Huckabee, Romney and Catholics

Should we control for things like education and income before concluding that “Catholicism” is the relevant variable?

Voters who drool out of the left sides of their mouths have indicated a distinct preference for the candidate who professes to believe there are small pastel-colored magical ponies waiting for us in heaven, while right-side droolers generally lean toward the candidate who professes to believe there are no four-legged animals in heaven at all, only bicycles – white ones with gold handlebars.

Catholics prefer a Mormon to a Southern Baptist?

More likely, the (dozens? hundreds? thousands?) of Catholics who showed up to vote Republican prefered an establishment-type CEO Republican to a populist Southern-style Republican, especially one who hangs out with Chuck Norris. (I mean, Catholics prefer New York vigilantes of Irish and Italian extraction over WASPy Texas vigilantes, right?)

You might put it that the parts of the state where Romney had the most trouble were the places where there were the most Protestants.

The one problem with the label “Catholic” is that it is something of a moving target. After all, Catholic can refer to someone who rigorously hews to the teachings of the Pope and Magisterium as well as someone whose never been to Church but happens to have been baptized into the faith and still think of himself as “Catholic” as a part of his ethnicity. So I think it’s tricky to try and make “Catholicism” *that* big a factor in someone’s decisions.

Ecological fallacy anyone…?

The debaser notes that the Catholicism measure is confounded by urbanicity. More serious is the ecological inference problem. (Do we even know whether the counties high in Catholics are high in Republican Catholics?)

This is pretty lame stuff.

The point is that the Mormons and the Baptists are both expansionist, proselytizing organizations (which the Catholics by and large are not). So they are in overt competition with one another. I saw a blog post not long ago, I forget where, that documented the Southern Baptists’ organized anti-Mormon campaign.

Gene:

1) Having grown up Catholic in and around Mormons in the American West you’re probably already familiar with them, but I strongly second Dan Miller’s recommendation in #13; the Great Brain books are tons of youth fiction fun, and filled with wonderful little asides and observations about being a minority in what was, at that time, a very homogenous Mormon state.

2) FWIW, I actually don’t think Mormon doctrine requires a denial of original sin, properly understood. But it’s a somewhat convolunted theological argument, and I’m a distinct minority in accepting it anyway.

Responding to a few people in the thread, I’d note that almost exactly 50% of Catholics went for Bush in 2004, so it’s not as if they’re a key democratic constituency or whatnot (they’re more likely to vote Democrat than protestants overall, but not by an overwhelming margin). So presumably there are plenty of republican catholics thereabouts, and it’s not immediately obvious that they’re voting against Huckabee because they’re secret liberals.

If you tell a Mormon missionary you’re Catholic, they’ll typically say that’s fine, do you want to talk. If you tell that to a Baptist, you’ll more than likely be told you’re going to hell.

The Mormons who knocked on our door — some of whom were actually American missionaries converting the heathen British — generally got the message at my dad’s ‘Sorry, no, Catholic.’

The double-glazing salesmen were less amenable.

I think the South Carolina map is going to be the really interesting one, because that’s got Bob Jones U in the north, and Charleston in the south. The sectarianism is vestigial, but memories are long.

On Blair: I don’t think it proves that a Catholic can’t be Prime Minister. The number of people who would disapprove that he was now a Catholic rather than a Protestant are pretty small (apart from possibly in Northern Ireland). On the other hand, it would have aroused extra hostility from a) all those who hate him having any faith at all (a lot of liberals) and b) right-wing Catholics in the media (Ann Widdecombe etc) who point out his un-Catholic views on abortion, gay rights etc. In other words, it would have gained him quite a lot of extra political grief, so he decided to postpone the matter. I think someone who was already a Catholic could get elected, but they’d have to make it clear (as JFK did) that they weren’t going to be bound by the Pope’s line on social matters.

What I meant to say that it is not a serious obstacle with voters (& I agree with what psg says) but that it is a “constitutional” impossibility, up there with marrying the monarch or heir to the throne?

It seems to me that Blair himself saw be/becoming a Catholic as such an impossibility.

What little comment I saw about it seemed to mention that it was probably just as well he’d postponed it until leaving office as it would have caused all sorts of complications for the Anglican church’s relationship with the state without pointing out the absurdity of all that in contemporary Britain given.

There’s nothing constitutional to stop a Catholic becoming PM as presumably the Tories,of all people,concluded about Jews too when they selected Michael Howard.

The monarchy,of course is a different matter covered by written parts of our constitution.Blair might have been understandably anxious to avoid bringing the two issues of the monarchy and the established church into contemporary debate—full reform of the House Of Lords where the bishops still retain their ex officio seats is still ongoing (98 years to date).

For my part I’ve always hoped someone–The Lib Dems most likely — would make disestablishing the C of E a commitment if only so we could all enjoy outbreaks of antidisestablishmentarianism.

Franck:
Northern Ireland’s voters elect MPs who reflect their religious/national divisions and are hence ignored by the three British parties who have had no support in Northern Ireland since the Ulster Unionists were finaly separated from the Tories in the 1970s.

Historically religion was certainly influentional:Methodism/Liberalism and Church of England = Tory-Party-At-Prayer etc and you can still see the influence of that on our own map.However those who unconsciously vote like this are no longer so active religiously as to suddenly alter a lifetime’s voting habit when a party leader switches religion.

In my own family and others I know the rabidly anti-Catholic ancestors were that infuriating beast the working-class Tory,doggedly voting against their own economic interests.Anyone still like them would merely see one more reason for not voting Labour so no change.The Tories have only 1 Scottish MP and no hope of much more in any forseeable circumstances.

God, is there anything that brings out as much crap statistical analysis as presidential elections?

The regression is based on the counties representing 100-odd independent observations. but look at the map: that’s just obviously not true. We aren’t looking at 100 counties here, we’re looking at three or four regions. Under the circumstances regression analysis isn’t going to be able to distinguish between religion and anything else that varies along the same regional axes, which no doubt includes not every all the demographic variables you could think of but no doubt some idiosyncratic geographic stuff as well. It’s like doing a regression on comments on this post and some typical Redstate thread and treating every comment as an independent observation. You’d find that left-leaning blog readers are far more interested than right-leaning ones in the Flashman books. No doubt with a high degree of statistical significance and a big r-squared.

Such BS.

On Blair: I don’t think it proves that a Catholic can’t be Prime Minister.

Blair was what you’d call ‘Catholic by osmosis’ long before he officially jumped; my guess is that he didn’t want to become the first Catholic PM through conversion, in case that set off any weird constitutional nonsense. Better that someone raised in the Church crosses that barrier, because he/she will be more able to tell insufferable converts like Anne Widdicombe to shut up.

Well, Eli does have a name you know, even a blog and a Simple Plan for Saving the World, but the real point of my comment was that the republican theocratic bird has two wings, CONSERVATIVE Catholics (very anti-abortion those) and evangelicals. In spite of Bill Bennett these two have little in common and enjoy a mutual fondness (not), so Huckabee causes the foo bird to circle endlessly until, well you know what.

I sort of agree with pitkin, but not as strongly. Is each county really an observation, or are they fairly arbitrary divisions?

“Agree with Pitkin” are the three sweetest words in the blogosphere, but it sounds like you’ve gotten to the right place place the wrong way here. If counties were indeed arbitrary divisions, then these results would be fine. The problem is that Kirchner is treating them as arbitrary divisions — as random samples of the Iowa population — when they are not arbitrary at all. When you’ve got geographic data like this where pretty much every demographic variable is organized along the same lines, plus a bunch of geographic confounders like endorsements by local officials, unions with memberships based in particular areas, etc., you just have a lot fewer data points than the naive regression analysis Kirchner does assumes. Under the circumstances, calculating significance and so on as if you’ve got 100 separate observations is just bad statistics. It’s not a first approximation of anything. Henry should know better.

I think this is signifigant because it suggests that Huckabee might not be the man to bring the Republican party to the Economic left, because the Republican coalition is pretty dependent on Catholic voters and his economic positions are anathema to the nonreligious part of the Republican base.

Personally as an American Catholic I have always had a certain sympathy for Mormons, they are generally pleasant, they have little historic antipathy for catholics and they are frequently persecuted by the very same people who until very recently talked about Popish plots. Add the fact that I was once subjected to a Baptist specifically condemning them to me and several others for believing in the “false doctrine of works” and my feelings can grow positively warm.

Huckabee’s sleazy insinuations against Romney for his religion grate on many catholics as well, even non religious ones because they remind us, as a group, of the kind of rhetoric that isn’t so long past in this country especially regarding Kennedy.

As an incidental I might note that Romney’s fiercest defender at the National Review is the very vocally Catholic social conservative, Kathryn Lopez.