Pennsylvania's religious vote

Religiously-minded voters turned out to vote in Pennsylvania yesterday. According to exit polls, 36 percent of voters said they attend church weekly, 45 percent said they attend occasionally, and 17 percent said they never attended at all. Of all these groups, only the last went for Obama over Clinton, prompting God-o-Meter to observe that Barack Obama has a secular base.

Despite campaigning with Catholic Sen. Bob Casey, forming a Catholic National Advisory Council and hiring a full-time Catholic outreach director, Obama got stomped in the Catholic vote - 37 percent of Pennsylvania voters and a key swing group that helped George W. Bush win the White House.

Clinton took 69 percent of the Catholic vote to Obama's 31 percent. Among the more devout (the 18 percent who attended Mass weekly), she took almost three-fourths of the vote. Among those who attend less often, she still got 65 percent to Obama's 35 percent.

Exit polls also showed Clinton doing better than Obama among white Catholics if matched against McCain. Eighty-two percent of white Catholics said they'd pick Clinton over McCain, and only 59 percent said the same of Obama. Twenty-one percent said they'd go for McCain over Obama, and 17 percent said they wouldn't vote at all.

The news may not be quite as bad as it looks for Obama, however. Obama didn't fare as badly among Protestants, neatly splitting the votes of Protestant weekly church attenders. Daily Kos also notes that Obama has made slight improvements since Ohio, raising his percentage of Protestant votes from 36 percent in Ohio to 53 percent in Pennsylvania. Clinton also won 40 percent of the white Catholic vote in Ohio and less (33 percent) in Pennsylvania. Overall, Obama and Clinton are virtually tied for the Catholic vote in a general election.

And religion isn't a voter's sole motivating factor. On the Wall Street Journal's Political Perceptions blog, Steve Waldman said it's possible that Obama's problem with white Catholics is really "just a problem with white, working-class seniors, who in Pennsylvania happened to be Catholic." George Marlin touched on this when he told Human Event's John Gizzi that aging, blue-collar, white Catholics mistrust Obama as a "Yuppie liberal."

Christopher Hitchens adds his biting analysis to theirs:

The apparent front-runner has a lot of work to do before he can count on the support of the old-fashioned households who care about guns, values, churches and other keywords and code words that Mrs Clinton can exploit with more conviction than he can.