Religion & Law

In my earlier posting, I cited the exit polls suggesting that, while Senator McCain prevailed among faithful Catholics who attend weekly Mass, Senator Obama won the overall Catholic vote. Other recent posts have also adverted to the reported result that the Catholic vote went to Obama this time. I and others appear to have been mistaken in taking such exit poll results at face value. Once again, the exit polls from this election proved unreliable, although somewhat less so than in 2004. While the exit polls at least got the result correct this year, the margins were way off. The exit polls showed Obama winning by 18 points, whereas his actual margin of victory was about one-third of that (here). In a crude attempt to bring those results better into line so that the media could report (and pundits pontificate about) exit poll numbers from various demographic groups, the exit poll results were re-adjusted and weighted to bring the margin down to 10 points, which of course is still about twice the true margin of actual votes cast. As a consequence, we simply cannot say with any certainty whether Obama or McCain carried the Catholic vote, other than to say that it was much closer than the exit polls suggest. Likewise, McCain's margin in carrying the majority of weekly Mass going Catholics presumably was largely than the poll results suggest.

Greg Sisk