Wonder why you're seeing all this advertising about Mormons?
“I’ll never forget this one woman,’’ said Stephen B. Allen, managing director of the church’s missionary program. When participants were asked how they would feel about doing community service with Mormons, “She said’’ — Allen adopted a stage whisper — “if you are serving alongside them, you can ask them the questions you always wanted to ask.’’
The result of the research was the “I’m a Mormon’’ ad campaign, a major rebranding effort.
The effort overlaps with a political campaign that, for the first time, includes two Mormons who are presidential contenders — former governors Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who is in the race, and Jon Huntsman of Utah, who plans to announce his candidacy tomorrow.
Gallup puts an exclamation point on it:
Though the vast majority of Americans say they would vote for their party's nominee for president in 2012 if that person happens to be a Mormon, 22% say they would not, a figure largely unchanged since 1967.
As the
Boston Globe story notes,
Both [Huntsman and Romney] will have to over come the same unease about Mormons the ads seek to diminish. At the same time, pop-culture forces like “The Book of Mormon,’’ an irreverent Broadway musical hit about of two naive Mormon missionaries who are sent from Utah to Uganda to proselytize, have driven public interest in Mormonism to new heights.
Timing is everything, except when it's location. Here's the bottom line forom Gallup:
Americans' reluctance to support a Mormon for president has held close to the 20% level since Gallup first measured this in 1967, and long after historical biases against voting for blacks, Catholics, Jews, and women have dwindled.
Currently, 18% of Republicans say they would not vote for their party's nominee if that person happened to be Mormon. This may be less troubling for Romney in the GOP primaries, where the vote could be highly fractured anyway, than in the general election, where -- should he win the Republican nomination -- he would need nearly complete support from Republicans to be competitive with President Obama. However, Kennedy's success in overcoming a similar challenge in 1960 relating to his Catholic faith may give hope to Romney and his supporters about his electability in 2012.
In any case, keep in mind that those ads are no coincidence. Romney (and Huntsman) still have a problem in the general.