Why Voters Don’t Care About Mitt Romney’s Mormonism

Back in the early spring, polls showed evangelical Christians preferred Rick Santorum in certain states during the Republican presidential primary. There was much hullabaloo about evangelical leaders meeting to try to avoid a Romney nomination, and attention-loving Robert Jeffress, the pastor of Dallas’s gigantic First Baptist Church, made a star turn as the attacker of Romney’s Mormonism. This hostility led to much media discussion of Romney’s “evangelical problem”—the supposed challenge the candidate faced in getting religious members of the GOP base on board.

Now we have proof that was another one of this election year’s cycles of baseless hype. A new Pew survey released Thursday found that eight in 10 voters either are either completely “comfortable” with Romney being a Mormon or simply don’t care. White evangelicals are slightly more skeptical, but the poll found that it made no difference in how ardently they support Romney.

This is exactly what always happens, despite how the media treat the evangelical dance with the GOP as more than the charade it is. To be sure, conservative Christian leaders would always love a more visibly on-fire believer like Rick Santorum. But as a few commentators were sharp enough to realize back in the spring, there was never any doubt that evangelicals, one of the GOP’s most committed demographics, would turn out to support whomever the party nominates. They see it as their duty to vote, and virtually any Republican candidate is better than the socialist Muslim that some of them believe President Obama to be.
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