Why Kerry lost.

THE COFFEE WAS STILL GROWing cold at Kerry campaign headquarters when conservatives and media commentators alike began proclaiming that President George W. Bush's electoral victory was due to the president's successful courtship of religious voters, specifically the addition of Catholics to Bush's core constituency of conservative Christians. The numbers seemed to say it all: Bush nabbed 52% of Catholic voters to Senator John Kerry's 47%. And Bush's share of the Catholic vote was up five percentage points over 2000--against a Catholic candidate.

In the crucial battleground state of Ohio, Bush's margin of the Catholic vote was even greater, 55% to 43%. In Florida, Catholics voted for Bush 57% to 42%. Leonard Leo, a conservative Catholic who served as an advisor to the Bush-Cheney campaign, gloated to the New York Times, "In both Ohio and Florida, the Catholic vote helped carry the president across the finish line."

Exit polls seemed to echo this contention that the religious vote carried the day for Bush. The number one concern named by voters in exit polls was "moral values." A larger percentage of voters--22%--named this as their number one concern than the economy/jobs (20%) and terrorism (19%). And among the presumably religious voters who named moral values as their number one concern, 80% voted for Bush.

Kerry lost, the story went, because he failed to attract these voters, particularly the Catholic vote. The White House was quick to crow about its center-right mandate and its long-anticipated electoral realignment, which it hoped would bring together white Evangelical Protestants--nearly 80% of whom voted for Bush--and church-going Catholics. Winning the "Catholic vote" had been a core component of Bush's election and reelection strategy. In 1999, the Republican Party launched a major initiative to court the Catholic vote. After the 2000 election, the party deployed a grassroots Catholic strategy modeled on a network strategy it had successfully employed with other groups.

It was clear that Kerry couldn't take the Catholic vote for granted. Bush was diligent throughout his first term about making appearances designed to demonstrate his respect for the Catholic constituency and to remind voters of the many areas of agreement between conservative Christians and Catholics, particularly on the issues of abortion and fetal stem cell research. He spoke to the Knights of Columbus and marched in Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade. He met with the pope in 2002 and again in June 2004, when Bush reportedly complained to Vatican officials that the US bishops weren't being "vocal enough" in supporting him on issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Actually, the US bishops had been pretty vocal all along on the issue of abortion fights and Catholic politicians once it became clear that John Kerry would become the Democratic Party's first Catholic candidate since John Kennedy. In January 2004, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke sparked instant controversy when he said that he would deny Kerry communion because of his prochoice voting record. "I would have to admonish him not to present himself for Communion," said Burke.

In April, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput moved the issue beyond the candidate to voters when he said that "real Catholics" should only vote for candidates who "act Catholic in their public service and political choices." Chaput's words were magnified later that month when Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Vatican official who has been mentioned as a possible successor to the pope, said at a Vatican press conference that Kerry "is not fit" to receive communion because of his prochoice stance.

Burke's admonishment was followed by a similar one in May from Colorado Springs Bishop Michael Sheridan. Sheridan went so far as to say that any Catholic who didn't toe the church line in the voting booth should be denied communion until they recant their sins. Other US church officials, including Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Kerry's home diocese of Boston, Alfred Hughes of New Orleans and John Vlazny of Portland, Ore., said that prochoice politicians should voluntarily avoid taking the sacrament.

In July, the full US hierarchy weighed in on the issue when the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a strong statement entitled "Catholics in Political Life" that said that prochoice lawmakers risk "cooperating in evil," but left the final decision about whether to deny them communion up to the local bishop.

The rhetoric heated up as the election approached, lead by a series of high-profile proclamations by Archbishop Chaput that Catholics who voted for prochoice politicians were "making a deal with the devil." In an interview with the New York Times, he said a vote for Kerry was a sin that would have to be confessed before a Catholic could receive communion. On October 21, Bush met with Cardinal Justin Rigali of Pittsburgh in the key state of Pennsylvania, where Catholics are more than one-third of the state's entire population. Two weeks earlier, Rigali told parishioners in a homily that they had a duty to vote for candidates "who hold our Catholic teaching that respecting life from conception to a natural death is inviolable."

When Bush won and early exit polls showed support for a president who would address "moral values," the story quickly became that Bush won because he was successful in his strategy to attract Catholics and other "values" voters. Kerry, in turn, lost because he failed to attract traditional, church-going voters, particularly Catholics, who rejected one of their own to vote for a Methodist. This analysis has important implications for 2008, because it suggests that the Democratic Party should move further to the right on issues like reproductive rights to make the party and its candidate more attractive to voters.

But is it true? Additional analysis of the exit polls showed that the "values" voter was largely a chimera. The exit poll question that queried voters' priorities failed to define "values," so a voter who said that values were her top priority could have been referring to the conservatives' Holy Trinity of abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research, or could have been referring to more liberal or moderate concerns such as the United States' unprovoked military excursion into Iraq. At the same time, the exit poll separated the issues of Iraq and terrorism, which then split concern over these key issues. Similarly, the economy and jobs were split from the issue of taxes, again diluting the potential impact of a potent issue.

Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center was quick to point out that the percentage of voters in 2004 who said they attended church once a week or who said they opposed abortion was no larger than in the 2000 election. And 60% of voters said they favored legal recognition of same-sex relationships, either in the form of marriage or civil unions, so clearly many voters were not motivated by an opposition to gay rights.

The reality is that Kerry didn't lose because he lost "values" voters or because Catholics defected wholesale from the Democratic Party at the behest of the Catholic bishops. Kerry lost because he lost votes across the board to Bush compared to Vice President Al Gore in 2000. Kerry managed to pull off the remarkable feat of losing voters in almost every key Democratic constituency to Bush: women, Hispanics, older voters, city dwellers, Catholics and Jews.

The Kerry campaign made a series of highly publicized blunders that stalled the candidate's momentum in the critical last two months of the campaign. The failure to use the media effectively to respond decisively to the Swift Boat smear campaign in the wake of a convention that was top-heavy with references to the Viemam war made Kerry appear disingenuous. The campaign's mystifying decision to all but ignore Kerry's substantial Senate record negated his consistent support of issues like reproductive rights and the environment, which are critical to progressive and moderate voters, and created a strange sense of non-accomplishment for a candidate who had been in the Senate for 20 years.

But the overwhelming reason Kerry lost is that he failed to articulate a compelling message that appealed to progressive and moderate voters alike, especially Catholics. His stance on the war in Iraq was confusing at best and disingenuous at worse. Even if he did support the dubious war at the outset, he could have offered a measured critique of the conduct of the war and the grounds on which it was fought that would have appealed to the 50% of Americans who opposed the war and echoed the concern of many religious leaders, including the Vatican, who opposed unilateral American military action in Iraq.

Kerry presided over an embarrassing erosion of the gender gap that has been a bulwark of the party's strength, which wasn't surprising given his lukewarm support for reproductive rights that belied a vigorous prochoice voting record. Kerry declared that he was against abortion in private but prochoice in his public life. But he treated reproductive rights like the party's poor stepchild during the election and rarely mentioned abortion on the campaign trail, which made it seem that he had been cowed by the US bishops into silence.

And at a time that Bush was asserting a global vision of American imperialism thinly disguised as turn-key democracy, Kerry failed to articulate an alternative world view. Despite the lesson of Afghanistan and the Taliban, he failed to put women's rights and global poverty into perspective in the debate over how to best control terrorism. Former Kerry speechwriter Andrei Cherney admitted after the election that voters didn't want a list of policy prescriptions from Kerry; they wanted to know how Kerry "saw the world," but he "never told them," she said.

In the end, John Kerry lost because of John Kerry. Despite unprecedented cohesion and coordination on the part of the Democratic Party and despite Bush's high unpopularity ratings and bungling of Iraq, Kerry failed to give a sufficient number of voters a compelling reason to vote for him. He failed to differentiate his vision of domestic and foreign policy from President Bush's and he failed to introduce voters to his substantial record of progressive public service. Many mainstream voters were clearly looking for an alternative to Bush; Kerry never gave them one.

PATRICIA MILLER, a former editor of Conscience, is a Washington, DC-based writer specializing in politics and reproductive rights.