With the conventions over and the debates approaching it is time to start tracking the vote of U.S. Catholics a bit more closely on the blog. The figure below aggregates the preferences of registered voters who self-identify as Catholic in national polls through last week (we'll comment on battleground state polls when preferences of Catholics are available and if you're looking for national data from previous elections you'll find it here).
The vote of Catholics remains quite evenly split 47% for President Obama and 45% for Gov. Romney (most of the differences between the candidates have been within margins of sampling error for the sub-group). Once in March and again in July, President Obama had a lead of 9 percentage points. Gov. Romney's biggest lead was 5 percentage points in April. He also opened a 4 percentage point lead during and after the Republican Party Convention that has now disappeared. Gov. Romney has never polled lower than 42% among Catholics and President Obama's support has never measured lower than 44% among this group.
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