Entries for April 04, 2007

You hear a lot more about Mormonism in this presidential cycle than I recall hearing when Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, ran for president 40 years ago. This morning the Washington Post ran a story on Romney's Mormon support, making the point that much of the $20 million plus he raised in the first quarter came from members of (to give its full name) the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It starts off with a Romney fundraiser in Idaho, the state with the second-largest percentage of LDS members and includes for your inspection a nice map (unfortunately I don't find it in the online version) showing counties with 25 percent or more Mormons in red, those with 5 to 24.5 percent in yellow, those with 1 to 4.9 percent in gray, and others left white. Utah is–no surprise–all red, and so is eastern Idaho; there are red counties as well in Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, and the sand hills of Nebraska (a lot of counties there have less than 1,000 people; maybe some Mormon missionary converted half the town). The Post story seems to me pretty fair-minded.