LDS voters lukewarm about Huntsman and give low marks to Harry Reid.

By Peggy Fletcher Stack

| The Salt Lake Tribune

Almost all Mormon Republicans (94 percent) have a favorable view of their fellow believer, Mitt Romney, but so do a surprising 62 percent of LDS Democrats.

Shared religion doesn’t always trump partisan politics, though. Just ask Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Mormon Democrat from Nevada is viewed unfavorably by more than half of LDS registered voters and fails to crack 50 percent even among fellow party members of his faith.

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At a glance

Other Mormon findings

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Coming Saturday

The Tribune’s Faith section will include more results from Pew’s “Mormons in America” poll.

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These are among the findings in a sweeping poll released Thursday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life titled "Mormons in America: Certain of Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society."

"I was struck by the degree to which Mormons, on one hand, feel misunderstood in American society and discriminated against," said Greg Smith, chief PEW researcher on this project. "On the other hand, most Mormons told us the acceptance of Mormonism was on the rise."

Overall, 86 percent of LDS voters give positive marks to Romney, fresh from back-to-back victories in Iowa and New Hampshire GOP presidential contests, compared with 50 percent for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a fellow Mormon, 42 percent for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 25 percent for President Barack Obama and 22 percent for Reid.

Clinton and Obama scored well among Mormon Democrats, earning favorable ratings of 89 percent and 78 percent, respectively. But those two Democrats have won over very few Mormon Republicans. In fact, nearly 90 percent of them view the president unfavorably.

That’s not unexpected, given the right-leaning politics of most Latter-day Saints. The poll shows 66 percent call themselves conservative while only 8 percent say they are liberal. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) identify with or lean toward Republicans while 17 percent side with Democrats. Another 75 percent of Mormons would prefer smaller government and fewer services while fewer than half of all Americans share that view. And support for the tea party is higher among Latter-day Saints than among the public as a whole.

The survey, conducted Oct. 25 to Nov. 16 with 1,019 self-identified Mormons, has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

LDS Democrats likely see Romney as "a seminal figure for Mormonism in general, partisan politics aside," said David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and a Mormon who advised Pew on the poll. "He is a pathmaker for Mormons just like Obama was for blacks and Kennedy was for Catholics."

Romney has represented Mormons "reasonably well," said Brigham Young University political scientist Quin Monson. "Plus, he’s not extremely conservative, and Mormon Democrats — at least in Utah — are probably more conservative than Democrats overall."

The poll also reveals that, unlike the rest of the nation, Mormons between ages 18 and 50 are even more Republican than those over 50.

"I’ve seen this with my students," said BYU sociologist Marie Cornwall, another Pew adviser. "They are far more conservative than [students were] 10 to 15 years ago."

That may be because older Mormons had a more diverse political experience, with men such as Democrat Hugh B. Brown in the LDS First Presidency, according to Campbell. Today’s young people have grown up in a Mormon world that is "almost monolithically Republican."

That’s a cautionary vision for the Mormon future, Monson said. The fear that the faith will become completely aligned with the Republican Party "has the potential to be exacerbated when this older generation dies off."

"It’s not healthy to be a one-party church," Monson added. "[LDS] leaders have said as much."

The poll shows that only 10 percent of LDS respondents view the Republican Party as unfriendly toward Mormonism, while 30 percent see the Democratic Party that way.

"It shows we have our work cut out for us," Utah Democratic Chairman Jim Dabakis said. "It’s not really an LDS problem but a Democratic Party problem."