USA Today has a new poll that asks, “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be one of the following, would you vote for that person?”  The three possibilities are “black,” “a woman” and “Mormon.”  Not surprisingly, a Mormon candidate runs up against the strongest resistance at 24% for no.  There is also greater hesitation among those who say that they would vote for a Mormon than on the other questions: another 14% say they would vote for a Mormon with some reservations.

Still, 24% who refuse to vote for a Mormon has to be a heartening improvement in the polling over Rasmussen’s stunning 43% who would never consider voting for a Mormon, right?  Well, it would be, except that USA Today’s poll was simply a national poll of adults 18+, while Rasmussen polled likely voters.  Obviously, this would indicate that anti-Mormon attitudes are considerably stronger among likely voters than they are in the general population, which is clearly very bad news for the Mormon running in the ’08 race.

It remains unclear to me how any Mormon candidate, even without Romney’s other baggage of hailing (most recently) from Massachusetts, the health-care bill he signed, and his flip-flopping, could prevail in a primary contest when four out of ten Republicans say that they will not even consider voting for a Mormon and almost two out of ten say that they aren’t sure one way or the other.   Values, shmalues–you usually cannot win any election when a combined total of more than 50% of the voters are either dead-set against voting for you or are not really sure if they can bring themselves to do it. 

In an extremely divided primary field, it is extremely remotely possible that Romney might be able to capture enough of the remaining 42% of GOP voters that are willing to give a Mormon candidate a hearing to win the nomination, but even then every general election projection shows Romney losing badly to almost every Democratic candidate (he loses by a more respectable margin to Tom Vilsack). 

This is not simply a function of Rasmussen polling–RCP combines and averages many different polls that all show incredible Romney weakness against the major Democratic contestants.  Both Newsweek and Investor’s Business Daily have polls showing John Edwards leading Romney by more than 20 points (Newsweek gives Edwards an implausible margin of 34!), while HRC and Obama handily trounce him as well.  Of course, polls in February of the year before the election cannot mean very much, but if they mean anything then electability is clearly a problem for Romney. 

You could argue that these dreadful results are just a function of a lack of name recognition, but most people still don’t recognise Obama’s name and nonetheless Romney fares poorly against him as well.  It seems that, without the nationally recognised names of McCain or Giuliani, the generic GOP presidential candidate is getting slaughtered even by such equally unknown candidates as Obama.  If Vilsack is winning in national polls against Romney, when the Iowan’s name recognition outside Iowa is virtually non-existent, the desire to avoid another Republican President is apparently quite strong.  As Republican primary voters become better acquainted with the liberals and moderates in the field of candidates, there will be a temptation to rally around Romney as the “electable” one who is more or less conservative, but all indications right now suggest that he is even less electable than they are. 

Another candidate might be able to overcome the burden of the strong bias against returning the GOP to the White House, but not if he is already carrying an essentially unbearable burden of strong resistance to his candidacy because of his religion.  Conservatives will not abide McCain or Giuliani because their views or their past betrayals, but neither will they back someone who is certain to go down to defeat, as Romney almost certainly is.  How’s that for bucking conventional wisdom? 

I will say this much right now: someone from outside the Terrible Trio will win the GOP nomination.  Who that someone is still remains entirely unclear, but none of the three currently touted as the leading candidates will succeed (I don’t rule out the possibility that one of them gets the VP nod, but for at least two of the three it seems unlikely to be accepted).  I suspect we will have surprise nominees on both sides, but whichever party chooses a Senator or former Senator will lose (the Democratic side is simply drowning in Senators, which means their winning ticket depends on a successful Vilsack or Richardson campaign).  That’s as much as I’m willing to say at this absurdly early point.