Forty-three percent (43%) of American voters say they would never even consider voting for a Mormon Presidential candidate. Only 38% say they would consider casting such a vote while 19% are not sure (see crosstabs). Half (53%) of all Evangelical Christians say that they would not consider voting for a Mormon candidate.
Overall, 29% of Likely Voters have a favorable opinion of Romney while 30% hold an unfavorable view. Most of those opinions are less than firmly held. Ten percent (10%) hold a very favorable opinion while 11% have a very unfavorable assessment. Among the 41% with no opinion of Romney, just 27% say they would consider voting for a Mormon.
It is possible, of course, that these perceptions might change as Romney becomes better known and his faith is considered in the context of his campaign. Currently, just 19% of Likely Voters are able to identify Romney as the Mormon candidate from a list of six potential Presidential candidates. ~Rasmussen
Wow. If this is accurate, 43% of the population would just be lost in any national general election in which Romney would run, and my guess is that they would mostly come from the Republican side of the fence. The Democrats must be salivating at the unlikely prospect of a Romney nomination (though they would, of course, denounce sectarianism and religious prejudice even as they were reaping the benefits). You can expect the 527s allied with his opponents in the primaries will be making a lot of noise about “unelectability.” The candidates themselves will pretend that they are above the prejudice of the mob, but they will probably say coded things to make the same point: “We need a nominee who will unite America, and we need a nominee who can compete across the country.”
People talk up the comparisons with JFK in 1960, but the right comparison for Romney might be Al Smith in 1928. Would another generation make a Mormon candidate acceptable? Possibly, if they become a much larger presence in national life and more people come into contact with them on a regular basis, but I suspect that there will be continuing opposition that is more deeply-seated than the old hostility to Catholic candidates. It might be worth pointing out that there has still never been a Catholic Republican nominee for President, which might be attributed to the fact that Catholics have only recently been coming over to the GOP in larger numbers, but it might also be a sign that Catholic candidates on GOP tickets think they will be unable to succeed on the national stage.
Now I’m not a political strategist by trade (but I play one at this blog), but I have seen enough of these polls to know that Romney’s 30% unfav rating before most people even know that he’s a Mormon (and this when a huge percentage of the population would never consider voting for a Mormon) is almost certain political death on the national stage. Losing half of the evangelicals right off the bat is doom for any GOP candidate for President. That’s not a guess–this is a reality of the dynamics of Republican primaries across the South, West and Midwest.
The activists, leaders and NROniks can keep telling themselves that Romney is the social conservatives’ friend and ally and expect that this will make all the difference, but these anti-Mormon attitudes seem pretty powerful. Romney can save himself some stress and a lot of time and work if he just bails out now. No one could blame him for not wanting to try to scale an insurmountable obstacle.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Grumpy Old Man
These results are counter-intuitive, at least counter to my intuition. Perhaps most Americans have never met a Mormon–kind of like the hill folk who used to think that Jews had literal horns.
The LDS aren’t so rare here in California, and in my experience practicing Mormons are decent, family-centered kind of folks of the “white bread” variety. Their religion may be a bit fantastical, but that’s most people’s take on other people’s religious beliefs.
If people meet Romney, or see him on TV, and realize he cleans up nice and doesn’t have seven wives or wear strange outerwear, perhaps they’ll look at it differently. Remember George Deukmejian, who was twice elected Governor of California although many, when polled, said they’d never vote for an Armenian. Most voters, of course, wouldn’t know an Armenian if they tripped over one. I suspect the same holds true for Mormons.
Well, some do, perhaps, the same percentage who know, say, that the Vice President presides over the Senate. [Await segue into Larison comment on the vices of democracy].
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:49 pm
M.Z. Forrest
The problem with Mormonism is not polygamy (which was predominately practiced in the past) so much as them not being Trinitarian. Ignoring for the moment that your typical Christian functionally isn’t a Trinitarian, I would expect preaching from the pulpit on the Trinity if this were to happen. I suppose one shouldn’t underestimate the prevalence of indifferentism, but I have a hard time believing that this issue won’t come up in the churches.
November 22nd, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Daniel Larison
You have a couple good points. You’re right that most Mormons are perfectly decent, white-bread folks, and, boy, do they love family! Growing up in New Mexico, I knew some Mormon guys in high school and you wouldn’t have been able to notice any difference between them and any evangelical or Protestant teenagers (except perhaps that they were even more serious). The Deukmejian/Armenian story is something to keep in mind, but the difference here is that people are wary of an obscure ethnic group perhaps because they don’t know very much about them. Perhaps they only know the old saying, “Never trust an Armenian.” (For the record, I don’t follow that saying.) Then again, most Californians probably didn’t know that saying, either.
My guess is that more Californians knew who the Armenians were (they are not exactly inconspicuous on the Left Coast) and some of the people who said they would never vote for an Armenian didn’t vote for him. But that sort of ethnic baggage, if that is what it is, seems to me to be less powerful than a fundamental religious divide like this one. If Christian voters think that electing a Christian like them is important and that a candidate’s faith is an important part of why they are voting for him, having a faith that isn’t really Christian makes a huge difference. Meanwhile, being Armenian in California might be a drawback in some communities (though I am unsure why anyone would necessarily have it out for Armenians in California) but it would have only limited impact. It was probably also not as intense or powerful of a resentment at work in the case of Deukmejian. Plus, unlike a Mormon, an Armenian could credibly and rightly claim that he is a Christian (albeit of a different confession from most in this country and the world), which might help offset any hostility about his ethnicity.
Muslims could argue that most Muslims are decent, conservative-minded people, but that doesn’t stop 61% from saying they would never consider supporting a Muslim for President. Obviously, Islam has many more negative associations than Mormonism and they are not the same, but the opposition to both is comparably great, because people (even if they know next to nothing about Mormon doctrines) view both religions with suspicion, assume the worst about it and view them as something very strange and alien. These are attitudes that do not go away quickly, and there is no reason why we would expect them to go away at all. Odds are that the more Christian conservatives learn about LDS teachings, the less enthusiastic they will be about Romney and Mormons in general. For a lot of Americans, doctrines and beliefs may be a low priority, but this same Rasmussen poll showed just how important a candidate’s religious beliefs are to all Americans and to evangelicals in particular. Romney will not be able to say that all “people of faith” share the same values forever. At some point, he will have to face up to the divisions over doctrine. He will either have to play the “America is a wonderful land of diversity” card, which will make the social conservatives most likely to vote for him feel ill, or he can play the lame “there shouldn’t be religious tests for office” card, which will make many of the same people laugh at him, or he could say straight-up, “Yes, I believe that God was once a man who became God, and that all of us will become gods in just the same way that He is, and I think there are many gods spoken of in our scriptures, only one of whom is the Son, and I believe that American Indians are the lineal descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and I make no apologies for adhering to the faith of my fathers.” That last one might earn him some respect for being honest and being devoted to the religion into which he was born, even if he gets trashed in the election, but the weasel-word claims that “people of faith” can agree on “values” will leave a lot of people cold.
Here’s the thing about hostile preconceptions: they stubbornly continue to exist even when a perfectly respectable representative of a given community appears on the scene and tries to dispel these attitudes. Romney can bend over backwards to show how normal and “just like the rest of us” he is, but that will just confirm in the minds of those who don’t like Mormons that there is something abnormal and strange that he is trying to cover up. At best, some of them might allow that Romney is a “good Mormon,” but retain a visceral opposition to Mormons and will, in the end, be unable to identify with any Mormon candidate enough to cast a vote for him. Obviously, in states with larger Mormon populations, such as Nevada and Utah, Mormons get elected and re-elected all the time (such as the new governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons!), so a level of familiarity and comfort is required to make these candidates acceptable to a wider population. Most Americans, because they have never encountered many Mormons or have only heard about them, usually from hostile sources, or have only seen splinter Mormon groups on something like Big Love, will not be comfortable with a Mormon candidate because all of the associations they have with them tend to be pretty bad.
It is not good for public relations when you have to keep saying, “Don’t worry, we no longer allow polygamy,” because what people hear when you say this is that, for quite some time, they did allow polygamy. Romney’s hokey polygamy jokes don’t help matters–they remind voters of the very thing Romney shouldn’t be reminding them of (i.e., that his religion is rather odd and different from theirs and has a rather checkered history in that area). Question: do Christian Zionists take offense at the Mormon claims to have found the new Zion in Utah? Odd things like that may determine how these folks vote come primary time.
If nothing else the media are going to go crazy playing up every hint of intra-GOP tensions and arguments, especially when it is centered around religion. Between public opposition to the man’s religion and the media frenzy about that opposition, taken together with the usual attacks on Romney for being a social conservative, his campaign doesn’t stand much of a chance.
I won’t go too much into the vices of democracy just now, except to say that such a system of popular elections very occasionally places great power in the hands of people who know shockingly little about a great many things and we are raised to believe that in their collective ignorance they will come to conclusions of sage and sober understanding. Why anyone continues to believe this, I will never know, but it will sometimes happen that the crowd will come to decisions that those who are better informed will find baffling in their visceral hostility or enthusiasm about this or that. It is a terrible, terrible way to choose representatives and magistrates. It is, alas, the one we are stuck with.
As I said, I think we will find the extent of anti-Mormon hostility in this country shocking. This poll result shocked me. This is the highest number I think I have seen for how many would never even consider voting for a Mormon for President. My guess is that the number will grow, not shrink, as people pay more attention to Mormonism.
November 22nd, 2006 at 2:11 pm
daninardmore
Apart from Romney’s Mormonism, I would never consider him a candidate I could root for (I quit voting this year, but that’s another story) simply because he is governor of Massachusetts. Call me prejudiced, but I wouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to a Massachusetts dog catcher.
November 22nd, 2006 at 2:19 pm
daninardmore
Maybe Cher gives Armenians in California a bad name?
By the way, Mark Twain’s forgotten little book on Mormonism is a great read by our greatest polemicist. (Apologies to Mencken fans, but I do place him in a very close second place).
November 22nd, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Daniel Larison
That’s a great point. Here you have someone who chose to relocate to Massachusetts, and who will start from the unenviable position of being the first Massachusetts governor since You Know Who to run for President. It occurs to me that the man has a lot of liabilities, and this bit about Massachusetts might well be another piece of baggage that will weigh him down.
November 22nd, 2006 at 5:41 pm
daninardmore
I’ve just been Googling, and it appears I’m confusing a couple of things: Mark Twain wrote a book on Christian Science which I remember reading as a young boy, but his remarks on Mormonism were a chapter in the book “Roughing It”, his memoirs of his days in the West as the “Late Unpleasantness” was just beginning.