The Romney Effect: Will Mitt's beliefs hurt his chances to become president?

It seems like a preposterous idea.  There is no way that it can happen.  People don't care about religion anymore or lack their of it.  Right?  Evangelical Christians will happily support a Mormon for president, just like any other Republican.  However, every other past candidate has been a Christian.

In a recent poll conducted by Gallup, they asked respondents if they would vote for candidates of different religious backgrounds.  Atheists scored the lowest with 54% saying that would vote for that candidate, and this was closely followed by Muslims (58% would vote for this well qualified candidate) and being gay or lesbian (68%).  Included in this poll as a choice was also Mormon.  Of the responses, 80% said that they would vote for this candidate including 90% of the Republicans polled.  Now, this poll was published on June 21st of this year (2012), and the polling took place on June 7-10.  So, candidates knew that Romney was their guy.  This could have had some effect on these numbers, but it's hard to know.

Now, this possible bias could skew the results, but there's no way to be certain of this.  Generally, Gallup has excellent polls that are well organized and have been conducted for a long period of time.  The numbers have changed little since 1968.  All of this would suggest that being a Mormon will not hurt Mitt Romney's chances of becoming president, but, with Paul Ryan as his VP, it's also hard to believe that his campaign wasn't, at least, a little bit worried about this.

There is also a somewhat similar real life example of polls not matching up with the outcome due to prejudice.  The primary example is Tom Bradley who ran for governor of California in 1982.  According to the polls, he was ahead going into the election, and, then, he lost the election.  The thing is that Tom Bradley was African American, and this result led to the creation of the theory know as the Bradley Effect.  You see, when respondents were interviewed, they claimed that they were undecided or voting for Bradley due to social desirability bias (telling people what you think they want to hear to appear less prejudiced).  So, people could be saying these things because they feel like they're supposed to, but it may not be the case.  Now, in direct opposition to this idea is the last presidential election where Barack Obama won the election.  Will there be a Romney Effect?  Only time will tell.