It’s a campaign in which pastors cause controversy and Democrats compete for religious votes. The latest exit polls from North Carolina and Indiana’s primaries yesterday show where religiously-minded voters cast their vote.

CATHOLICS: Obama made gains among Catholics, a group he’s struggled to win and heavily lost in past primaries. According to First Read, he went from losing 70-30% in Pennsylvania and 63%-36% in Ohio, to finally narrowing it to 59%-41% in Indiana. The campaign boasts, “Barack Obama is building one of the largest grassroots campaigns of people of faith in history.” Doug Kmiec, who stirred the Catholic community with his endorsement of Obama, reiterated and explained his support:

I believe that my faith calls upon me at this time to focus on new efforts and untried paths to reduce abortion practice in America. Senator Obama’s emphasis on personal responsibility, rather than legal bickering over potential Supreme Court nominations in my judgment, best moves this issue forward.

WRIGHT: Rev. Jeremiah Wright had a mixed effect. Nearly half the voters in both primaries said the issue was important to their vote. In Indiana, 71% of the voters who said the issue was important went for Clinton, and 67% of the voters who said it wasn’t important went for Obama. In North Carolina, however, Obama won more votes from people who said the issue wasn’t important (72%) than Clinton did among those who considered it important (57%), the Associated Press reports. There was some speculation that Obama’s renunciation of Wright would dent his monolithic support from black voters, but 9 in 10 black voters cast their vote for him.

RELIGIOUS VOTERS: When it came to the religious vote, Obama branched out a bit from his secular base. Among religious voters in Indiana, Obama won both the voters who attend church more than weekly (55-45%) and the voters who never attend church (52-48%), while Clinton won overall occasional attenders (54%-46%) and Protestant voters. In North Carolina, Obama won both weekly attenders (55-43%) and occasional attenders (59-39%), along with his usual secular voters.

Since endorsing John McCain in February, Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee has been backpedaling out of decades’ worth of anti-Catholic statements. From labeling Hurricane Katrina the “judgment of God against the city of New Orleans”—dished out because of the city’s homosexual subculture—to penning a book that explains how “the Roman Church shaped the policy of the Third Reich,” Hagee had the marks of McCain’s own Jeremiah Wright. (The McCain camp even pulled an Obama when the senator explained his relationship with the pastor: “He says that he has never been anti-Catholic, but I repudiate the words that create that impression.”)

An uproar came from Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who linked to a YouTube clip of Hagee where, equipped with an ominous pointer, he calls the Catholic Church the “Whore of Babylon.” The biggest stir, though, has come from guys like New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Running with Hagee’s pro-Israel stance, Rich scoffed that his “rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.”

But Hagee’s interview last week with Deal Hudson, director of InsideCatholic.com, may help explain for Rich and others why McCain-Hagee is not really analogous to Obama-Wright (besides the fact that the mostly areligious John “Agents of Intolerance” McCain didn’t sit in Hagee’s Cornerstone Church for 20 years listening to his sermons). Hagee categorically denied that his “Whore of Babylon” bit refers to the Catholic Church, saying in his eschatology it instead pertains to the post-Rapture Church, but he also told a personal story that Hudson said shows “another side of the man who has now become a symbol of anti-Catholicism.”

In the 1990s, Hagee bought a Catholic girls’ school—San Antonio’s first, founded in 1851—run by Ursuline sisters, who had to sell the property because they’d become too old and too few to maintain it. The sisters couldn’t reach a deal with the archdiocese, so they offered it to Hagee. Hudson says:

Hagee was then told that the delay in selling the property had meant the sisters had to draw on their retirement accounts to live. Hagee then said, “I want to buy this school by the close of business tomorrow.”

Hagee, the sisters, and their attorneys met the next morning. The Ursulines’ attorney said, “Shall we tell Reverend Hagee the real problem?” . . . The attorney for the sisters explained that the archdiocese had expected them to move out of the convent immediately after it was sold and asked what Hagee wanted the sisters to do.

“My plan would be to give them a five year lease to the convent, and I will charge them ten dollars a year. We will pay all utilities and up-keep.” Hagee then took a 50-dollar bill from his pocket and paid the lease himself. One sister looked at the attorney and said, “Let’s get this thing done.”

The following Sunday, Hagee sent his church bus to the Ursuline convent, picked up the sisters, brought them to his church, and seated them in the front row for both services (5,000 attend each service). “I thanked them publicly for their lives of sacrifice and devotion to Jesus Christ. The congregation gave them standing ovations because the campus we bought was the fruit of their labor, a testimonial of their commitment to Christ.”

Hagee let the Ursuline sisters stay in the convent for twelve years, free of any cost. “Our children hugged them,” he said. “They would reach out and grab them by the hands. They were very precious to us for what they had done with their whole lives which had been invested in building this wonderful school. We were glad to honor them as long as they walked on this earth.”

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.

After weeks of bad bowling, whiskey-imbibing, attacks, counter-attacks, and talk of bitter, small-town voters, the Pennsylvania primary comes to a resolution – or at least a vote – today. Here’s your key to the Pennsylvania primary.

POLLS

Clinton started with a 14-point lead at the end of February. Obama narrowed that lead and today, Clinton has a Real Clear Politics Average lead of 6.1%. The race may come down to undecided voters and who turns out to vote.

KEY VOTER GROUPS

A candidate’s ability to capture these groups helps predict electability in November.

White Catholics. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, Clinton leads Obama 66-29% among this group, which is also key in the general election. Obama became the first presidential candidate to hire a fulltime Catholic outreach director and got endorsements from some prominent Catholics, but God-o-Meter wonders if Catholic reticence could be Obama’s biggest stumbling block in November.

White, working-class men. WSJ says they’re a swing constituency with a growing concern about the economy, and Hillary Clinton leads 49% to Obama’s 44%. Obama usually leads among white men, and Quinnipiac University gives Obama a lead (53-42%) among all men.

Rural, small-town voters. This is the group Obama seemed to disparage when he said, “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Obama’s comments seemed to make little difference in the polls, but Clinton leads among rural Democrats 58% to Obama’s 37%.

DEFINING VICTORY

Pundits say an Obama win might mean Clinton dropping out, but most expect a Clinton win. The margin of victory is relevant, though. According to the Wall Street Journal, former DNC chair Steve Grossman defines a “convincing victory” as a five-point win. The Los Angeles Times puts it at 10 points. Salon says Gov. Rendell deems a 6-7 point Clinton win “tremendous.” Mother Jones Blog splits the difference: “Over 7, victory for Clinton. Under 5, victory for Obama. Anywhere from 5 to 7 and we call it a draw.” Clinton shrugged it off today: “I don’t think the margin matters.”

Delegates make a difference, too. Obama is about 377 pledged delegates from winning the 2,025 he needs to clinch the nomination. He’s 139 delegates ahead, and even if Clinton wins the popular vote, she probably won’t get the delegates she needs to close that lead. The Washington Post crunches the numbers and says the candidates could evenly split the delegates.

For conservatives who oppose the Iraq war, does John McCain—thoroughly unconservative to many of them—offer any compelling reason to vote for him in November? Right now, a majority probably believes he does. But reasons for thinking he doesn’t are gaining currency. McCain’s pool of voters shrunk by two last week when a couple notable conservative Catholics defected and endorsed Barack Obama. The surprise endorsements have since propelled the conservative blogosphere into an introspective reflection about whether McCain is in fact a good gamble.

Not surprisingly, the two endorsers, who as strong Catholics comprise a demographic sought after by Obama’s campaign, say they hung their cross-party hats on the Iraq war issue. The first was Doug Kmiec (noted in WoW here), head of the Office for Legal Counsel in the Reagan and elder Bush administrations, who wrote in his announcement in Slate that, while conservatives might consider his Obama support “party or intellectual treachery,” he believes Obama, though he may disagree, “will respect and accommodate” discussion from both sides.

The second was Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University whose son, a soldier, died in Iraq in May 2007. Bacevich outed himself in The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservative magazine, claiming that “[f]or conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.”

The endorsements have led to endless back-and-forths over whether anti-Iraq war, pro-life conservatives should let their war opposition trump the possibility of getting enough solidly conservative Supreme Court justices, through McCain nominations, to finally overturn Roe v. Wade. (Justice John Paul Stevens is 87; two others are over 70.) In weighing McCain, conservative pundits have especially narrowed in on whether, even if Stevens and others were replaced, Bush appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito would vote to overturn Roe. (During his confirmation, Jack Balkin has pointed out, Roberts may have betrayed the answer when he told the Senate that Roe was the “settled law of the land.”)

At his Atlantic blog, Ross Douthat argues that “to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 is to give up on overturning Roe for at least a decade, probably for two, and possibly for all time.” Douthat challenges Bacevich to make a “more detailed case for why issues of war and peace ought to outweigh the abortion issue for pro-life voters in ’08.”

Writing in Taki’s Magazine earlier this week, meanwhile, Dan McCarthy made a detailed case for why the Iraq war should trump abortion, adding that conservatives should furthermore take “a true pro-life position” by being against both the war and abortion. And Daniel Larison, who blogs at The American Conservative’s site, contends that Bacevich and Kmiec’s support for Obama “on an issue of war and peace is much more likely to lead to the desired result in the foreseeable future than voting based on the promise of future judicial appointments, whose ultimate decisions in a case many years down the road may or may not lead to the overturning of Roe.”

Still, Jim Antle, associate editor of The American Spectator, argues that Democrats have done far less to “mitigate the war” than Republicans have done to reduce the number, and restrict the availability, of abortions. (Though beyond voting against the original authorization or funding it since, it’s not clear what Antle believes Democrats were to have done.)

“There are plenty of Catholic voters, a real swing voting bloc, who oppose both the Iraq war and abortion,” muses Antle. “How many of them will side with Bacevich and Kmiec rather than the Ross Douthats who vote on the abortion issue?”

The Democrat who wins Pennsylvania will have to court the Catholic vote. According to AP, Pennsylvania’s 3.8 million Catholics make up 30 percent of the state’s population. So far, Clinton has a hefty 70-24% lead among Pennsylvania Catholics.

Clinton has always had an edge among Catholic voters. She handily won the Catholic vote in Ohio and Texas, and according to a recent Gallup poll she still leads among Catholics by almost 20 percentage points. Among white Catholics, she gets 57% to Obama’s 34%. Among nonwhite Catholics – mostly composed of Hispanics – she leads 53% to 42%.

Why is Hillary winning the Catholic vote from Obama?

The Wall Street Journal says Catholics liked Clinton’s husband and approve of her emphasis on universal health care. Clinton also has supporters among white working-class voters and Hispanics, traditionally Catholic voters.

In an interview with God-o-Meter, Catholic Republican and Obama endorser Doug Kmiec speculated that Catholics support Hillary because Obama voted against the Infant Protection Act. Michael Sean Winters says Clinton could gain points with Catholics by positioning herself as a more moderate candidate on the abortion issue. Obama could do the same to persuade pro-life Catholics like Kmiec, who says trying to change abortion law is “a bit of a fool’s game,” and pro-lifers should instead focus on changing “the heart of the individual person and the attitude of the larger culture.”

The racial divide matters, too. Kmiec notes that Hispanics are heavily Catholic and divided from African Americans. On Artvoice.com, former Democratic consultant Bruce Fisher sees a divide between white Catholics and black Protestants. The white Protestant evangelical religious experience — “boisterous, enthusiastic, demonstrative” — is familiar to most Africans Americans but “alien, uncomfortable and more than a little bit threatening to Catholics.”

InsideCatholic.com editor Deal W. Hudson advises Obama to use pro-life Catholic supporters like Timothy Roemer and to find common ground with social conservatives on issues like illegal immigration and faith-based initiatives. It’s advice Obama should heed, especially if he and John McCain end up vying for the support of a voter group that makes up 25% of the general electorate.

Douglas Kmiec, head of legal counsel for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, has endorsed Barack Obama. In a Slate.com article this Sunday, Kmiec reaffirmed his belief that life begins at conception, his support for traditional marriage, his belief in a limited judicial role and in religion’s importance in the public square. Sounds like the beginning of a list of reasons not to back Obama, but Kmiec draws the opposite conclusion:

I am convinced based upon his public pronouncements and his personal writing that on each of these questions he is not closed to understanding opposing points of view, and as best as it is humanly possible, he will respect and accommodate them.

Andrew Sullivan praises Kmiec’s integrity and open mind, but most conservatives find it hard to see how a president could accommodate both pro-life and pro-abortion positions, or how “understanding” a point of view is relevant if you’re going to oppose it anyway. Powerline blogger Paul Mirengoff deems it “one of the most vacuous statements I’ve ever read,” and Patterico calls it “one of the most puzzling pieces of writing I have ever read.”

Some conservatives, including Shannen Coffin on The Corner, already dismissed Kmiec as “off his rocker” when he published another piece saying Obama was a natural choice for the Catholic Reaganite vote. Like Reagan, Kmiec said, Obama has empathy and a desire to make Americans deserve to feel good about themselves.

Rod Dreher said he just didn’t get it: “I think the guy just loves the feeling Obama gives him … It wouldn’t require so much tortuous logic simply to say, “I’m a Republican who’s sick of the Republicans, and want change. Obama is a likable, decent guy, and I’m willing to take a chance on him.” But as Kmiec has noted before, Catholics do hold views that make them uncomfortable in either party. They’re pro-life, anti-death penalty, often anti-Iraq war, and concerned about global warming.

Will other Catholics follow Kmiec’s lead? So far, they’ve been voting for Hillary Clinton over Obama, but the New York Times says they’re a fickle group: “No other large group has switched sides so often, or been so consistently aligned with the winners.”