Why not just ask more general questions such as, "Are you such a narrow-minded, intolerant religious bigot that for that reason alone you'd gladly reject the best candidate and let the other party win?"
When polling voters about a narrow list of religious affiliations, the questions become more and more about actual rather than hypothetical candidates as elections approach. In the polls of 1960, for example, respondents inclined to vote Republican might have shown far more tolerance toward Catholics in general if the particular Catholic in question did not happen to be a Democrat.
A Fox News poll last December asked registered voters whether or not a candidate's particular religious affiliation would make them more or less likely to vote for that candidate. On the Mormon question, 54 percent said it didn't matter and 9 percent said it would make them more likely to vote for the candidate (there are 6 million LDS members in this country). What is really fascinating, however, is that 38 percent of Democrats said they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon, compared with just 32 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents.
In that same poll, 41 percent of Democrats also said they would be less likely to vote for a Muslim candidate, which (with a 3 percent margin of error) is statistically no different from the percentage disinclined to vote for a Mormon. Has anti-Mormon bigotry suddenly become politically correct among Democrats, or do Democrats being polled know the LDS candidate is a Republican?
In any case, they surely know, as Bruce Wilson put it in the Salt Lake City Tribune, that "the state of Utah, with its overwhelming Mormon majority, is the reddest state of all. Most Americans also recognize that nationally known Mormon politicians are almost universally conservative Republicans, like Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett. And, if they have Mormon friends and acquaintances, they have found most of them to be right of center on the political spectrum."
Suppose the Mormon presidential candidate in 2008 was Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, rather than Mitt Romney. Would pollsters still be telling us that 38 percent of Democrats are less likely to vote for a Mormon? And who, except the pollsters and press, could possibly be surprised if the answer changed? This is mostly about politics, not religion.
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