POLL

18 Percent Won’t Support Mormon Candidate

Figure unchanged since 1967.

A new Gallup poll has found that bias against a Mormon presidential candidate has not changed in the past 45 years. 18 percent of Americans said that they would not vote for a well-qualified candidate who was also a Mormon. Gallup took the same poll in 1967, when Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, was seeking the GOP nomination. At the time, 17 percent of Americans said they would not vote for a well-qualified candidate who was also a Mormon. Gallup’s editor-in-chief wrote in a report, “The stability of resistance to a Mormon presidential candidate over the past 45 years is an anomaly … resistance to a candidate who is black, a woman, or Jewish has declined substantially over the same period of time.”