Washington, USA - Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith was supposed to haunt his campaign, hurt his efforts among evangelical voters and give enough pause to independents that his quest for the White House would be difficult, if not doomed.
But, in the end, concerns about his LDS religion barely surfaced in the general election and, in fact, Romney’s embrace of his leadership roles in the faith in the final months of the campaign may have boosted his effort.
"I think it was one of the most helpful things he said during any time of the campaign," says Bruce Gronbeck, a University of Iowa professor emeritus of political communication who now lives in Longmont, Colo. "That’s not to say [religion] was a primary issue, but it was an underlying base for his appeal to a broad range of the electorate."
The proof? Romney could be on track to gain more votes from evangelical Protestants than Sen. John McCain did in 2008 and on par with those won by President George W. Bush in 2004.
About 76 percent of white evangelical Protestants are leaning toward Romney, according to a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. McCain drew 73 percent of that vote last time around.
The numbers don’t surprise Mark DeMoss, a senior adviser to the Romney campaign who has been an unofficial outreach guru for evangelicals.
"I have spent much of the past six years talking to people — largely evangelical audiences — about the importance of looking for candidates who share my values, even if they don’t share my theology," DeMoss told The Salt Lake Tribune. "While many people still, apparently, look for candidates of common faith ... during the presidential primaries, most seem to be comfortable aligning with the candidate who best reflects and represents their values in the general election."
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Utahns’ view » In Utah, where the populace is much more sensitive to the impacts Romney’s faith has on the election, a new Tribune poll shows that LDS voters polled are split on whether Romney’s faith was a good or bad thing for his bid. Thirty-one percent say it was a positive, 33 percent saw it as negative and 32 percent believe it had no effect.
There was no such split among Utahns who said they weren’t Mormon, with 39 percent pegging Romney’s faith as a positive for his bid and 9 percent suggesting it was a negative.