POLITICAL MEMO:

Romney visit rallies more than GOP base

Area’s Mormons could be the difference in tight race for Nevada’s votes

Sun, Oct 5, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Republican Governors Association

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney visited Boulder City last week to rally the Republican base for Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jon Porter. His visit also served to excite another group that could prove critical to Republican fortunes in November: Mormons.

Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stirred a national conversation about his faith during the primary season and excited Mormons who savored the prospect of seeing one of their own elected president.

The effect was felt deeply in Nevada.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 11 percent of Nevadans are Mormon, compared with 2 percent of Americans nationally. Mormons made up more than a quarter of Republican caucusgoers here and they voted overwhelmingly for Romney. (He got 95 percent of the Mormon vote.) In what is expected to be a tight race, winning those voters’ support could be critical for McCain.

History is on McCain’s side. About 85 percent of Mormons have favored the Republican candidate in past presidential elections, said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum who studies religion and politics. “It may be a stereotype that Mormons are Republican, but it’s a true stereotype,” he said.

Mormons, he said, agree with Republicans on social issues, such as opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and the party’s principles of free market economics and limited government.

That wasn’t always the case. As Richard and Joan Ostling write in “Mormon America,” in the 1890s, after the church dissolved its own political party, members were encouraged to choose between the two major parties and felt more affinity with Democrats because Republicans had led a war on polygamy and thrown up roadblocks to Utah’s statehood. Over time, most Mormons found a home with Republicans.

Politics, however, is not preached from the pulpit, experts said. Church leaders have gone to great lengths to emphasize the neutrality of the church, issuing a letter before each election to be read aloud to congregations. The church does not endorse candidates.

This year’s letter, issued late last month, urges members to vote and “actively support those you believe will most nearly carry out your ideas of good government.” Also noted: “Principles compatible with the gospel may be found in various political parties.”

If fact, Mormons are considerably less political in church than their Catholic and Baptist counterparts, according to research conducted by Quin Monson, a political scientist at Brigham Young University. “You could count the number of Mormon survey respondents who admitted to political discussion in church on one hand,” he said.

The church does instill a strong sense of civic responsibility and encourages its members to run for public office, though. Among its most prominent members in Southern Nevada is Rory Reid, chairman of the Clark County Commission.

“There’s a real effort to keep politics separate,” he said. “It’s just not appropriate to talk about it in church meetings.”

Reaching the community, then, means tapping individual Mormons’ social networks, Monson said. Congregation leaders, he said, are strongly discouraged from using church membership lists for political purposes.

But this isn’t to say the Mormon leadership doesn’t get involved in issues it considers relevant to its teachings. In 2006, for instance, the church joined with other faiths in asking Congress for a marriage amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and in California it is campaigning against a gay-marriage ballot measure.

Discussion: 4 comments so far…

By coltakashi

10/6/08 at 9:23 a.m.

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The article skips over a lot of history. For most of the 20th century, the two major parties were well balanced in Utah politics, alternating dominance of the legislature, of statewide offices like the governor, the single Representative, and the two Senate seats. However, when the national Democratic Party was radicalized by the left wing in the 1972 elections, embraced abortion, and attacked the armed forces, taking positions opposing the views of many religious people around the USA, not just Mormons, the Democrats lost their natural majority and became a permanent minority party in states like Utah and Idaho and the South, which had been dominated by the Democratic Party for a century. The Democratic Party wins national elections for president by downplaying its left wing policies (as Clinton did). The Democrat left wing sees itself as on a holy war to transform America, which is always seen as imperfect and flawed in its fundamental moral values, which do not embrace gay marriage, unlimited abortion, or unlimited tolerance for people like Osama bin Laden and Fidel Castro who also hate America. They know they cannot achieve the changes they seek through persuasion of the majority of Americans, so they seek to accomplish it by misdirection, by executive orders, and by packing courts with left wingers like themselves who believe it is more important that the law be "politically correct" than that it reflect the judgment of the majority. It is an anti-democratic, elitist program.
By Michaelson

10/6/08 at 11:13 a.m.

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Just for the public's information:

This Mormon doesn't vote for Mormons BECAUSE they are Mormon! (That would be bigotry.)

Fact is, though I'd have to agree that Romney was the best qualified person running this year (to deal with the economic mess we're in now), I didn't like anyone that ran this year terribly much, and frankly, I don't like McCain or Obama- Obama is an inexperienced, sweet-talking, ignorant child and McCain is a self-absorbed, power-hungry, war-mongering joke.

America, can we forget race, gender, and religion, and vote based on qualifications? If we cannot do this, we deserve what will happen to us in short order with someone at our helm who hasn't a clue...
By BillKeshlear

10/6/08 at 12:47 p.m.

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There are solid indications that many Mormons who normally vote Republican will simply stay at home on Election Day. McCain is a Westerner, but not a brand of Westerner many Mormons would typically embrace.

Although he represents a Western state and he's a Republican, McCain does not share LDS values. Mitt Romney is not a gambler. He would never have offered up Ann as someone who should maybe enter a beauty pageant/striptease show at a biker fest in Sturgis, S.D., and would never leave her for an adulterous relationship with a rich heiress 17 years younger than himself.
By kurt

10/6/08 at 10:51 p.m.

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Most Mormons I know are sitting this election out or voting for Libertarian Bob Barr. They say Obama is a left wing socialist. They are ticked at McCain for doing nothing to stop gay marriage and for not talking about Teri Schaivo in the campaign. (The girl that was allegedly brain dead.) My Mormon friend at work still remembers McCains mom questioning the integrity of the Mormon Olympics held in Salt Lake City in 2002. Also she told me that McCain made a mistake in the Iowa election by not firing a Minister who claimed Mormons fund the radical group Hamas.