Some well-informed people — Rupert Murdoch among them — have suggested that Mitt Romney could exploit Obama’s increasingly fractious relationship with America’s Catholics to win the presidential elections in November. The so-called ‘Catholic vote’ is often said to be the crucial swing factor in American democracy.
Romney, however, may be facing a bigger socio-religious stumbling block than Obama’s: evangelicals. They don’t like him. Mainstream Protestant Republicans in the north have plumped for Mitt, generally speaking, but he has been far less successful in the evangelical south. ‘As a county’s evangelical population expands,’ says Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende, ‘Romney’s vote share declines.’
The obvious explanation is that southern Baptists and born-again Christians are hostile to Romney because he is a Mormon. But it is probably something broader: Romney is also a rich northerner who is notorious for contradicting himself on matters such as gay marriage — hardly a recipe for popularity within the Bible belt.
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