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No Valentines For Romney

Matt Yglesias describes the dynamic of Romney’s many political woes pretty succinctly: The trouble, as I see it, has to do with Romney’s convenient conversion to social conservatism over the past two years or so. One assumes that to win, Romney is going to need to talk about his newfound commitment to abortion-banning and gay-hating […]

Matt Yglesias describes the dynamic of Romney’s many political woes pretty succinctly:

The trouble, as I see it, has to do with Romney’s convenient conversion to social conservatism over the past two years or so. One assumes that to win, Romney is going to need to talk about his newfound commitment to abortion-banning and gay-hating and the most obvious way to do that would be within the context of talking about his deep Christian faith and so forth. But while that might work great for a Protestant or a Catholic, I don’t think it goes over so well if your deep faith is something most Christians consider weird and, indeed, not really Christian.

Similarly, it’s hard to do the standard JFK-style “my faith is not an issue” thing if you’re simultaneously trying to convince politically mobilized Christian traditionalists that you’re the candidate for them. It seems to me that this winds up being a very difficult sweet spot to locate.

I have come to pretty much the same conclusion in my “occasional” posting on this topic.  Romney’s campaign has managed to cook up a real witch’s brew of political liabilities.  Even if he could magically fast-forward to the nomination and fight the general election now, Republicans would have to be fools to bet on him to win it all.  There is the obvious opportunism and pandering of the last two years, which makes him seem power-hungry and unscrupulous, mixed with an opportunistic embrace of a religious politics that puts off many moderate and secular voters by making him appear willing to adopt what they regard as hard-line and even dangerous views for the sake of personal power.  Then there is an attempt to soft-pedal his own little-known religion, because even he knows that it is a political problem, while nonetheless claiming that his “faith” is central and essential to the religious politics that he wants to practice (so central that he doesn’t want to talk about it in any detail).  He wants to be able to talk about “enduring values,” as he did in his speech yesterday, without anyone paying close attention to the fact that his values have been about as enduring as the fall fashion lines.  He wants you to know that he believes in God, but he doesn’t want anyone to peer too closely at what sort of God he believes in.  This will go over like a lead balloon in the retail politics atmosphere of the Granite State.  People there are experienced in this sort of thing and can usually spot fakes a mile off.  It should be fun to watch. 

Now to that ABC/Post poll to which Mr. Yglesias referred.  35% say (question 44c) they are “less likely” to vote for someone if he is a Mormon (this apparently climbs to 39% among Republicans), while 61% say that it wouldn’t make any difference.  As a percentage, this is fairly consistent with the Bloomberg poll showing 37% who would not vote for a Mormon and the Rasmussen poll that had 43% who would never vote for a Mormon.  Roughly four out of ten Americans have some significant resistance to the idea of a Mormon President.  In Kennedy’s time, the resistance to a Catholic President was, I recall reading somewhere, roughly half as great as a percentage of the population, and he won a squeaker of an election thanks to a little help from his friends in Chicago and Texas.  Should he somehow magically get the nomination, Romney would face even greater resistance nationally than Kennedy did and presumably does not have nearly as many mob and local power broker connections with which to steal a close election.   

The phrasing of the poll questions seem important to shaping our perception of how big of a problem Romney’s Mormonism is, and I think it probably has an impact on the results as well.  Yglesias takes the 35% “less likely” figure to mean that it is a problem, but not insurmountable, while I think the Rasmussen figure of 43% “never consider” figure suggests strong and unyielding resistance.  It is possible that opposition to a Mormon candidate might be more changeable than I am assuming, but typically these sorts of strong prejudices don’t vanish in the course of a year and a half.     

Rasmussen asked, “would you ever consider voting for a [fill in the blank] candidate?”  Given a question this wide-open, which doesn’t even force the participant to commit to actually voting for a Mormon if he doesn’t want to make that commitment, you might think that the results would be less anti-Mormon.  After all, it just asks whether you would ever consider voting for such a person–implying that it might be in twenty years and not the next election when you finally do so–and even then the resistance to Mormonism remains intense and distributed throughout the population.  

The Rasmussen poll shows more anti-Mormonism than either the recent Post or USA Today polls.  This is a function of the differences in the sample groups, as I mentioned the other day, but it is also happening because the way the Rasmussen poll is asked allows a maximum number of respondents to confirm their anti-Mormon sentiments.  Given the chance, likely voters (who are the only kind of poll respondents who really matter as far as elections are concerned) express profound resistance to the idea of a Mormon candidate.  Is that purely abstract and based in misinformation such that an actual Mormon candidate talking about what Mormons actually believe could reduce that resistance?  Possibly.  But the resistance is simply too high.  There isn’t enough time for Romney to win people over to both an acceptance of Mormonism as more or less normal and convince them that he is the right candidate for President, especially if he avoids the subject as often as he possibly can.    

USA Today asked if you would vote for a qualified person who “happened to be one of the following.”  This poll was, like the Post poll, a national sample of adults, rather than Rasmussen’s survey of likely voters.  The qualification that the candidate is qualified and that phrasing of “happened to be” probably improve the results across the board.  Only 24% said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon candidate, which is still nothing to sneeze at, but it is much more favourable to Romney than most other polls on this topic.  By saying “happened to be,” the pollster gives the impression that these things are well and truly incidental to the identity of this qualified candidate.  That will probably encourage people to ignore these factors in a hypothetical situation when they might, in reality, take them more seriously.  Indeed, the nature of these sorts of prejudices would be such that many of the respondents might think that there would never be a qualified [fill in the blank] candidate, because these people regard [fill in the blank] as inherently unqualified for the job.

Now that Romney has officially announced, I suppose he won’t turn around and go home now.  That really would be the better move for him, since not even the most stellar candidate could overcome the political obstacles he faces and he isn’t that great of a candidate anyway.

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