Saturday, January 19, 2008

The Mormon Vote and the Evangelical Vote   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

John Podhoretz, noting that Romney appears to have won 94 percent of Mormons in Nevada, comments: "(Forget Mike Huckabee’s claim on evangelicals; a number like that suggests Romney is this year’s unqualified king of identity politics.)"

It is, as far as it goes, a good point. I myself never held Huckabee's appeal to his fellow evangelicals against him. The trouble with the way he has campaigned, as far as I'm concerned, is that it means that he will have a very low ceiling to his support from non-evangelicals. Huckabee ran behind Ron Paul in New Hampshire and Michigan among voters who didn't share his religion. Romney has shown that he can do just fine among non-Mormons, who were a negligible percentage of the vote in the other states where he has placed first or second. (Again, I'm not really disagreeing with Podhoretz here, so much as using his comment as a launching-off point.)

01/19 04:54 PMShare