Ned Barnett
Mitt Romney scored big in Nevada, and - especially in light of his trifecta loss in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado - it is perhaps important to look at the Nevada Mormon Connection. In Nevada's caucus, according to exit polls, roughly 70 percent of Romney's voters were Mormons. That was commented on, but largely ignored by the media - which may be gun-shy about mentioning religious affiliation as a factor in voting - instead, the media focused on how Romney dominated the votes of "very conservative" and "Tea Party" Nevadans.
Now here’s something that’s REALLY overlooked - Mormons in Nevada are, by and large, Very Conservative, and a great many of Nevada's Tea Party members are also Mormons. In 2010, I served both the Clark County (Las Vegas) Republican Party and the Nevada Republican Party as Communications Director, and also counted as my client two Nevada-based subsidiaries of the Tea Party Express - and in those roles, I was able to see that a significant portion of the "very conservative" and "Tea Party" Nevadans were also Mormons. There being nothing unusual in being a Mormon in Nevada, this was not kept hidden or swept under the table.
However, the national political media is - as noted - either gun-shy about focusing on the religious preference of voters (especially members of a controversial religion, such as the LDS), or they just didn't make the connection. But the connection is there. The research firms who conducted the exit polls know this, but chose not to share the second-tier correlations between religious affiliation and their status as "very conservative" or "Tea Party." But the information is there for anyone who cares to look into it.
Absent the exit polling data, we can look to the Tea Party revolt of 2010 that forced out "mainstream conservative" Republican Senator Bob Bennett in a hotly-contested primary. He was pushed out by Tea Party/Very Conservative Utah Republicans ... and this being Utah, there was no way that this movement could NOT have been constituted of Mormon Tea Party/Very Conservative voters.
The exit pollers have the background numbers and could easily run the cross-correlations, but since they’re not looking for a “Mormon” story, they didn’t say that X percent of the voters were Mormon, and Y percent of the Mormons were Very Conservative, and Z percent of the Mormons were Tea Partiers - and they also didn't say that these Mormons voted for Romney the way African Americans voted for Obama in 2008.
Nevada's Very Conservative/Tea Party Mormons are not to be confused with Borg drones - they can and do think for themselves, but having lived their lives as a member of a minority religion, when it comes to supporting their own, they tend to vote in a very lock-step fashion.
Which all goes to explain why Romney did so well in the Middle-American Nevada on Saturday, then lost big in three other Middle-American/Flyover states, none of which has an electorally-significant Mormon population. At 6 percent - Romney's loss in Colorado was the closest to a win - and as Fox News pointed out in its late-night coverage of Colorado's caucus, Colorado has a far higher Mormon population - as a percentage of the total electorate - than does Minnesota or Missouri. Which, I believe, is a hidden-but-important factor in understanding why Nevada didn't effectively predict other states with otherwise similar electorates.
