Catholic Vote Is Harbinger of Success for Clinton

[CarolNYC]

Catholic Vote Is Harbinger of Success for Clinton
By JIM DWYER
Published: February 9, 2008

Hillary Rodham Clinton has run away with the votes of Roman Catholic Democrats in nearly all the primaries, often beating Barack Obama by two to one or better, exit polls show. In New York, she received 66 percent of the Catholic vote to his 30 percent.

“I didn’t go to bed until 1 in the morning waiting on the results,” said Joe Quinn, a Catholic who is a building superintendent on the Upper West Side. “I slept very well, let me tell you.”

Catholics, who make up about a quarter of the registered voters in the country, have backed the winner of the national popular vote for at least the last nine presidential elections, going back to 1972. The Catholic scorecard: five Republican and three Democratic presidents, and one popular-vote-winning but presidency-losing Democrat, Al Gore.

No other large group has switched sides so often, or been so consistently aligned with the winners. Over that same period, a majority of white Protestants typically voted Republican, while blacks of all faiths and Jews strongly backed Democrats.

(snip)

Mr. O’Dwyer maintains that Mrs. Clinton as a senator — and Bill Clinton, as president — paid attention to ethnic and working-class Catholics who were often overlooked by both parties. “Every one of the ethnic groups got a hearing,” he said, making them comfortable with Mrs. Clinton’s position on Social Security, health care, education and immigration. And both Clintons, he said, had played central roles in brokering an end to the armed conflict in Northern Ireland.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/nyregion/09about.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin