Recently in Romney Category

In a post on who gets the vote of "religious conservatives," Steve Waldman writes:

That leaves Huckabee. As a former Baptist minister himself, he has standing to criticize Palin without being cast as anti-Christian. Mainstream media mistakenly assume that Huckabee failed last time because his base was too limited to religious conservatives. Actually, he fared no better among Christians than McCain and Romney early on. He was distrusted by many in the party for being too liberal, not for being too conservative.

This is entirely misconceived. As any examination of the exit polls from last year's GOP primaries will show you, Huckabee did fail because he had trouble drawing beyond his base of white evangelicals. They loved him. The distrust came from so-called leaders of the religious right, whose suspicion arose, at least in substantial part, because they didn't think he could win. His "liberal" moment was over after Iowa. As for faring no better among Christians than McCain and Romney, that's only if you include all Christians--Catholics and and Mainline Protestants and Mormons as well as Evangelicals. Huckabee couldn't win the former, for sure. But Catholics and Mainline Protestants do not constitute the conservative religious base of the GOP. C'mon, Steve!

The big question for GOP big shots at the moment has to be whether Mitt Romney can manage to garner enough rank-and-file evangelical support to marginalize Huckabee. So look for Romney to play a big role in fighting the Proposition 8 repeal referendum. Where has Romney just bought a new home? La Jolla, California.

Update: I don't appear to be the only one with this thought.

My proposed linkage between anti-Mormon prejudice among evangelicals and the persistent flip-flop charge against Romney has drawn some interest, and raised the question of how one might go about demonstrating it. In a comment, Lowell Brown, who posts over at Article6, expressed the wish for some empirical evidence: "Now, did Romney make some Christians distrust him because he claimed to have very similar beliefs? Maybe, but I sure haven't seen any data to support that hypothesis." While I don't know of any survey of the subject, there is some anecdotage that points strongly in that direction, and in mine.

To wit: Late last year, the Corner's Jonah Goldberg quoted a number of responses to his thoughts about evangelical anti-Mormonism. One evangelical respondent wrote:

The sharper the contrast between Mormon and orthodox Christian doctrine, the better....To address one obvious objection, voting for a Jewish, Muslim, or even atheist candidate does not carry the same set of concerns. Unlike Mormonism, none of these other belief systems attempt to position themselves within the Christian faith.

It's hardly a stretch to see this person as becoming even less likely to vote for Romney the more he made himself out to be like evangelicals. Then there's this comment, along whose lines Goldberg said he received "piles":

Speaking for myself, there is no policy that I think a Mormon would pursue that I find objectionable. I will not vote for a Mormon because they claim to be Christian, when they are not Christians. Electing, or even nominating, a Mormon continues to send the message to Americans that Mormons are fine and dandy, Christians like everyone else. Thousands of Christians are converted to Mormonism each year, and it is done under false pretenses. From what I have read, Mormons are very good at appearing to be orthodox Christians with new recruits. It's only later that the blatantly non-orthodox views come out. So, I rule out voting for a Mormon not because of actual policies they might pursue, but because of the message their election would send to Americans.

Let me make a couple more quick comments. I would vote for a Jew. I would vote for a Hindu, an atheist, etc.

This, it seems to me, is pretty direct evidence in support of my proposition. The justification for voting against Mormons is not that they belong to some non-evangelical faith but that their faith misrepresents itself, and so is not to be trusted. Electing a Mormon would somehow sanction this way of doing business, and therefore send the wrong message to Americans. Under the circumstances, it is plain how the flip-flop charge reinforces the prejudice. What's wrong with Romney the politician is what's wrong with his faith: Both sail under false pretenses. Q.E.D.

In an interview with John Green last week, former Romney campaign adviser Mark DeMoss (and one time chief of staff to Jerry Falwell) said pretty much straight out that it was Mike Huckabee who sunk the Romney campaign:

Would I like the president to share my faith? Sure. Would I like Mitt Romney’s credentials and intellect and character and competence and experience combined with an evangelical Southern Baptist faith? I’d love it. But I didn’t have it, so I liked everything else. But there’re still a lot of folks saying in this country, I vote on this. I heard repeatedly from people who said, how can you support a Mormon when we have one of our own running for president? We should support one of our own, a fellow Southern Baptist.

I think there are some other things that ought to be part of a president, like competence and experience and so on. These are interesting times.

DeMoss is very annoyed at Huckabee for running an ad in South Carolina (but not elsewhere) advertising himself as "a Christian leader." His takeaway from the campaign?

I’d like to really change the – one of my missions, I think, is to change the debate from religion to values. Values should play a huge role in a campaign. Religion, I think, should play a secondary role.

And that, to some of my friends and colleagues, is probably a little heretical. But I really believe it. After all, we really don’t know as voters a very great deal about most or any of these candidates’ or past presidents’ personal faith anyway. We know what they tell us. But we don’t know. And a lot of times, particularly religious conservatives have put great stock in a candidate who they thought was a fellow evangelical only to find out, gee, maybe they weren’t, were disappointed. Well, if your interest had been in common values rather than common theology, you might have been less disappointed.

This is not exactly a new line from DeMoss. But ever since Lee Atwater took George H.W. Bush around to testify to his born-again-ness to evangelical pastors all over the South (Falwell foremost among them), GOP operatives have encouraged evangelicals to focus on the personal faith of presidential candidates, and to set a high value on having one of their own. One day I'd like to hear one of these operatives 'fess up to how this golem was created.

I'm still catching up from last week, and in the process this piece by the Washington Times' Ralph Z. Hallow caught my eye. The questions it raises have to do with the extent of evangelical antipathy to Mitt Romney, and the degree to which it is based on anti-Mormonism or concerns about Romney's less than consistent record on abortion and gay rights. The answer may be that the alternatives are mutually reinforcing: Conservative evangelicals don't trust Romney because 1) they don't trust Mormons and 2) they think he's a flipflopper. The latest poop on the GOP Veepstakes (from Politico's Jonathan Martin) pairs Romney with MN Gov. Pawlenty as McCain's two "conventional" choices. (The alternative is to do something wacky like picking Joe Lieberman.) My sense is that, in the end, McCain will go conventional and steer clear of Romney. The evangelical base really matters a lot, and it really doesn't like Romney. Making him McCain's running mate and Republican presidential heir apparent will seem like the GOP white shoe establishment doubling down against religious conservatives.

Update: On the other hand, Friday's Zogby poll of likely voters by religion reports that whereas 46 percent of white evangelicals say that a Huckabee veep nod would make them more likely to vote for McCain (as opposed to 4 percent less likely), 34 percent say they would be more likely to vote for him if he choose Romney (as opposed to 10 percent who would be less likely. Not much of a differential, all things considered. If Lieberman were the guy, however, only 20 percent of white evangelicals would be more likely to vote for McCain, and 23 percent would be less likely. Fuggetaboutit, Joe.

Does Musgrave speak for Colorado Springs?

Mitt Romney's son, Josh, told the Desert Morning News today that he is considering running for Congress. More interesting is his belief that Mormonism cost his father a win in Iowa. Josh Romney said "When it's religion, you definitely take it personally. It's highly offensive, but I think that the vast majority of people we saw were very accepting. They said, 'Your dad shares our values and we don't care about his religion." Josh said that Mormonism wasn't an issue until Huckabee pondered whether Mormons believe that the Devil and Jesus are brothers in the New York Times.

Prior to Mitt Romney's withdrawal, there were five exit polls in states with high percentages of evangelicals that asked how much a candidate's religious beliefs mattered: Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Mike Huckabee won Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, and came in second to John McCain in Oklahoma and South Carolina. Romney came in third in all of them except South Carolina, where he finished fourth behind Fred Thompson. The question is: To what extent did anti-Mormonism play a role in his poor showing in these states?

So what's the verdict on the religious significance of Mitt Romney's run? Here are some provisional thoughts.

1. Romney's Mormonism did hurt him. There were evangelicals who voted for him, but in those states where they are thickest on the ground, there were too many who didn't. As a generic Protestant, he would, I suspect, have been able to hold off Mike Huckabee across the South.

Update with empirical data in support of above: Fully 49 percent of GOP voters in Alabama said that the religious beliefs of the candidate matter “a great deal” to them. Of those, 61 percent voted for Huckabee, and only 9 percent for Romney. Evangelicals made up 77 percent of the vote. This would seem to provide some basis for ascribing Romney’s problems to anti-Mormonism among evangelicals.

2. The fact that Romney obtained endorsements from leaders of the religious right--Paul Weyrich, for example--was a good thing for the country. After the warm evangelical embrace of George W. Bush as "our Christian president," it was gratifying (at least for devotees of the constitutional prohibition on religious tests for office) to hear conservative Republicans insisting that "we are choosing a president, not a pastor."

3. The absence of voices among the pundit class denouncing evangelicals for anti-Mormon bigotry was unfortunate. This may be put down to the soft bigotry of low expectations: What do you expect from those people? But had Romney chosen to run as a business conservative who was moderate on the social issues, I suspect there would have been more stepping up on his behalf. He never enjoyed the period of media embrace that Huckabee did.

CBN's David Brody interviewed Christian Coalition leader and fallen GOP angel Ralph Reed on his thoughts of John McCain. Reed outlined what McCain needs to do to win over his party's base. Reed: "First, he should choose a running mate with strong conservative credentials, both on social issues and economic issues. Then he should adopt a conservative platform at the convention, and run a general election campaign that sounds conservative themes on taxes, terrorism, and values. If he does those things, he should be able to unite the party. If not, it will be difficult to rally the grassroots and win a highly competitive, close race in November." Thus, I'd infer that Reed isn't eager to jump on the Huckabandwagon anytime soon. In fact, it looks like he is more of a Romney 2012 kind of guy. The Washington Times has it that shortly after Romney's CPAC resignation, he met with a group of GOP giants to tell them he'd be soldiering on for the cause. Keep checking back to see how this plays out...

His fellow Mormons were proud of Romney and excited about his candidacy not only because he is a co-religionist, but like most of them, a Republican. But they learned a bitter lesson from his campaign. Anti-Mormonism in American society is anything but dead.