With Romney out Utahns in quandary
- February
- 12
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LDS Church members gamely took it on the chin during Mitt Romney’s failed attempt to win the Republican presidential nomination.
National polls early in the campaign revealed Americans to have reservations about a Mormon as president. Anti-Mormon sentiment, especially among evangelical Christians, ran high. At least one Republican candidate and another’s mother took swipes at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its beliefs.
And now that their favored son is out, Mormons, especially those in Utah where Romney ruled, may be in a quandary about where to throw their traditionally conservative support.
“It is complicated for Latter-day Saints given that Utah went 90 percent for Romney in the primary,” said Armand Mauss, a Washington State University emeritus social science professor and a Mormon.
Many Mormons interviewed in the past months about why they support Romney insisted his faith alone wasn’t the reason they wanted him to become president, citing everything from his family values to his ability to tackle economic issues.
“First and foremost, I support Mitt Romney because I think he’s the man with the right qualities,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert, who traveled to Boston to help raise money for Romney. “Secondarily, he happens to be a Mormon.”
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Herbert acknowledged that he and other Mormons feel “gratitude and pride” seeing a fellow member of the faith in the national spotlight. But, the lieutenant governor said, Romney’s candidacy has also made it clear not everyone is ready for a Mormon leader.
“There is probably also a realization that Mormon bigotry is out there still in the country as we’ve seen it bubble up. There is still some work to do,” he said, to show that Mormons are “acceptable people to be your neighbors and your leaders.”
The Washington Post was among several large newspapers Friday that attempted to sum up the rise and fall of Romney and how it effected members of his church. Asked the Post: “So, was it good for Mormons?”
A front page story in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Mormons Dismayed by Harsh Spotlight,” noted that Romney’s candidacy brought more attention to the LDS Church than it has had in years.
“What the church discovered was not heartening,” the story said.
A Gallup Poll last February, just weeks after Romney formally announced his candidacy, found 46 percent of the nation to have an unfavorable view of the LDS Church.
“Something about the Mormon religion apparently disturbs a significant portion of the American population,” the Gallup News Service wrote.
Romney’s yearlong run for the GOP nomination, including his “Faith in America” speech last December, apparently didn’t change the perception among voters.
But not everyone believes there’s still significant concern about a Mormon in the White House.
Rodney Stark, a Baylor University social science professor, said Romney’s run didn’t add to the unfavorable view of Mormons.
“It might have done some good. He didn’t have any horns, and he gave up pretty gracefully,” Stark said.
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in Nashville, said Romney handled the questions about his religion effectively in his “Faith in America” speech.
That speech, delivered at the George H.W. Bush Library in Texas, was intended to reassure evangelicals who don’t consider Mormons to be fellow Christians as well as reaffirming the role of faith in American life.
Land said he rarely hears about the Mormon issue. “I haven’t heard much about that since the speech,” he said. But he acknowledged a lot of evangelicals remained “suspicious of his receptiveness in adopting positions important to them.”
Romney didn’t mention religion when he withdrew Thursday or in an e-mail sent out Friday thanking supporters. His campaign spokesman said religion wasn’t a factor in his decision to quit the race.
Mormons were willing to weather frequent public attacks on their beliefs and culture while Romney was in the race. In Utah, nine out of 10 Republicans voted for him in Tuesday’s primary. But now that he’s out, whom will they support?
“I would think historically they will stay about as Republican as they always have,” Stark said.
Unless that Republican’s name is Mike Huckabee.
“Huckabee is going nowhere. On top of that, he’s no friend to Mormons. He’s no friend to anybody for that matter,” Stark said.
Because Mormons often identify with social conservatives, they might ordinarily be inclined to go for another social conservative like the former Arkansas governor. But not this year.
While campaigning in Iowa, Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, asked a magazine reporter: “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”
Because Huckabee was seen as at least “buying in to some of the canards about Mormons,” Mauss said, LDS Church members became suspicious that he might be in tune with protestant evangelicals who held anti-Mormon seminars in their churches.
“I think Mormons have been put off by the hostile expressions of evangelicals,” he said.
That leaves Republican frontrunner John McCain, who isn’t on Utahns’ good list either, and Democrats Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. A Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll Thursday had McCain at 30 percent, Obama at 25 percent and Clinton at 11 percent.
Romney leaned heavily on Mormon voters in states like Nevada, where there are a sizable number of LDS voters, as well as in California, where he didn’t fare well. Even in Michigan, many of the Romney supporters turning out for rallies were Mormon.
He won Nevada’s GOP caucus on Jan. 19 with exit polls showing about half of his overall vote came from Mormons. That because a whopping 95 percent of the caucusgoers who identified themselves as Mormon said they voted for Romney.
Kelly Patterson, head of Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, said Romney not only didn’t hurt the prospects of the next LDS candidate for president, he likely helped.
“I don’t think it bodes ill for future LDS candidates,” Patterson said. “One thing you can probably say with a higher degree of certainty is that he has probably made it easier for the next LDS candidate, because next time, it will be old news.”
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