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But more so than other recent Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton tested the conscience of a lot of Catholics who see abortion as immoral. She dropped the pledge that pro-abortion rights Democrats have offered to make abortion rare. Instead, she advocated voiding the Hyde Amendment so that federal funds could be used to pay for abortions. Even Clintons running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, opposed repealing the Hyde Amendment.

The Pew survey released this week did not detect a similarly large divide over religion in the GOP; it found that sixty-eight percent of moderate and liberal Republicans said religion had a positive impact.

The survey of 2,504 adults also looked at attitudes toward other major institutions, including the national news media, financial institutions, labor unions and colleges.

The two wings of the Democratic Party had somewhat similar responses in certain areas, such as colleges, where large majorities saw a positive influence: seventy-two percent favorable, and; nineteen percent, negative. That broke down to seventy-nine percent favorable for liberals and sixty-seven percent for moderates and conservatives.

In contrast, Republicans divided over colleges, with a breakdown of fifty-one percent positive and forty-three percent negative for moderate-liberal Republicans and twenty-nine to sixty-five for conservatives.

Partisan differences over banks and financial institutions have widened, since, according to Pew, it was the first time since 2010 that more Republicans had a positive view of the businesses than negative. In this survey, forty-six percent of Republicans saw the financial institutions in a positive light, and thirty-seven percent viewed them as a negative for the country. Among Democrats, fifty-four percent had a negative view and thirty-three percent, positive. As recently as 2015, Pew found that there were no partisan differences on this issue. Now, there is a thirteen-point gap.

What all this tells us is that attacking colleges and the national news media and defending churches would seem to be effective to attract, or perhaps pander, for conservative Republican votes. For Democrats, the same can be said of attacking banks and financial institutions. The survey shows that if anything, the ideological gap between the parties is widening. Catholics are known to serve as a moderating influence on both parties, but the countrys drift is toward deeper partisan division.

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The Democrats' Religion Problem - Commonweal