Voters may typically support politicians with whom they share something in common, and chiefly on topics that can be classed as social issues. But that’s not the case for one particular presidential candidate. 

A recent study by Pew Research Center found Catholic voters are less likely to support Rick Santorum, the Republican who’s a member of their same church, than they would Mitt Romney in a general election.  

According to the survey, 44 percent of Catholic voters said they would support Romney if he faced Obama in November. Only 39 percent of these same voters said they would support the Catholic Santorum, however.  

President Obama took a majority of Catholic vote in both cases.  

Through most of his political career, Santorum has regularly cited his Roman Catholic faith as key to particular platform positions, including his opinion that contraception is immoral.

The Church itself professes this restraint against all types of birth control, too, even by coitus interruptus.

This topic gathered much attention recently with Santorum’s statements that companies should be able to deny coverage of birth control from their employees’ insurance policies, and his public criticism of Romney’s assumed stance on this same issue.

While no one may know exactly why these Catholic voters disassociate themselves with Santorum, a “Voter Guide” produced by the Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good may lend some insight.

CACG’s guide (subtitled “The Common Good in America Today”) doesn’t specify or even allude to any candidate platforms, but it does list nine key political standings of Catholics.  And Santorum doesn’t uphold many of them – not even in full on its pro-life tenet.

Take labor, for example; CACG’s guide states “the Catholic Church has explicitly affirmed the rights of workers to organize themselves into unions and to collective bargaining since 1891.”

During his 11-year term in the U.S. Senate, though, the highest rating Santorum received from the AFL-CIO was a mere 21 on a 100-point scale, indicating a notable distance between him and this CACG principle of workers’ rights.

The “Voter Guide” openly supports the Affordable Care Act and other healthcare programs, too. “We believe that the ACA, Medicare and Medicaid give concrete expression to the biblical belief that we are our brothers’ keeper,” the guide reads on the topic of health care.

Santorum, however, includes repeal of ACA as a key category in his campaign. He also declares significant changes to Medicare, which could change to a status CACG fears most: “a voucher program that would leave the elderly to the mercy of the insurance companies.”

On foreign policy, CACG’s guide states belief that “statesmen should heed what is known as Just War Theory, not least because that theory insists that war must always be a last resort.”

But Santorum has already threatened air strikes against Iran, and includes funding of rebel overthrow of its government in his platform.

At least he aligns with CACG on the topics of birth control and abortion – but not in full, unfortunately.

On the pro-life topic, the guide reads “Those who share our commitment to the unborn must be challenged to embrace programs that provide affordable health care to the elderly,” an embrace that Santorum fails to provide due to his proposals to slash Medicare budgeting and remove federal oversight that protects its users.

So do these issues mean a lot to Catholic voters? Apparently.

Remember, the Pew study found they favor Romney – whose Church of Latter Day Saints refers to Catholics as a “whore of Babylon” in its writings – five percent more than they do Santorum.