The 'God Gap' in the First Presidential Polls

In a recent post we presented research indicating that President Obama could win re-election without winning a majority of the Catholic vote (which is historically rare and difficult to do). This is possible with the rising number of U.S. voters without a religious affiliation (i.e., Nones) who historically vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in presidential and congressional elections. We indicated that the president could go no lower than 44% support among Catholics and Protestants if he hopes to win re-election.

With the Republican nominee decided (in all likelihood), the first national head to head polls are coming out. Gallup surveys have shown President Obama trailing but this gap is within the margin of error. Today, Pew released results that also show a tight race with a slim lead for President Obama. It is still a long, long time before any of these polls are predictive of anything. But as a first look, the Obama campaign might be second guessing some of their recent decisions that may have alienated religious voters.

The Pew survey of 2,373 registered voters (landline and cell phone samples) was conducted April 4-15 (margin of error +/-2.3 percentage points). Among Catholics overall, Gov. Romney leads Obama 50% to 45% (he has gained 8 percentage points on Obama since March). This level of support is also consistent with what President Obama would need to make the electoral math work for him (although by just 1 percentage point). His bigger problem is among Protestants overall where his support dips to 43% (and even much lower among Evangelicals). This is too low to indicate a good chance for re-election. More problematic for his campaign is that his support among Nones has dipped below the 70% he needs to comfortably counter-balance poor support among Christian voters (67% now compared to 75% last month). The survey results also indicate that this is likely due to the respondents' overall concern about the economy rather than social issues, where Democratic Party policies attract the votes of Nones best. Social issues lag far behind the economy, jobs, health care, and the deficit in stated importance.

Pew and other survey research organizations frequently report specifically on the preferences of "White Non-Hispanic Catholics." Regrettably, in this survey they don't give us the numbers for Hispanic/Latino(a) Catholic registered voters. But there may be good reason. There are likely too few of these respondents in the survey for them to comfortably report the information (i.e., margins of error are too high). However, this does not make this group unimportant! In fact compare the percentage support for either candidate among Non-Hispanic white Catholics and Catholics overall in the chart above. Hispanic/Latino(a) Catholics' support for the president is primarily what is keeping his current overall support among Catholics above 44% (...it is also notable that support for the president among Catholic women is measured at 51%). 

Hispanic/Latino(a) Catholics are the fastest growing part of the Church and the Catholic electorate. Their growing influence is in some ways as important as the emergent None voters nationally (and even more important in specific states accounting for the Electoral College). For more research on the Catholic Hispanic/Latino(a) voter see the upcoming release: Blessing La Política: The Latino Religious Experience and Political Engagement in the United States. As the publisher notes this book is "an essential guide to the new face of electoral politics in America" providing a "comprehensive analysis of the political tendencies of Latinos and Latinas of faith." How do I know? I wrote the epilogue, "The Growing Influence of the Latino Catholic Vote." Look for more on this topic on this blog soon. 

Data in Context: New Ordinations and Seminarians

Anne Hendershott and Christopher White have a piece in The Wall Street Journal today, citing CARA, which notes the number of new ordinations to the priesthood in the United States and that some seminaries are at capacity and have had to turn away applicants. 

All good news. However, the Catholic Church in the United States still faces significant challenges when it comes to vocations. As we have discussed here previously there is no shortage of Catholic men who say they consider the priesthood. Yet there still are too few who decide to follow through and become priests.

The WSJ piece notes there were 467 ordinations last year. These data are listed each year in The Official Catholic Directory (OCD) for the United States and worldwide in the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae (ASE).  The 2011 OCD lists 467 ordinations in the U.S. (as well as 13 others in U.S. territories), yet these ordinations occurred in the year previous, 2010. These include both diocesan and religious ordinations.  There are no official numbers out yet for 2011, but CARA estimates these to be very similar to 2010 (possibly exceeding 480).

The ASE provides detailed information for every country on the annual changes in the numbers of diocesan priests (those most likely to be in parish ministry).  Of the 467 ordinations in 2010, 402 were diocesan. That is a bit above the average of 391 diocesan ordinations during the 1999 to 2009 period but not by much. As shown below, one of the most stable trends in U.S. Church data since the mid-1980s has been the annual numbers of diocesan ordinations.

Despite this rather predictable inflow each year, it is still not enough. The number of diocesan priests dying or departing the priesthood annually is larger than the number of new priests ordained. What results is a net loss in the numbers of diocesan priests. In 2010, this resulted in a net change of -301. These losses accumulate each year creating a running deficit in the number of diocesan priests (for more see my piece on this topic in Our Sunday Visitor). These losses are dealt with, in part, by bringing in international priests who have been ordained outside the United States. When too few priests have been available, bishops have also utilized Canon 517.2 to entrust the pastoral care of parishes to permanent deacons or lay persons, clustered parishes, or merged and closed parishes.

What can we expect for the future? As the WSJ piece notes, there are seminaries in the United States that are at capacity and new seminaries are being built. But this is related more to realignment than a groundswell of new seminarians. Seminaries have closed and others have reduced their capacities. Since the mid-1990s the number of seminarians has remained about as stable as the number of new ordinations. There is not much change here either—which is also good news. There have been few, if any, indications of declines in priestly vocations for two decades. Yet the challenge remains because the Church doesn’t just need stability it needs growth to keep up with a growing Catholic population and an aging clergy.

In many ways the Catholic Church is coming to terms with an important period of its history (for more see: Same Call, Different Men: The Evolution of the Priesthood since Vatican II). The number of ordinations in the mid-20th century was extraordinary. Many of the surviving priests ordained in that period are now in their 70s or even older.  Replacing them all is a big challenge. It cannot be done with less than 500 diocesan ordinations per year. In fact, the Church needs more like 700 per year to establish stability in the numbers of U.S. diocesan priests overall.

Is that possible? Yes. As I noted in a previous post: “We can roughly estimate that about one in 100 Catholic men who say they ‘very seriously’ considered becoming a priest are likely to follow through and be ordained. If the Church could just increase that to two or three in every 100 who ‘very seriously’ consider this, concerns over priest shortages would end.”

The WSJ piece indicated that “renewal is coming.” Take a look at the green line in the chart for the seminarians above. This represents those enrolled at the post-baccalaureate level of priestly formation for dioceses. This line has been on an upward slope since 2005. The totals are growing by about 20 individuals per year. That is something to cheer (and study more). At the same time Catholics should not go away from reading the WSJ piece thinking “great, problem solved!” Significant challenges remain to close the deficit that we have accumulated. Getting 700 ordinations per year would simply level off the current downward slope in the number of diocesan priests. Turning U.S. trends positive will require significantly more.

Briefly Noting...

The Electoral Calculus of Nones

The Washington Times (...later linked by The Drudge Report) picked up my recent post on the importance of None/Others in the 2012 election. Comments to the story indicate some confusion with the math. The data analysis for that post used state-level polling data measuring the size of religious groups and their voting histories and preferences over the last decade. To simplify I'll just work with the national numbers to show how simple the calculus is (...as some seem to doubt that 22% of voters can decide an election).

If President Obama wins 72% of the votes of those with no religious affiliation and those with non-Christian religious affiliations (22% of voters in 2010; note this is also the adult population percentage for these groups) he will likely have won a total of 15.8% of the national popular vote. If also he wins 44% of the Christian vote (Catholics, Protestants, and other Christians equaling 78% of voters in 2010) he will likely have won an additional 34.3% of the total popular vote. Add those totals together and you get 50.1%.

This is an over-simplification but even the more complex state-level and historical models and simulations also point to that 44% total of the Christian vote as the lowest level of support the President can receive to still have a chance to win. This is made possible by the strong electoral support he and other Democrats get among those without a religious affiliation and those with a non-Christian affiliation in national elections over the last decade. It just happens that this portion of the electorate has now grown to a point where losing Christian voters no longer means losing the election for Democrats.

Growth in the Catholic Population of Ireland

As predicted here last year, Ireland’s census, released Thursday, shows that Catholicism continues to grow in that country. Despite a campaign by Atheists for people to refrain from checking the Roman Catholic box, the census registered 179,889 more Catholics in 2011 than in 2006 (growth of 4.9%). Eighty-four percent of Ireland’s population self-identifies as Catholic. However, as shown below, Catholicism is not growing as quickly as the overall Irish population.

The number of Irish identifying as “Lapsed Roman Catholic” in the census grew from 540 individuals in 2006 to 1,279 in 2011. The number of non-Catholic Christians in Ireland increased by 46,350  to a total of 281,256 in 2011 (now 6.1% of the population).

Atheists grew from 929 individuals in 2006 to 3,905 in 2011. Agnostics increased from 1,515 to 3,521. Much more notable is the rise in Ireland’s Nones. Those identifying as having no religious affiliation increased from 186,318 in 2006 to 269,811 in 2011 (44.8% growth). Nones now represent 5.9% of Ireland’s population. One in four Nones (25%) were born elsewhere in Europe and 7% immigrated from outside of Europe. Thus, more than two-thirds of Ireland’s Nones (67%) are “homegrown.”

There is a gender gap in Ireland’s non-religious population. In the total population there is a 50/50 split between men and women. But among Atheists, Agnostics, and Nones, men outnumber women 58% to 42% (46,491 more men than women).

Failing History: The President’s “Flat Earth” Jokes

Twice in recent weeks President Obama rather unfortunately described critics of his energy policies as “flat-earthers.” Here is an example:

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society—they would not have believed that the world was round.”

The line usually gets a good laugh and a lot of play on television news. But if one’s aim is to imply that people are being stupid it does not help to use an ignorant understanding of history, science, and as it turns out Catholicism to make your point (… and I’m not the only one surprised by this).

The notion that most people during the time of Columbus thought the earth was flat is one of the most stubbornly false legends of history. Not only incorrect, the roots of this notion are grounded in anti-Catholicism. As scientist and historian James Hannam writes “The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants.” In America, Washington Irving played an important role in perpetuating the flat earth notion by using it to spice up his widely read Columbus bio-drama. It has been a staple of bad history text books ever since.

Historian Lesley Cormack describes in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, how the Columbus story was used as an anti-Catholic insult: “a belief in the flat earth was equated with willful ignorance, while an understanding of the spherical earth was seen as a measure of modernity” (p. 29). Yet the reality is, as Cormack explains, very few people believed that the world was flat during the Middle Ages or even earlier. You can go all the way back to St. Augustine (354-430) and find belief in a spherical earth. She concludes that “there is virtually no historical evidence to support the myth of a medieval flat earth” (p. 34). 

I don’t think President Obama was intentionally repeating a staple of old-fashioned anti-Catholicism for that effect (it would be an odd choice as the Church has generally supported the cause of understanding and dealing with climate change). Instead I think it was akin to a common misconception in the media about science and specifically about the (mis)use of polls of scientists presented as evidence of scientific fact. Many use these polls to try to marginalize critics of green energy and theories of anthropomorphic climate change as out of touch oddballs.

As a pollster and a scientist I can tell you it matters little if 85%, 90%, or 95% of scientists state that they believe human activity is the primary cause of global warming. From the point of view of history the only thing that will matter is how well current climate change models explain and predict the future. Good data and evidence always win out in the end. 

In the early 20th century I am sure most physicists polled would have agreed entirely with the Newtonian model of physics. But there were a small percentage of physicists imagining and discovering something different. One of these men was working in a patent office and was named Albert Einstein. He would have been one of the “doubters” or “deniers” of the classical model of physics in his time. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions long ago revealed that scientific knowledge does not advance through consensus building as it is often popularly imagined (or as it is presented in media polls of scientists). Our knowledge can take some unexpected and strange twists (e.g., Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory) and it is often the 5% of “doubters” in the “current models” who end up revealing a more accurate and refined representation of reality (there is considerable group think in science that often irrationally converges on models—stubbornly ignoring counter evidence and attacking those who put this forward... yes, there are a lot of politics in science).

In the discussion of climate change there are specific facts largely beyond doubt (i.e. what some call “incontrovertible evidence”). It is clear to most that warming has occurred in recent decades. I don't know of evidence that would lead one to believe otherwise. But we simply do not have sufficient evidence yet to say that these changes are primarily a result of human activity (even with a feasible model and theory, a correlation between two trends, emissions and temperatures, are insufficient for what one could call incontrovertible evidence of causality) or that the warming has continued to increase as expected in more recent years. Global temperatures do not appear to have kept pace with increases in emissions and atmospheric concentrations. There are also other possible models and explanations with supporting evidence that indicate sources of warming may be related to other natural causes and events. But even if these did not exist it would still be absolutely legitimate to scientifically doubt whether carbon emissions are the primary source of observed climate changes. When it is not legitimate to do so, we either have “incontrovertible evidence” (e.g., for the flat earth this consisted of geometric measurements proving a spherical earth... confirmed much later by circumnavigation and even much later by photographs of the planet from space!) or we are no longer having a scientific discussion (... and there are Nobel Prize winning scientists who have some doubts about human activity-based models of warming). 

A Devil’s Advocate is useful not only for the cases of saints but also science. The “doubters” fulfill a very important role as skeptics in the process (as long as this is honest and informed skepticism unmotivated by ulterior political purposes or payment from an oil company!). It is part of a good scientific process. The joking rhetoric that is being used in the president’s energy speeches is damaging. It’s not only bad history, it’s bad science.