Did Catholics Save McCain?

In recent weeks, God-o-Meter has spotlighted John McCain’s revitalized evangelical outreach operation, led by Sam Brownback and his former presidential campaign aides. But one of those former campaign aides tells God-o-Meter that the bigger story might be Brownback & Co.’s effort to build an 11th-hour Catholic outreach operation for the Arizona senator.

The former aide, who spoke on background, said that Brownback—a conservative evangelical turned conservative Catholic—has taped robo-calls for McCain in early primary states, written a letter defending McCain’s pro-life record to be published in this week’s National Catholic Register, and that a former Brownback intern is now student chairman of a national Catholics for McCain group.

The biggest push by Brownback and his staff came in last week’s Florida primary, where McCain won a plurality of Catholic voters, 40-percent to Mitt Romney’s 29-percent. “The Catholic outreach effort for McCain had been pretty much nonexistent because they had put everything into New Hampshire,” the aide said. “So the Brownback people in Florida wound up running one of the most effective elements of the ground game there.”

In the week and a half before the Florida primary, roughly ten current and former Brownback staffers—some from his defunct presidential campaign, others on leave from his Senate office—descended on the Sunshine State on McCain’s behalf, enlisting 200 other in-state Catholic volunteers who’d volunteered in the 2004 Bush-Cheney reelection effort. Working from a map that identified the Catholic churches most likely to support a Republican candidate, the Florida team quickly built a persuasion and get-out-the-vote effort.

The Brownback crew also designed a McCain flyer tailored to Catholic voters, highlighting McCain’s pro-life record, and printed up tens of thousands of copies in English and Spanish for distribution in and around Catholic churches.

Prior to winning the Catholic vote in Florida, McCain had split Catholics with Mitt Romney in New Hampshire and lost the Catholic vote to Romney in Michigan. In South Carolina, where Brownback was also active, McCain won 45-percent of Catholics, a plurality. “McCain has sometimes been knocked by the evangelical community for not being outspoken enough on the life issue,” says the Brownback aide. “We argued that if he’s good enough for Brownback, the most pro-life guy in the Senate, then Catholic pro-lifers could be OK with him.”