Just a quick note…
In this weekend’s Nevada caucus, the first primary contest with a large percent of Mormon voters (26% of participants), Mitt Romney won handily by 50 percent of the total. But he strikingly won 90 percent of the Mormon vote.
During the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, African-Americans were criticized for blindly following Obama because of race. Similar charges are not being leveled, at least not to the same extent, against Mormon voters for Romney.
Humans are social animals and we all have reasons for hewing to identity and affinity groups, as well as calculations about whether and how supporting a particular candidate will affect us and our communities.
There is no question that anti-Mormon bias is going to be a factor among some Republican voters when it comes to Romney. But I’m also interested in whether and how the close hewing of Mormon voters to Romney as a candidate will be explored with the same persistence than the black vote for Obama did.
