I first persuaded myself in 2003 that Catholics would abandon the Democrats at the next election. More of them did indeed vote for President George W. Bush the following year. But nevertheless, it wasn’t one of my most accurate predictions.

The occasion for these thoughts came when Senate Democrats blocked the nomination of William Pryor to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Pryor was then Alabama’s attorney general — he has since made it to the appeals court — and was anathema to Democrats as a conservative Catholic. The party of the Left feared that his jurisprudential eminence would elevate him quickly to the Supreme Court, where he’d hew to the Constitution rather than to their policy agenda.