BOSTON (Reuters) – Republican Mitt Romney has remade himself in a second run for president, with a leaner campaign apparatus and a message focused with laser-like precision on the nation’s economic problems.
But the “Mormon question” still remains for the former Massachusetts governor: are Americans ready to put a Mormon in the White House?
Surveys suggest American voters are more accepting of the idea now than when Romney staged his first presidential run in 2008. But at the margins, many remain suspicious of Mormons.
A Quinnipiac University poll this week found voters less comfortable with the idea of a Mormon president than having a leader of any religion other than a Muslim, or an atheist.
“The fact that less than half of voters have a favorable view of the religion is likely to be a political issue that Governor Romney … will have to deal with,” said Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Connecticut.
Romney has closer ties to Mormonism than other Mormons in U.S. politics, such as Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and Jon Huntsman, his possible Republican rival for the party’s presidential nomination.
A fifth-generation member of the faith whose forebears were involved in the religion from the mid-1850s, Romney is
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