Spanish translator would convey his remarks. In one Cape Cod parish, experts made a presentation on embryonic-stem-cell research that Flynn believes effectively addressed the audience's misunderstandings. He also visited parishes in Ohio and New Hampshire.

In response to John Kerry's debate statement about his intention to appoint only judges who would uphold abortion rights, Flynn took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling on his old political ally to reject any litmus test on judicial candidates that would rule out faithful Catholics.

Flynn was elected mayor of Boston in 1984, and reelected twice by record margins. He was appointed ambassador to the Vatican in 1993 by Bill Clinton. He is the kind of Catholic who was once comfortably at home in the Democratic party: Flynn opposes capital punishment; he was against the war in Iraq; he is committed to "social justice," and is a champion of the poor. But, like Pennsylvania's late Gov. Bob Casey, Flynn is staunchly opposed to abortion.

In fact, our old friend Bill McGurn calls this year's rout of Democratic candidates "Bob Casey's revenge." In 1992, the Democratic party chose to enforce an orthodoxy that relegated a popular loyal Democrat to the treatment Republicans reserve for David Duke. It mattered not that Casey had just been reelected in an important battleground state by over a million votes; nor did Democrats care that he was an exemplary "progressive" on health care, welfare, and race. His party denied him a speaking role at its convention, choosing instead to welcome six Republican women who supported abortion rights--including a Pennsylvania activist who had worked for Casey's opponent.

Flynn explains that his party has taken Democrats like him for granted because it "has been kidnapped by elites who only want us on Election Day." But he warns that the kind of blue-collar Catholics he has spent his life with are no longer reliable quadrennial Democratic allies. "The party thinks that just because a guy's an electrician or works for the gas company he will be a traditional Democrat who will ignore cultural issues, but that's not true any longer," Flynn says. "There is too much coming at them now. Abortion has been there, but now there's gay marriage, which makes them feel hopeless, and embryonic-stem-cell research."

Flynn points out that many of the Catholics who voted for Bush had reservations about his positions on some issues. "At the briefings, I would explain that we could argue over the war in Iraq or about tax cuts for the rich, and I was with them 100 percent on those issues, but in this election we have to do something different and take our Catholic values into the voting booth." The gay-marriage court decision in his own state no doubt helped Flynn to mobilize the Catholic voters who provided Bush with such a boost, but other states also saw significant Democratic defections among Catholics--leading Flynn to believe that the Massachusetts model can be exported.

"This was the perfect example of how lay Catholics should respond to the challenge of defending our values," he says. "It's not the intention to make the Church or the Bishops more political, but to make lay Catholics more involved." In Massachusetts, Archbishop O'Malley involved the right layman--and Catholics responded overwhelmingly. In Virginia--where the Bishop of Arlington carefully instructed his flock on how competing values should be weighed, and informed them about their responsibility as voters--Bush received his most decisive victory over Kerry among Catholics (63-36).

Democrats have ceded valuable redstate real estate to Republicans by writing off evangelical Christians. If they continue to dismiss the moral sentiments of millions of Catholics, they won't have a prayer in blue states, either.