Recent polls show voters deeply dissatisfied with Congress and the president, a situation that has Republican Party strategists scrambling to retain control in Washington, especially in the House of Representatives. Even in the aftermath of the administration’s criminal failures in Iraq, however, it is unclear whether the Democrats will be able to turn righteous indignation and dissatisfaction into votes. Why? Religion-or the Democrats’ lack thereof-may be the answer.

This November’s congressional elections are a warm-up for the 2008 presidential race, and whether the Democratic Party will be able to nominate a candidate capable of wresting the White House from a discredited GOP is also in question. One reason, as philosopher and political activist William A. Galston observed in a recent symposium for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (pewforum.org), is that the Democratic Party is deeply divided itself. Many of the party’s more liberal voices are convinced that Democrats need to sharpen their response to the Republicans, not just about the disastrous war in Iraq, but also on “culture war” issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage. Galston, who served as deputy director of domestic policy to President Bill Clinton, notes that many within his own party remain deeply resentful of Clinton’s efforts to move the Democrats toward the middle on values-laden issues like welfare reform.

Striking a less strident note, especially on moral issues touching on religious faith, is crucial to the Democrats’ hopes of regaining control of Congress and the White House, said Galston. “A simply secularist stance by a great political party is a formula for defeat and irrelevance,” he argued. Prochoice himself, Galston nevertheless cited Clinton’s veto of the bill banning partial-birth abortion as the greatest political mistake of Clinton’s presidency. In defending what fair-minded people consider the extreme side of a deeply divisive issue, a party is perceived as extreme and exclusionary itself. That perception is one reason why Bush made such significant gains among middle-of-the road voters, and especially among Catholics, in the 2004 election. In fact, Galston contends that the white Catholic vote, which Clinton and Gore had won but which swung heavily (by seventeen points) to Bush in 2004, is where future elections will be decided. “The real story of the 2004 election was much more about Catholics than it was about Protestants,” Galston said. “And I think the real story of American politics in the next ten years will be written as much around the behavior of Catholics, persuadable Catholics, as around...evangelical Protestants.”

In what sense are Catholic voters persuadable? According to Galston and other political analysts, these mostly “traditionalist” Catholics are not single-issue voters. In other words, “wedge issues” alone (such as abortion or same-sex marriage) won’t win them over. Rather, it is the perceived honesty, character, and integrity of a candidate that matter most. Candidates who can demonstrate a connection between personal and public responsibility in their own lives-who show a willingness to shoulder duties as well as assert rights-gain credibility. This perceived sense of personal integrity also weighs heavily in the evaluation of a candidate’s strength on foreign-policy questions. Perhaps the most important way in which voters measure these moral qualities in a politician is by how comfortable with and respectful toward religion he or she is.

At the moment, the Democratic Party is widely perceived to be unfriendly or even hostile to people of religious faith. Unless that impression-not a wholly inaccurate one, according to Galston-can be changed, Republicans will continue to be given the benefit of the doubt by “persuadable” voters. As Galston described the Democrats’ problem, “If a party does not share your values, does not respect religious faith, can’t be trusted to keep America safe, and doesn’t know what it stands for, that sounds like a pretty powerful indictment to me.”

Are Democratic Party leaders listening to Galston and others who warn about the Democrats’ deep-seated “religion problem”? So far the signs are not promising. When fifty-five Catholic Democrats in the House released a “Statement of Principles” last February, the careful parsing of their position on abortion was particularly disappointing. Galston reports that his own efforts to moderate his party’s abortion-on-demand policy have been met with vociferous resistance. Still, prolife Democratic candidates have received the party’s backing in important Senate and gubernatorial races for this fall. One thing is certain, the voters the Democrats need are waiting for the party to prove it is as open-minded and liberal about religion as it prides itself in being on other issues.

August 1, 2006