New York City, USA - A new study released by the Brookings Institution argues that Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion is unlikely to hurt him at the polls in November.
The researchers based the conclusion on an experiment in which people were asked whether they planned to vote for Mr. Romney or Mr. Obama. Some of the respondents were first given information about Mr. Romney’s religion – and in some cases, quite detailed information – while others were given none. Those who received the information first were no less likely to support Mr. Romney.
Such prompting is a common research method in social science, used both to convey information and to put it at the forefront of respondents’ minds.
“Our results should not be taken as definitive, particularly because they are not based on a nationally representative sample,” write the authors, Matthew M. Chingos of Brookings and Michael Henderson of the University of Mississippi. “But they do suggest that concerns over Mitt Romney’s ‘religion problem’ have been overblown.”
The paper begins by laying out the two competing stories about whether some voters would spurn Mr. Romney’s candidacy because he is Mormon (and the first Mormon to win a major-party presidential nomination).
On the one hand, the authors note that 22 percent of Americans said in a recent Gallup poll that they would not vote for a hypothetical Mormon candidate for president. By comparison, 10 percent or less of respondents said they would not vote for a Hispanic, Jewish, Baptist, Catholic, female or black candidate. Only a hypothetical gay candidate (32 percent) and a hypothetical atheist candidate (49 percent) fared worse than the Mormon candidate.
Another poll found that evangelical voters were especially likely to oppose a Mormon candidate, and Mr. Romney indeed fared poorly among evangelicals during the Republican primaries.
But the authors go on to say that none of these patterns are proof that voters will spurn Mr. Romney. Having objections to a hypothetical candidate, Mr. Chingos noted in an e-mail, is not the same as rejecting a specific candidate whom voters see as having views far closer to their own than an opposing candidate.
Mr. Chingos and Mr. Henderson say that the initial reluctance of evangelical voters to support Mr. Romney may simply reflect that they are more conservative than he is. Research has shown that such voters overwhelmingly support their party’s nominee in the end, the authors write.
To conduct their study, the researchers recruited 2,084 participants through Amazon.com, to fill out a computer survey. All respondents were asked a few basic questions about themselves and were then randomly given one of four different sets of information about Mr. Romney:
A: Mitt Romney is seeking the Republican nomination to run for president against Democrat Barack Obama this fall.
B: Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is seeking the Republican nomination to run for president against Democrat Barack Obama this fall.
C: Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is seeking the Republican nomination to run for president against Democrat Barack Obama this fall. The Mormon Church believes that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the Bible is the word of God.
D: Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is seeking the Republican nomination to run for president against Democrat Barack Obama this fall. In addition to accepting the Bible as the word of God, the Mormon Church also believes that the Book of Mormon is the word of God. The Mormon Church believes the Book of Mormon was written on golden plates by ancient inhabitants of America whom Jesus Christ visited shortly after his resurrection. The Church also believes that the book was later discovered in 1823 when Joseph Smith found it buried in upstate New York.
Finally, the survey asked people about their voting plans in November.
Among all participants, support for Mr. Romney did not vary significantly across the four groups. Among conservatives, support was actually higher among those who received information about Mormonism than among those in group A, who did not.
“Our experiment does not provide a definitive test, but one compelling idea is that Romney’s religion gives voters a clue about how the candidates differ ideologically,” the authors write. “It may be that associating Romney with a religious label itself prompts voters to think of the candidates in more ideological terms.”
When asked whether he thought the information about Mormonism might push survey participants toward Mr. Romney, because they did not want to seem prejudiced, Mr. Chingos acknowledged that possibility.
But he said the way in which the survey emphasized the aspects of Mormonism that differ from Christianity would instead seem likely to make some people pause, especially given the previous poll results showing many Americans’ hesitation about the religion.