The contention that Romney, as a Mormon, will have problems with evangelicals is a testable one, so I took a shot. I have a blog that is reasonably well recognized in the world of Christian blogging, so I ran a poll for a week. The question was
As a traditonally creedal Christian, Would you find it difficult to vote for a presidental candidate of Mormon Faith?
The answer came in 53% “NO” - 47% “YES”. You can view the full results here, such as they are. Given the very unscientific nature of this poll, I think it reasonable to call this as having come out even. An old NRO piece pegs the “would not vote for a Mormon” number at 17% of evangelicals, certainly more accurate than my poll here, but is it dead nuts on? Christian bloggers, who primarily would have been the voters in my poll, are in some sense opinion leaders and could be shaping votes as things grow closer.
Most interesting was to watch the results see-saw through the week the poll was up depending on what particular quarter of the Christian blogosphere had linked to the poll that day. I have no data to quanitify this effect at this time, but we need to look into it.
Two questions then. Firstly, can a Romney carry the nomination with only 50% of the evangelical vote? Some recent Pew data says that evangelicals were 35% of Bush’s total votes in ‘04, a loss of half of those would have cost him the election, but that says nothing about the primary. My personal opinion is that things will depend largely on whether a Romney opponent emerges that is heavily identifiable as an evangelical. So far, none of the front-running field is; Mike Huckabee, who is a former Baptist minister but does not appear to be a serious contender at the moment, has a strong evangelical identity. There is lots of time for one to develop, however.
We need more data to know anything for sure, but one is forced to wonder if, as Romney does appear to be in the first pack - his money sure is - a Huckabee or some other readily identifiable evangelical candidate wouldn’t play the religion card as Ted Kennedy did when Romney opposed him for Senate. One also has to wonder if that approach would not backfire with non-religious conservatives who take religious liberty very seriously.
The second key question then is which evangelical branches should Romney be courting? The governor told me when I met with him that he had a good meeting with Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Community Church here in Southern California. Time magazine named Warren the most influential evangelical in America. However, Warren has been recently moving leftward, signing the Evangelical Climate Intitiative, and most recently the Torture Is A Moral Issue statement. While there is nothing particularly left-wing about the later statement itself, it is blatantly aimed at current administration policy and it makes common cause with some clearly identifiable lefties, like Jimmy Carter, and noted Christian leftie Jim Wallis.
It is likely that religious evangelical opposition to a Romney candidacy would come from religious conservatives, who also tend to be political conservatives. The completely unscientific observation of voting patterns in the small poll I ran would support this.  One has to wonder if Romney doesn’t need to be courting more conservative evangelicals than Warren. Or is he figuring that the conservative evangelicals are not that significant numerically? If the 50% my poll indicates is anywhere close to the truth, that would be a miscalculation.
It’s early, in fact an eternity in political terms, but based on my conversations and this little unscientific poll, I think Romney’s religious problems with evangelicals are real, and significant. So far the evangelical right is remaining quiet on the issue. I have contacted several important leaders for comment and to date gotten only refusals. But one must wonder what Romney’s best strategy is - proactive or reactive?
If reactive, how would one counter the issue when it arises. Claims of bigotry would be counter-productive serving only to alienate the group. But the same group is also likely to be somewhat immune to arguements that “Mormons aren’t really that different.” There are very significant theological differences, if not political or practical ones, and such people are making decisions largely out of theology.
In this writer’s opinion, a proactive strategy would serve Romney much better. Make friends out of them now, before they become actual vocal opponents. Seek the common ground and stand on it.
Lowell adds:
I will lay aside for now my disappointment in the reponses John got, which reveal a fairly frank bias against a political candidate simply because he is a Mormon.
As a simple matter of strategy, I agree with John. Bridge-building is necessary. Any presidential candidate in the current Republican Party needs to build those bridges, even those who already have a strong evangelical Christian profile. Romney needs to build bridges even more than the others, for obvious reasons.
It appears that Romney is going to wait for a significant event to occur, and then address the religion issue strongly — while all eyes are watching. This is an excellent strategy for the general public, but it doesn’t deal with the nuts and bolts issues John refers to above. I think Romney is a very smart man, and I do not doubt he will be breaking bread and meeting with the right people before too long.
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