ETTERING, Ohio - From the asphalt playground at St. Albert the Great Church to the manicured gardens at St. Charles Borromeo's, this middle-class suburb has a booming population of the voters most in demand this election year: Catholics.
People like Diane Fowler, a 33-year-old full-time mother, who says she has one political concern - abortion - and so plans to vote for the Republican nominee, Governor George W. Bush of Texas. And Gerald E. Dolle, a 62-year-old landscaper who says Catholics should be concerned about the poor, so he's voting for the Democrat, Vice President Al Gore.
But the real targets of the presidential campaigns are people like Margaret A. Jerome, a 78-year-old retired Navy medic, whose vote is up for grabs.
''I don't care much for Gore, because he's for the abortion business, and that's against our faith,'' Jerome said. ''But Bush is something else with his business with medical insurance. I don't trust either one of them.''
Remember angry white males? Soccer moms? Well, this year, the prized political constituency is Catholic voters.
''There is a conscious effort on the part of both campaigns to focus more on the Catholic vote than ever before,'' said James S. Nathanson, a former political director at the Republican National Committee who is now a consultant in nearby Dayton.
Catholics have become the constituency of the moment thanks to a coincidence of geography and politics.
At a time when Republicans seem to have locked up much of the South and inland West, and Democrats the Northeast and West Coast, the election of 2000 is widely expected to be fought in a handful of states in the mid-Atlantic and the Midwest.
Those very states, thanks to 19th-century immigration patterns driven by industry and agriculture, are home to above-average numbers of Catholics. In Ohio, for example, Catholics are expected to make up as much as 35 percent of the vote, compared with perhaps 27 percent nationwide.
Bush and Gore have traveled repeatedly to Ohio, which has the seventh-largest number of electoral votes, and are waging active campaigns here in Montgomery County, considered critical swing territory. Last week Gore and his running mate, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, spoke at a middle school in Miamisburg, near Kettering, and Gore doubled the size of his paid staff in Ohio.
But Catholic voters interviewed here last week made it clear that it will be difficult for the candidates to craft a single message that will appeal to large numbers of Catholics.
There are plenty of Catholics, like Fred L. Billow, 58, of Centerville, who are committed Republicans and are disgusted, as Billow put it, with ''the immorality of the Democrats.''
There also are Democrats, like Karyn J. Hecker, the principal of Dayton Catholic Elementary School, who said she leans Democratic ''because I think there's so much more we can do for people, and somebody's got to do it.''
The candidates are fighting over the swing voters in the Catholic population: those who say they could go either way. ''They're both decent and good men, but I don't know how they will be as president,'' said Ruth Magoto, 79, of Kettering. ''I want to know more about the issues, like Social Security and good schooling. They both have a program, but neither one has any idea of what should be done.''
Catholics - because they were immigrants, often working class, and members of a sometimes unpopular religious minority - gravitated to the Democratic Party in the mid-19th century, and their loyalty was buttressed when the Democrats nominated for president Catholics Al Smith 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.
The status of Catholics has since dramatically improved; they are the largest single religious denomination in the country and are on average more affluent and better educated than Protestants. Catholics have remained the most Democratic group of white Christians.
Catholics did provide important support to Republicans Richard Nixon, in 1968 and 1972, and Ronald Reagan, in 1980 and 1984. But they supported Democrat Bill Clinton by a larger margin than the general public in 1992 and 1996, and some believe they will do the same for Gore.
''The decline in Democratic Party identification among Catholics seems to have leveled off and may even be reversing,'' according to a new study of American Catholics, ''Catholicism USA,'' published by Georgetown University.
In the wake of the 1996 election, the Republican National Committee set up a Catholic Task Force in an effort to improve the party's showing among Catholics. The task force, headed by Brian P. Tierney, who works in advertising in Philadelphia, is doing everything from talking up how compassionate conservatism fits the Catholic social ethic to making sure that Republicans appear at Catholic festivals and feast day celebrations.
The Democratic National Committee sneers at the Republican outreach effort, which DNC spokeswoman Jenny Backus characterized as ''damage control.'' Backus said that the Democratic Party's social and foreign policy positions more closely resemble those of the American bishops, and that a large fraction of Catholic voters favor abortion rights.
''There is no question Catholic voters are essential, but you can't pull them out solely based on religion,'' she said.
Of course, neither party speaks directly to all elements of Catholic social teaching, a philosophy described by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago as ''the seamless garment'' of life. That Catholic political philosophy opposes not only abortion but capital punishment and assisted suicide, and supports programs to help the poor.
That philosophy makes Catholics what political scientists call a ''cross-pressured'' group. They are pulled left by traditional loyalties, concern for the poor, and, sometimes, attitudes toward the death penalty. But they are pulled right by economic self-interest, opposition to abortion, and conservatism on moral issues.
Gore and Bush both have had bumps along the road in their courtship of Catholics.
Bush attracted significant - and unwelcome - press attention when he spoke in February at Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist college in South Carolina with a history of anti-Catholicism. And Republicans in the House leadership further offended Catholics by rejecting a Catholic priest who had been recommended for House chaplain.
But those events appear to be history; Bush apologized for a ''missed opportunity'' at Bob Jones, and the House gave the chaplaincy to another Catholic priest. Bush attended the funeral of Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, met privately with Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston, and has consulted many other Catholic leaders, including former Boston mayor Raymond L. Flynn, over the past few months.
Gore has had his own problems with the Catholic hierarchy because of his support for abortion rights. In June, a bishop in Scranton, Pa., refused to allow Gore to campaign at a Catholic hospital. And although Gore reached out to the Catholic hierarchy by issuing a last-minute invitation to Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles to speak at the Democratic National Convention, the cardinal was given a midday speaking slot sure to garner little news attention for his antiabortion message.
Some experts question whether there really is a ''Catholic'' vote.
''Yeah, there are more than 62 million Catholics in the US, but there are the Catholics you see faithfully every Sunday in church, there are the Catholics from after Vatican II who don't vote according to church values and principles, and there are the Catholics who are Catholic in name only,'' said Flynn, the former mayor and ambassador to the Vatican who is now attempting to create a stronger voice for Catholics as president of the Catholic Alliance. ''If you put those three categories together, they make up a pretty big chunk of votes, but they don't vote that way, so it's one of the weakest constituencies in America today.''
Indeed, Catholics are much more divided between the parties than are either African-American Protestants or Jews, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, or white evangelical Protestants, who are consistently Republican.
And the days when Catholic priests could guide the voting behavior of their parishioners are long gone. In Massachusetts, for example, Bishop William Murphy recently wrote in a column for the diocesan newspaper, ''I fail to understand how any Catholic can support a candidate who is outspokenly and unambiguously pro-choice.'' But the Bay State, which has a Catholic majority, is represented by two Catholic Democrats in the US Senate and a Catholic Republican in the governor's office - and all of them support abortion rights.
