What if Romney was a mainstream Christian?

Would the voters that would care about that issue rather vote for Obama or stay home in large enough numbers that he would have won?
 
Would the voters that would care about that issue rather vote for Obama or stay home in large enough numbers that he would have won?

Very few people cared. The vast majority of the time I heard of this "issue" was by liberals who were operating from their negative image of conservative voters.

This POD would have very little impact.

Although, now that I think of it, might have made a difference in his ability to draw people away from Huckelbee back in 2008.
 
There were people that didn't vote for him because of that. would it changed the outcome of the election maybe in a few states but he still wouldn't have won
 
I'm not so sure. I have some very conservative and Evangelical relatives in the Deep South and Florida. Several of them didn't vote in the last election because they couldn't bring themselves to vote for either candidate, and Romney's religion was reason they most often mentioned.

Admittedly, this is anecdotal evidence, and Romney won most of the South by wide margins, but if otherwise conservative and Republican voters were staying home it could have an impact, particularly in Florida and in down-ticket races across the country. We probably still wouldn't have President Mitt, but we could see a stronger Republican House or a more evenly divided Senate.
 
Romney loses Utah if he converted from LDS to mainstream Christianity, as ex-Mormons are seen very negatively by Mormons, they are viewed as evil apostates.
 

d32123

Banned
Romney loses Utah if he converted from LDS to mainstream Christianity, as ex-Mormons are seen very negatively by Mormons, they are viewed as evil apostates.

I don't think ANYTHING could get Utah to go for Obama, not even that, tbh.
 
Romney loses Utah if he converted from LDS to mainstream Christianity, as ex-Mormons are seen very negatively by Mormons, they are viewed as evil apostates.

What if, however, Romney was a Christian by birth? Although, since this would require a POD many years back in his family, butterflies and such.
 
What if, however, Romney was a Christian by birth? Although, since this would require a POD many years back in his family, butterflies and such.

Well if it was George Romney who converted to Christianity, then changing his life in a significant way would have butterflies on 1960s politics.

For Mitt Romney to have no Mormon ancestors but to still exist and be similar to the man he is OTL is virtually ASB.
 
I don't think that Romney would lose Utah although he vould be mainstream Christian. They couldn't ever vote Obama and hardly anybody else democrat too.
 
Romney had the institutional support of the Christian right in this election; remember Billy Graham scrubbing "Mormonism is a cult" from his website? I literally cannot find a significant Christian conservative voice headed into the election who was arguing that voters should stay home rather than vote for Romney (and obviously, none of these people were endorsing Obama). That's not to say that, if you dig deep enough in the bowels of right-wing-nuttery, you won't find the occasional oddball in the Deep South who refused to vote for Romney; I'm sure those people exist. But from a systematic perspective, Romney's Mormonism wasn't a factor at all.

There's also no evidence that Romney's Mormonism was a drag on downballot races; the closest Senate race, for example, was Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, and she obviously ran well ahead of Obama in her state. Ditto Jon Tester in Montana.

So the answer to the question is: absolutely nothing. That fits, by the way, with the evidence producing by polling aggregator sites such as the Princeton Election Consortium and 538, which showed a remarkably stable race for all of 2012. In fact, back in August, Michael Tomasky noticed that the 538 histogram was calling 332 EV -- the exact result of the election -- as the single most likely distribution of electoral votes. Here's what he said:

Most outcomes, in a range running from 150 EV’s up to 400, rate around a 2 percent chance of Obama receiving that number. The highest spike on the chart? It’s at around 330 EV’s, which [Nate] Silver [of fivethirtyeight.com] reckons Obama has a 14 percent chance of hitting. Now, most political journalists would chuckle derisively at the idea that Obama is going to carry home 330 EV’s. Deride away. And while you do, bear in mind that Silver called 50 out of 51 states last time (counting D.C.; he missed only Indiana) and every single Senate race.

...

An extremely close election that on election night itself stands a surprisingly good chance of being not that close at all.

That's the first week of August, before either party's convention, before the bulk of the ads ran, before -- well, most of the campaign, really. And 538 had been running that histogram since the primaries; Tomasky just noticed in August.

The numbers suggest that -- notwithstanding the second-guessing and finger-pointing that inevitably surrounds a losing candidate -- Mitt Romney was a pretty good candidate who ran about as good a campaign as could have been run in 2012. He certainly produced the campaign's most dynamic moment, statistically speaking, after the first debate.

Had Romney drastically underperformed the statistical fundamentals; if, say, Obama had won not only North Carolina, but the Omaha congressional district as well, and had states like Arizona, Georgia, and Montana gone down to the wire -- then it might be worth asking 'what went wrong?' and wondering if something like anti-Mormon bias was in effect. But the data suggest that simply wasn't the case.
 
Top