Sunday, October 08, 2006

Vote for a Mormon president?


The Mormon Question

Will Mitt Romney (R-MA) be an Al Smith or a John Kennedy?

In other words -- will his presidential bid reflect attitudes about
Mormonism or will it shape them?

The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg asked their sample of registered
voters whether they'd ever vote for a Mormon presidential candidate.
35 percent said no.

The two groups most united in their opposition: liberal Democrats, of
whom 40 percent were skittish, and more-than-once-a-week churchgoers,
of whom a majority was opposed. (Note that these slices are taken from
subsamples of a larger poll and are thus somewhat less precise).

Why?

It might be that Mormons are perceived as a fundamentally conservative
denomination which scares modernist/secular Dems as much as their
alleged heresy scares some evangelicals.

We'd love to see a similar poll that delves into support/opposition by
denomination. Just a hunch, but we'd bet that Southern Baptist moral
conservatives would have more objections than Catholic moral
conservatives. What about Missouri Synod Lutherans? They're
congregated throughout the Midwest and often in closer proximity to
established Mormon communities. But their penchant for doctrinal
purity is as strong as the Southern Baptists'.

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