From Deseret News archives:
Mormon Media Observer: Mitt's curtain call
The media�s conventional wisdom is this: Romney and members of the LDS Church did not understand how deeply rooted anti-Mormonism is, and that was the death knell for the Romney campaign.
Here�s a sampling of news and opinion:
A lengthy Wall Street Journal analysis had this as its lead paragraph: "Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency brought more attention to the Mormon Church than it has had in years. What the church discovered was not heartening."
It goes on to quote Democratic pollster Peter Hart. The LDS faith "was the silent factor in a lot of the decision making by evangelicals and others," Hart said, adding that the Romney campaign ran into "a religious bias head wind."
New Republic columnist Peter Keating put it this way in a column: "But Romney probably wasn't going to earn those ballots (in southern states) anyway. Southern states have GOP primary electorates dominated by evangelical Christians, specifically by Southern Baptists. And many of those Southern Baptists are committed to blocking the ascension of a Mormon to the presidency.
"For the conservative pundits backing Romney who missed this story, ideology trumps theology. But for many evangelicals, it's the other way around. Southern Baptists and Mormons are not only two of the four largest religious denominations in the country, they are the most aggressive of American missionary faiths, and have been on a collision course for generations."
Keating claims the bias in the south has to do largely with the Southern Baptism anti-Mormon campaign bolstered since the 1980s.
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