During Mitt Romney’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, one of the big questions, in the media, at least, is whether fundamentalists and evangelicals in the Republican Party would vote for Mr. Romney. Conventional wisdom has been that evangelical voters were going to be a big problem for former Governor Romney. After all, the implicit argument went, you know those bigoted, right-wing Republicans. They oppose same-sex marriage because they don’t like gays. They voted against Obama because he was black. The big question in 2012 was going to be: Who did the evangelicals hate more: President Obama or Mormons?
There is only one trouble with this story-line. When it comes to not wanting a Mormon to be President, it’s not the Republicans who are the bigots. Hidden deep in an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about this year’s election was this sentence: “Democrats in the poll were more likely than Republicans to express concerns about a Mormon president.”* But Peter Hart, the Democratic half of the duo which conducts the poll, explained that this wasn’t because Democrats don’t like Mormons. Rather, some Democrats were just using this question as a proxy for not wanting Mitt Romney to be president. Now I have heard of voters coming up with phony policy differences to explain why they oppose a candidate when it’s really bigotry. I have never before heard of somebody using bigotry as a substitute for policy differences.
In any case, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal poll isn’t the first one to identify where the anti-Mormonism is. A Gallup poll in June of last year showed that while 18% of Republicans and 19% of independents would not support a Mormon for president, 27% of Democrats would not support a Mormon.
In other words, when it comes to anti-Mormonism, if you want to find the bigots, look left.
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* Neil King Jr. and Danny Yadron, “Obama, Romney Toe to Toe,” The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2012; Laura Meckler, “One in Four Say Having a Mormon President Would Cause Concerns,” The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2012.
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