Earlier this week, Carl Forti, the deputy campaign manager and political director of Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign, told an audience at the National Journal Insiders Conference that his former boss’ biggest disadvantage is his religion.
It was a blunt acknowledgment that the presumptive front-runner’s biggest disadvantage has to do with neither politics nor policy.
“It’s not something you can test,” said Forti. “It’s not something you can poll. There’s just a bias out there.” At the same event, Mark Mellman, a prominent Democratic pollster, agreed, saying the bias is the “last acceptable social prejudice.”
And in an interview The Daily Caller, one senior Republican senator agreed with the comments about Romney’s faith.
“I think Mitt Romney is good, but he has problems,” Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma told TheDC. “And it’s totally unfair, but the fact that he is a Mormon is probably five or six points against him.”
The fact that Romney’s religion might work against him is likely part of the reason he will be re-tooling his strategy and lowering expectations in Iowa – a state that is considered to be very socially conservative. But he’s not alone. A strategist aligned with Jon Huntsman, the current ambassador to China, potential presidential candidate and fellow Mormon, told TheDC earlier this week that any Huntsman campaign would largely stay away from the early-voting state.
While the strategist didn’t say religion was a factor in the decision, he did say “[…]We have a huge disadvantage when it comes to the infrastructure, money and time other candidates have spent in Iowa.”
In a recent CNN interview, Romney himself commented on the role his faith would play in a presidential elections, saying, “I can’t judge the politics…Most people in [this] country recognize that in fact the nation itself was founded on the principle of religious tolerance and freedom.”
“We respect other people’s beliefs and in a lot of cases, people who honor faith and try to be true to it,” Romney added.