{"id":5,"date":"2010-06-03T14:50:23","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T14:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/reids-mormon-support.html"},"modified":"2010-06-03T14:50:23","modified_gmt":"2010-06-03T14:50:23","slug":"reids-mormon-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/reids-mormon-support.html","title":{"rendered":"Reid’s Mormon Support"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Reid.jpg\"<\/span>For months and months, Harry Reid seemed about as likely to be reelected to the Senate as the Orioles are to win the American League East. But a new poll<\/a> now shows him leading all three of his main Republican rivals. What gives?<\/p>\n

As the folks over at TPM point out<\/a>, the GOP candidates have done an excellent job of knocking each other down. But there may be a bit of a hidden religious factor at work as well. At the Mormon History Association meetings in Kansas City last weekend, the word was that the leadership of the LDS Church was putting out quiet signals that it would be a good thing if Reid retained his seat. No Mormon has ever held a higher position of authority, and even if virtually all of the church’s general authorities<\/a> (as they’re called) are Republicans, keeping a Mormon Democrat as Senate Majority Leader is preferable to having him replaced with a first-term Republican.<\/p>\n

None of the three leading Republicans are Mormons, and though a latecomer to the field, Chad Christensen, has been playing the LDS card<\/a> for all it’s worth, he’s not given much of a chance. Anecdotally, Reid–who is an active and enthusiastic member of the church–seems to enjoy considerable LDS support. <\/p>\n

How much of a difference does the LDS vote make in the Silver State? According
\nto the 2008 Trinity ARIS, Mormons constitute only 5.2 percent of the population. (Thanks to emigration from
\nCalifornia, that’s down from 9 percent a decade ago.)
\nStill, in a close election, a few percentage points matter, and turnout among Mormons is always high.  <\/p>\n

Mitt Romney scored a huge and unexpected victory In the January 2008 Republican
\ncaucuses<\/a>, racking up over 50 percent of the vote to Ron Paul’s 14 percent and John McCain’s 13 percent. Later that year, Obama beat John McCain handily, 55-43. With the quiet blessing of Salt Lake City, I wouldn’t count Harry Reid out this year.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For months and months, Harry Reid seemed about as likely to be reelected to the Senate as the Orioles are to win the American League East. But a new poll now shows him leading all three of his main Republican rivals. What gives? As the folks over at TPM point out, the GOP candidates have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nReid's Mormon Support - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/reids-mormon-support.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reid's Mormon Support - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For months and months, Harry Reid seemed about as likely to be reelected to the Senate as the Orioles are to win the American League East. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}