Crow Before Dinner

Well, if you remember, after the third debate, yours truly, amiable amateurish pundit, declared:

Kerry's contesting the Catholic vote. And quite frankly, I don't think Bush OR Rove have fully appreciated the difference between a traditionalist Catholic and a traditionalist evangelical Protestant. Bush's rhetoric seems custom-designed to alienate conservative Catholics. We'll know in less than a month whether I'm right on that, but my guess is that Kerry is going to crush Bush in the Catholic vote. Most Catholics know how difficult it is to square the religious positions of the Catholic Church with the civic obligations of an American citizen. Bush is unwarrantedly disdainful of that kind of "nuance." I can't say what a WASP in Atlanta will hear in that debate... but I suspect a Catholic in Atlanta is going to have second thoughts about Bush.

So, check out this article:

A Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday has Kerry winning among white Catholics 50%-43%--a huge change from the October 3 poll which had Bush leading 49% to 33%.

By comparison, George Bush beat Al Gore among white Catholics by about seven points.

An October 14 ABC News poll showed a similar dramatic shift.

Kerry's favorable vs. unfavorable rating among white Catholics before the debates was 36% vs. 50%. After the debate: 50% vs. 41%. Kerry improved across the board, but the shift was more stark for white Catholics than just about any other group the poll measured. (By comparison, his standing among women improved from 41% favorable vs. 42% unfavorable up to 53% vs. 38% after the debate.)

In both cases, the improvement seemed to come from undecided Catholics choosing Kerry, not Bush Catholics switching.

Neither poll teases out the causes for this, but in both cases the shift happened after the second and third presidential debates. It was in the third debate that Kerry had his most expansive declaration of his personal faith.

Sorry to brag, but it's nice to get at least one right... oh, and I find it interesting.