Then a viable Mormon presidential candidate appears on the scene and we suddenly find the airwaves, blogosphere, and print media filled with horrible misportrayals of our religion. This was alarming to Mormons whether or not they supported said presidential candidate.

We are told by friendly non-Mormons that the Mormon Church should use better PR to counter the misinformation and eventually Church leaders even encouraged members to get involved in the media, especially the blogosphere, to provide accurate information to the public.

As it is likely there will continue to be Mormons that want to be public servants, even for high offices, I guess we individual Mormons will have to train ourselves to very clearly separate our “crusade” to be understood correctly from our desire to cooperate on political issues that are important to many other social conservatives.

The best we can hope for is that people like John will continue to aid our efforts by taking a stand that Mormons who want to cooperate on political and social issues should be welcomed into the tent and treated as full-fledged fellow Americans.

First, among the introductory observations:

The campaign began and ended with Mormons: Some religious conservatives opposed Mitt Romney in Iowa because of his faith and some gay activists demonstrated against the Latter-day Saints because of their support for banning same-sex marriage in California.

Some LDS people might well wonder how they managed to miss the “ended” part, particularly in light of at least one comment at the Oscars’ ceremony last night.

Interestingly enough (in light of a long prior thread), the University of Akron’s study doesn’t include a separate category specifically for Mormons, but lumps them in with “Other [White] Christians.” That is likely to get some people’s panties in bunch, from a number of perspectives. But a couple of perhaps topical quotes are worth highlighting:

Another place where Obama gained was with the composite category of White Other Christians: He received more than one-quarter of the vote, up from Kerry’s one-fifth in 2004. This result is also a surprise, because the largest denomination in the category is the Latter-day Saints, one of the most Republican religious communities in the nation. True to past form, the Other Christians were consistently conservative on the issues, especially cultural ones, though they gave the economy high priority in 2008. It is also possible that the Mormon controversies of the Republican primary season redounded to Obama’s benefit. This group is another place where Obama made modest gains in a Republican constituency.

Personally, I’m not sure the national Republican primary controversies constituted the major component in any shift among Mormon voters here. But I have no hard data to back up my suppositions.