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What happened in South Carolina is really pretty simple. The Mormon Gap killed Mitt Romney. Defined as the percentage-point difference between the evangelical and the non-evangelical vote for a given Mormon candidate in a Republican primary, it turned out to be 16 points; i.e. Romney won 38 percent of non-evangelicals but only 22 percent of evangelicals. By contrast, Newt Gingrich won 44 percent of evangelicals, as opposed to only 33 percent of non-evangelicals.

In other words, had evangelicals voted like non-evangelicals, Romney would have won the primary, 38 percent to 33 percent. But since fully 65 percent of GOP primary voters counted themselves as evangelical, he lost, 28 percent to 40 percent. And lest anyone think that Gingrich, the Catholic convert, can't be the Huckabee of 2012, be it noted that Newt actually did a point better among evangelicals in the Palmetto State than Mike did in 2008. 

Update: This blog has joined forces with the Religion News Service and is now sailing under their banner at http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/mark-silk. What happened in SC seems to be happening in Florida.

We know about the political Gender Gap: the tendency of women vote Democratic and men to vote Republican. And we know about the God Gap: the tendency of the more religious to vote Republican and the less religious to vote Democratic. To these two (discussed here) we should start thinking about a third gap, more limited in scope but nevertheless of real potential significance. Call it the Mormon Gap: the tendency of evangelicals to vote disproportionately against Mormon candidates in Republican primaries.

The Mormon Gap may be defined as the percentage-point difference between the evangelical and the non-evangelical vote for a given Mormon candidate. Despite reports from the field alleging that Mitt Romney's Mormonism is less of a factor this primary season than it was in 2008, the Mormon gap has thus far not shrunk. To the contrary.

As I've noted before, Romney did worse with evangelicals in this year's Iowa Caucuses than he did four years ago. Then the Mormon Gap (Evangelicals/Non-Evangelicals) was 14 points (19/33); this year it was 24 points (14/38). In New Hampshire, the gap was seven points in 2008 (27/34) and nine points this year (31/40). In South Carolina, the gap was 8 points in 2008 (11/19); according to the latest PPP poll, it's now running at 18 points (21/39).

Now you might think that what we're looking at is not a Mormon Gap but a Romney Gap. But there's a good piece of evidence that suggests that this is not just about Romney. In this year's New Hampshire primary there was a second Mormon candidate who did well enough for a Mormon Gap to be assessed. And in John Huntsman's case the gap was 10 points (9/19).

Of course, given contests with different proportions of evangelical voters and multiple candidates finishing with varying vote totals, the significance of the Mormon Gap changes from state to state. In Iowa and South Carolina, where evangelicals make up some 60 percent of the Republican electorate, it's very significant. In New Hampshire, where they are less than a quarter, not so much: Romney's 9-point gap reduced his total vote by just three percentage points.

How much does the Mormon Gap matter? After the 2008 election cycle, John Green and I ran the numbers and concluded that Mitt Romney lost the nomination because evangelicals didn't vote for him. If he loses the nomination this time around, it will be for the same reason.

So in South Carolina yesterday a man who, well, might be Muslim, asks Newt Gingrich whether he could support a Muslim-American for president, given that we recently had a woman in Hillary Clinton and a Jewish-American in Joe Lieberman running for president. And without missing a beat, Newt responds:

I think it would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up sharia. I am totally opposed to sharia law being accepted by any court in the United States. In fact, I favor a federal law that preempts it, and says sharia law will not be used in any court in the United States. And this is a very fundamental question...

We have a friend in Arizona who serves in the U.S. Navy, who's a medical doctor, who's Muslim, but who's a totally modern person trying to find ways to bring Islam into modernity...

It depends entirely on the person. If they are a modern person integrated into the modern world and prepared to recognize all religions that's one thing. On the other hand, if they are the Saudis who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow either a Jew or Christian to worship in Saudi Arabia, that's something different...

But within that framework, a truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat. On the other hand, a person who belonged to any kind of belief in sharia, any kind of effort to impose that on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat.

Now let's try substituting "halakha" for "sharia." Halakha is the large body of Jewish law by which rabbinical authorities have for a couple of millennia sought to regulate the religious and civic behavior of the Jewish people. Some of it is more authoritative, some less, and new rulings get issued by different rabbinic powers that be. If he wants to find Saudi-like examples of it, Gingrich should check out Israel's haredim, who are hard at work these days trying to undermine the equal status of women, to say nothing of issuing fatwas against Jews working with and selling real estate to non-Jews. Not very modern.

On the other hand, there's the aforementioned Joe Lieberman, a more or  less modern individual who observes the Sabbath, keeps kosher, and generally, as Newt would say, belongs to some kind of belief in halakha. I don't know whether Newt would ever have supported Lieberman's presidential aspirations, but I'm inclined to think that he wouldn't consider them a mortal threat to the republic.

Support for presidential candidates aside, Gingrich's sharia preemption law would not only be unconstitutional (as a federal judge in Oklahoma recently made abundantly clear), it represents precisely the kind of war on religion that he (along with Rick Santorum and Rick Perry) have been heatedly charging the Obama Administration with conducting. What is the ministerial exception to employment law but judicial recognition of a particular faith's right to use its own rules to determine who's in charge?

If the Free Exercise clause means anything, it means the right of Americans not to be a modern person integrated into the modern world, whatever that means. Gingrich's personal religious test for presidential office is about as un-American as it gets.

To evangelicals, that is. Here's how R. Philip Roberts, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, explained it to Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times:

I don't have any concerns about Mitt Romney using his position as either a candidate or as president of the United States to push Mormonism. The concern among evangelicals is that the Mormon Church will use his position around the world as a calling card for legitimizing their church and proselytizing people.

That would be kind of like Focus on the Family using Tim Tebow's position as the anointed quarterback of the Denver Broncos to run its cute John 3:16 commercial during Saturday's Broncos-Patriots blowout.

Personally, I'd be surprised if the LDS Church decided to feature President Romney (much less Candidate Romney) in one of its "I'm a Mormon" ads. But Roberts' admission does tell us something about why evangelical leaders really like the idea of having one of their own in the White House: It's as much about the religious as the political agenda.

That's the word from the conclave in Texas. Will these guys have enough swot to move South Carolina evangelicals away from Gingrich? "Easy to command" was in the famous WaPo crack about the evangelical rank-and-file 20 years ago. As the next day's correction declared, there was "no factual basis" for saying so then. Maybe there will be now. Or maybe, the pooh-bahs will mainly succeed in dividing the evangelical sea sufficiently to let Romney cross through victorious. Update: WaPo's Dan Balz rings the changes.

Religious identity doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to voting in New Hampshire, as demonstrated by a new poll conducted by JZ Analytics for the Washington Times. It shows the two Catholic candidates, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, actually doing worse with Catholics than they do with Protestants. And Mitt Romney does just about as well with GOP primary voters who identify themselves as born again--evangelicals, mostly, one presumes--as he does with everybody else.

As Andrew Walsh and I argue in One Nation, Divisible: How Religion Religious Differences Shape American Politics (just out in paper, with new material on the Obama presidency), New Englanders embraced a principle of church-politics separation in the mid-20th century in order to put the grim Yankee-Irish Catholic conflicts of the previous century behind them. John F. Kennedy brought that principle to national politics when he won the presidency in 1960. And it's why New England pols like Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and Howard Dean tend to handle religion so badly on the national stump.

That's not to say that religion doesn't matter at all in New England, but you have to look carefully. In the JZ Analytics poll, Santorum, at 10.8 percent overall, does do a good bit better with the born-agains (19.7 percent) and those who attend worship services once a week or more (21 percent). That's an opportunity for him, but a small one. There aren't a lot of born-agains in New Hampshire, and these days (according to our 2008 ARIS survey), northern New England is the least religiously affiliated region of the country.

Primary Update (Rev.): And so it goes. In the actual primary, Romney won pluralities of Catholics (42 45 percent), Protestants (32 35 percent), and, yes, even evangelicals (27 30 percent). Among the last of these, to be sure, he beat out Santorum by just one point a modest seven points. But he got 37 40 percent of non-evangelicals as opposed to Santorum's mere 7 6 percent. And only 22 percent of NH GOP primary voters identified as evangelical. Meanwhile, in a state where libertarians include a healthy proportion of red-blooded Ayn Rand atheists, Ron Paul amassed almost half the Nones to Romney's 19 21 percent. But unfortunately for Dr. Paul, only 12 percent of the voters fell into that no-religion category.

According to the last two PPP polls (12/27) and 1/1), nine out of 12 Iowa evangelicals who have changed their preference in the last few days have moved to Santorum. Most of them have come from Paul and Bachmann (who have shed 22 percent and 27 percent of their evangelical support respectively). Santorum now has a quarter of the evangelicals in his corner.

Meanwhile, evangelicals have crept up to nearly 50 percent of likely caucus attenders. With the former Pennsylvania senator (18 percent) in a statistical tie with Paul (20 percent) and Romney (19 percent), a continuation of the Santorum Surge will put him over the top--and by a hefty margin if the church buses roll.

As the Gingrich balloon sinks  back to earth under the weight of its own bombast, Airship Romney motors along, buoyed by the improbability of the alternatives and imperilled only by...the Dark Cloud of Mormonism.

Maybe. To find out, the Salt Lake Tribune engaged Mason-Dixon to do some polling on religion and the GOP's Great Race, and came up with the interesting info that while half of Democrats consider Mormons to be Christians, nearly two-thirds of Republicans do. What happened to all that anti-Mormonism in the Republican base?

I'm thinking that the prospect of having Mitt Romney in the White House is driving (some) Republicans to reassess their exclusion of Mormons from the Christian fold. Only last month, Pew found that little more than half of Republicans considered the Mormon religion to be Christian. (The margin was 54-33, compared to the Tribune's 63-20.) Fully 87 percent of Republicans want their presidential contenders to be Christian (as opposed to 67 percent of Democrats), so if you can't beat 'em, let 'em join you.

Of course, it all comes down to choosing actual candidates, and mercifully, more pollsters are recognizing the need for including religious i.d. in their questionnaires. A case in point is Quinnipiac's most recent Virginia poll, which has Gingrich and Romney running one-two at 30 percent and 25 percent respectively. Sure enough, Gingrich has disproportionately more evangelicals (34 percent) and Romney disproportionately fewer (22 percent). Even so, Mitt's got as much evangelical support as the three evangelicals--Bachmann, Paul, and Perry--combined. If he does secure the nomination, I look for further revaluation of Mormonism's claims to Christian identity.

Yesterday, I missed this very helpful graphic from CBS (h/t David Gibson) cross-tabulating support for the GOP wannabes in Iowa by evangelical and Tea Party status:

I underestimated Gingrich's evangelical support by a few points, but what's interesting to note is that all the non-Mormons do better with both TPiers and evangelicals than they do with the totality of likely caucus-goers. Indeed, if there were no TPiers and evangelicals, Mitt Romney would be winning handily, but unfortunately for him 50 percent support the TP and 32 percent are evangelicals. (How many evangelicals are TPiers it doesn't say.)

What are evangelicals doing supporting the likes of Gingrich? NYT's Ross Douthat is dismayed, but not because he thinks conservative Christians have no business taking at face value Newt's public displays of contrition and embrace of the conservative religious agenda. No, it's because, well, what will the liberals think?

His candidacy isn't a test of religious conservatives' willingness to be good, forgiving Christians. It's a test of their ability to see their cause through outsiders' eyes, and to recognize what anointing a thrice-married adulterer as the champion of "family values" would say to the skeptical, the unconverted and above all to the young.

Happily, the new NYT/CBS Iowa poll asked the evangelical/born question. Unhappily, the detailed array doesn't offer crosstabs for preference by religion, and all the story tells us is that evangelicals prefer Gingrich to Romney by a 3-1 margin. Since Gingrich leads Romney overall by a margin of 3-2 (28 percent to 18 percent), it's evident that Romney's share of them is disproportionately small. If 30 percent chose Gingrich--and in a field with significant evangelical support for Bachmann, Perry, and Paul, that seems generous--it would leave only 10 percent favoring Romney.

Altogether, 32 percent of the likely GOP caucus-goers identified themselves as born-again or evangelical. That's down from 39 percent in the NYT/CBS Iowa poll taken at this time four years ago. Then, Romney was leading Mike Huckabee 27 percent to 21 percent. At the caucuses two months later, Huckabee trounced Romney 35 percent to 25 percent because evangelicals turned out in droves, constituting fully 60 percent of all GOP caucus-goers. Huckabee wouldn't have won without them.

This time around, evangelicals seem less interested in going to the caucuses and less likely to find a Huckabee to get behind. But if the candidacy of one of the born-agains is, like Gingrich's, born again, all that could change. NYT/CBS found two-thirds of likely caucus-goers still unsettled in their choices. This one's a long way from over.