The Case for Mormon Moderation
It seems Zvika Krieger was already at work on a profile of Utah Governor Jon Huntsman before he unexpectedly agreed to take the Ambassador to China job. His conclusions about that business—partly politically motivated on Obama’s part, but it works because Huntsman’s so well-qualified, and it works for Huntsman since he doesn’t think a moderate can win unless the GOP gets a thrashing first in 2012—are probably correct, but not all that new and interesting. What is interesting is this theory of why Huntsman started drifting into the reform camp in the first place:
Huntsman seems to have learned another lesson from the Romney campaign: A Mormon, no matter how conservative, cannot win amongst the right wing of the party–particularly evangelicals. Romney thought he could win their favor by becoming a drum-beating social conservative, underestimating the deep-rooted antipathy many evangelicals have toward Mormons. A recent Pew poll found that 39 percent of evangelicals hold negative views of Mormons–a sentiment Mike Huckabee used against Romney. Though RNC Chair Michael Steele was lambasted last week for saying “the base … rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism,” he wasn’t that far off: According to a study by John C. Green and Mark Silk, the size of the evangelical community was one of the best predictors of Romney’s success or failure in each state; without the evangelical vote, they argue, Romney probably would have won in four of the five southern states he lost. In light of Romney’s experience, the more likely base for Huntsman would have been the moderate wing of the party, which is less concerned with religion in general (and the LDS church specifically).
I’m not sure that Huntsman’s really hit on a “solution” to this problem. It seems to me that given evangelicals’ large numbers, the tendency, come what may, will be for an evangelical-friendly candidate to win. Which is to say, a Protestant Christian who favors banning abortion and is hostile to claims of gay and lesbian equality. Of course given the winner-take-all nature of most GOP presidential primaries, it’s always possible for an unlikely Republican candidate to prevail against a divided field. But a Mormon intrinsically has a steep hill to climb.
27 Responses to “The Case for Mormon Moderation”
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May 20th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
“Which is to say, a Protestant Christian who favors banning abortion and is hostile to claims of gay and lesbian equality.”
Ah yes, John McCain, the famous church-going abortion banner.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I suspect one reason for the antipathy of other religious leaders towards Mormonism is that Mormonism is a one-word proof of the falseness of religion.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Republican candidates for president only need that label. Reagan, for example, was not a churchgoer and didn’t give a damn about abortion one way or the other, but he wore that label happily, as did John McCain.
Interestingly, the only genuine article among recent Republicans was the elder Bush. The rest pretended to much more religious conviction than they held.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
I think that Romney ran a pretty awful campaign. He was a moderate Republican but he ran as a right winger, it was strange. I will say that Mormons as a group have very conservative views across the board, but are very skeptical of breaking down the church state barrier because that hasn’t worked out for them in the past.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Mormons may have a steep hill to climb, but it’s nothing the snow-capped mountain that an Atheist would face. Unless an Atheist runs against someone who has actually been convicted of molesting children, he’ll lose.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
“Of course given the winner-take-all nature of most GOP presidential primaries, it’s always possible for an unlikely Republican candidate to prevail against a divided field.”
Arguably, that’s what happened to John McCain.
I don’t know what percentage of Romney voters would have had Huckabee as their second choice, or the other way around; but if it were only 50%, Romney would have won New Hampshire. Less than 40% for him to take Florida. Conversely, 25% would have given South Carolina to Huckabee. And that’s just the among the pre-super-Tuesday states.
Plurality winner-takes-all is a horrible way to decide between more than two options, and that’s how the majority of delegates are selected (for the Republicans and for the Democrats).
Both parties should look into alternate methods. Myself (and this is what I blog about at leastevil.blogspot.com), I think score voting is the solution to these problems.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
This is like listening to a debate about the Sunni/Shiite divide; I can grasp it at an intellectual level, but it is intuitively alien to me. Sectarianism has always simultaneously fascinated and puzzled me; and I’m glad of it. It serves to remind me of that Anglo-American(i.e. US and Commonwealth vs. Euro-Laïcité) secularism is a great pillar of Liberty, as weak as it may have become in recent decades. This all may sound somewhat chauvinistic, and perhaps it is.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
@Brad #1.
Actually, McCain is a “church going abortion banner,” although he may not have a reputation as such. Did you actually read the post? McCain is a Protestant Christian who was boosted, along with Huckabee, because many Evangelicals simply won’t vote for a Mormon.
Most Evangelicals regard Mormonism as a dangerous, heretical cult, so this is hardly surprising. And many in the GOP base are convinced McCain did poorly because he wan’t wnough of a bible-thumping reactionary.
Good bet the 2012 nominee comes from the (non-Mormon) Religious Right or someone who endorses their anti-modern agenda without reservation.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Craig @4: “… Mormons[...] are very skeptical of breaking down the church state barrier because that hasn’t worked out for them in the past.”
It actually worked out quite well, when the state in question was Deseret or the Utah Territory. Once Utah became a state, not so much. Of course, one of the great problems with theocracy is that everyone who wants it, thinks that they’ll be the theocrat.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
As a Utahn, I’m here to tell you that theocracy is alive and well. The LDS Church holds a veto power over every act of the Utah legislature, without exception.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Ah yes, John McCain, the famous church-going abortion banner.
Ah yes, John McCain, who somehow became a Baptist on the campaign trail in South Carolina in spite of: a) having self-identified as an Episcopalian most of his political life; b) not having been baptized.
I think that makes Matt’s point for him. The problem that a Mormon candidate faces, as opposed to someone who hasn’t demonstrated much religiosity in the past (McCain, Bush) is that he can’t convincingly suck up to the Southern Baptists.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I think it’s a distinct possibility that Romney’s record of running for public office in Massachusetts as a Rockerfeller-type Republican was at least as big an obstacle to courting Southern evangelicals as his LDS affiliation.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
The odd thing is that if you think of the divisions in the Republican party simplistically as being between the pseudo-libertarians of the Mountain West and the religious right of the South, the Mormons may have a lot of social positions in line with the Southern branch, but a geographic affinity with the Westerners (and maybe more in common economically) to go along with the distrust the Southern Baptists have for Mormons.
Interesting stuff…
May 20th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
I do wonder whether a socially conservative evangelical who is liberal/progressive on economic issues could pull off a victory. With the evangelicals making up the bulk of the diehards in the GOP right now, it might be possible. Actually, in the 2008 election, I had nightmares of Clinton facing off against Huckabee, with Huckabee running to Clinton’s right on social issues, and to her left on economic issues. Still gives me the willies.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
“Plurality winner-takes-all is a horrible way to decide between more than two options, and that’s how the majority of delegates are selected (for the Republicans and for the Democrats).”
Winner-take-all primaries are banned in the Democratic Presidential system, and it’s astonishing anyone could not know that after last year.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I am actually under the impression that the number of winner-take-all primaries for the GOP has significantly decreased over time.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
[...] Huntsman Gets What Mitt Romney Never Got Forget the religious right. Stick with the [...]
May 20th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
This just shows how problematic it is to determine general rules from a single example. I mean, maybe evangelicals turn off of Rombet because he was Mormon, but maybe they didn’t like him because he was a transparent fraud, a social moderate from Mass. who only discovered social conservatism when he started running for President. It’s like when people make generalizations about women candidates based on what happened to Hillary Clinton when it’s not as if any of the next dozen or so women to run for President are going to be former First Ladies whose husband’s sex life was put under a microscope, you know.
And as for Romney winning four southern states if only evangelicals didn’t vote in Republican primaries, well, who do you expect to be voting in Republican primaries in the south?
May 20th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
In theory such a candidate would be formidable, especially in the U.S. political context, but in practice it never seems to work out. Williams Jennings Bryan? Pat Buchanon?!? Granted, we’ve almost never had a true economic progressive as U.S. President, so it may be hard to generalize.
Maybe I’m overoptimistic, but I just can’t see in 2012 and beyond the majority of the American electorate ever embracing in-your-face fundamentalism/evangelism in a Presidential candidate from one of the two parties. Even if they softpeddle it, like Huckabee, the acts of their followers will simply repel everyone else who is non-male, non-white or non-Christian.
From a religious right perspective (which I admit I do not share), they might be better served with a libertarian-oriented opposition party, as such a government, in theory, would not interfere as much in their domestic affairs. The trick is, of course, that they must also live by that bargain and not try to impose their religious values by public policy.
The likelihood of the RR’s leaders adopting this is unlikely, but the alternative is to empower an increasingly-secular Democratic national majority for the indefinite future. They’ll probably like that even less.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Joe C,
I’m certainly not part of the “Religious RIght” as a movement, as I’m on the Left on issues of economic, foreign policy, and the environment. But certainly, as a Christian who sympathizes with conservative points of view on issues like abortion and law-and-order, I’ve got to say that I can’t ever see myself voting for a libertarian leaning candidate for any office.
Libertarianism (or call it what it is, ‘classical liberalism’) is, I think, hostile to Christianity at a much deeper level than social democracy at its most secular or atheistic. A social democrat (or even a Marxist) can be hostile to religion on a conscious, intellectual level, but they do share with the Christian a conviction that there is such a thing as an absolute good to which societies and individuals should conform, something higher and more important than mere individual preferences, and that a decent society is one which tries to model itself after that ideal of the perfectly good society. Thus a Christian can argue with a social-democrat or even a Marxist about ends and means, because they share a certain basic conviction. The libertarian however, does not accept that any code of values is ultimately any better than any other, and does not believe that any individual should be required to conform to any preexisting moral code against their will, or that society should try to make men good as opposed to merely allowing them to be good if they choose. Its for this reason that I consider libertarianism not just flawed in some of its secondary premises (such as that there is no God) but flawed in its very primary foundations. Libertarianism is, I think, diabolic and demonic at the root, for it seeks to make the individual the ultimate controller of his own destiny and his own fate, which as St. Augustine puts it, is the very definition of original sin. Thus I’d much rather have a hard-core secular liberal in power than any sort of libertarianism.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:20 am
The weird thing about the Mitt Romney campaign is that his father ran in the Republican primaries for president in 1968 without Mormonism becoming an issue. And this was eight years after Catholicism was an electoral issue. Though no one seems to have found Nixon being raised as a Quaker odd.
As a thought experiment, if Harry Reid had run for president in the Democratic primaries, would Mormonism have been an issue then? I think the missing ingredient may be the presence of evangelical voters. It might be easier for a Mormon to run for president as a Democrat than as a Republican.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:49 am
Romney didn’t lose because Evangelicals don’t like Mormons.
He lost because his campaign played into a lot of negative stereotypes Evangelicals have about Mormons.
Evangelicals often have this idea that Mormons put on this shining face of family-values, upstanding morals, social conservativism, and all-around Christian goodness. But underneath it all, we’re really a bunch of brainwashed lying cultists who are trying to lure you away from the “real Jesus.” The stereotype is that Mormons will downplay their real theological differences in the hopes of misleading people into their church. The idea that we will do and say anything to get a convert.
Now, can anyone who was paying attention in 2007 and 2008 tell me how Romney played right into that stereotype?
Anyone?
May 21st, 2009 at 2:09 am
Hector — Libertarianism is evil because it sees people as worthy only insofar as they are “useful.” It claims to recognize the value of individuals, but all it really recognizes is their economic value. People are inherently valuable, and libertarianism rejects this.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:02 am
The weird thing about the Mitt Romney campaign is that his father ran in the Republican primaries for president in 1968 without Mormonism becoming an issue.
1968 was when there were still a fair number of Republican voters who considered themselves “moderate” or even “liberal” and before the Southern evangelicals became a major factor in Republican party.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:12 am
“As a thought experiment, if Harry Reid had run for president in the Democratic primaries, would Mormonism have been an issue then? I think the missing ingredient may be the presence of evangelical voters. It might be easier for a Mormon to run for president as a Democrat than as a Republican.”
I’m thinking that there’s actually a large block of evangelical Christians who vote in Democratic primaries.
I don’t have any idea if suspicion of Mormons is as big among black evangelicals as it is among white ones, though.
If Harry Reid had a serious chance of winning the Democratic primary, I think the left would collectively explode.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:59 am
It might be easier for a Mormon to run for president as a Democrat than as a Republican.
Romney himself must have attracted a substantial number of Democratic votes to win the governorship of Massachusetts. He might well have done better in ‘08 as a Democrat.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I think Huntsman’s star is also on the rise ( see here: http://www.newsy.com/videos/gop_soul_search) He has the conservative chops that have become all but an overtly spoken requirement for GOP politicians while taking more socially moderate views on some issues.