Poll Asks About Religion, Political Movements
If their political views agreed, 53% of voters surveyed in a University of Texas-Texas Tribune Poll would support a candidate of the Mormon faith. Photo by Ben Philpott for KUT NewsAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
John F. Kennedy had to answer questions about his religion in 1960. So did Barack Obama in 2008. In 2012, the GOP primary field has two Mormons running, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. The University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll took Texas voters’ temperature on this topic. KUT’s Ian Crawford spoke with Ross Ramsey, executive editor of the Tribune, about whether Texans would vote for a Mormon candidate.
We didn’t ask voters straight up, would you vote for a Mormon; what we instead asked them was, do you think most of the people you know would vote for a Mormon presidential candidate if they agreed with him or her on the issues? Fifty-three percent said yes; 23 percent said no, even if they agreed with him they wouldn’t vote for him; and another 25 percent said, don’t know; they didn’t register an opinion on this.
So obviously it’s an issue; if the voters are split on it, it remains a question as we go forward in this primary.
Ramsey also discussed how Texans feel about upstart groups such as the tea party and Occupy Wall Street.
We’ve done something in our polls for a while that is kind of interesting: We say, are you a Republican or a Democrat, and we get a split. Then we say, “If the tea party were its own party, how would you go there?” And what you get is that 20 percent say they’d be Republicans, 33 percent would be Democrats, 24 percent would be tea party candidates, and another 24 percent don’t identify themselves.
You can hear the interview by clicking the audio player above.
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