Angry More about Romney than his Mormon Faith
As Republican Mitt Romney struggles for political traction Super Tuesday, he may find a new Harris Interactive survey troubling.
The Internet survey of 2302 adults used a novel approach to try to determine what really bugs potential voters about the top candidates. Is it the candidate? Or is it race, gender or religion? Half the Republicans responding to the survey said the thought of Mitt Romney in the White House made them angry or upset. When asked to imagine an un-named Mormon as President, the anger and upset dropped to a third of the GOP respondents.
The survey was conducted January 15-22, long after Romney seemed to push the religion issue out of the campaign, at least as a regular focus of news stories. The coverage since Romney's December speech about faith has largely been about issues and strategy.
The Harris Interactive survey indicates that Romney's Mormon faith is still troubling to a significant share of Republicans. And it indicates an "additional amount of baggage ... in addition to his LDS faith," says Kelly Patterson, director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young University, a partner in the Harris survey.
Harris and CSED wanted to ask the religion question indirectly. There's a phenomenon in polling called "social desirability," in which respondents tend to give the socially desirable answer, rather than their real feelings. They tend not to say they wouldn't vote for a Mormon, or woman or African-American because, well, it's just not cool to say that.
So the Harris survey framed the question in terms of what would anger or upset the respondent. A Mormon in the White House? Mitt Romney in the White House? Harris considers the survey method experimental. And Internet surveys don't have the long history of reliability found with random telephone surveys.
The pollsters also asked about gender and Hillary Clinton and that's a wash. Thirty percent of those surveyed are angry or upset about the notion of Hillary Clinton in the White House. Slightly less have the same reaction to a woman as President. There's a bigger spread on questions related to race. Only 9 percent were upset and angry about an African-American in the oval office. But a third are ticked-off about the phrase "President Barack Obama."
Check out the study and its methods for yourself at:
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=864
-- Howard Berkes
10:17 AM ET | 02- 1-2008 | permalink
