Interesting Stats from Nevada

An Interesting post from Crosstabs.org on the Exit polls out of Nevada.

“…Now onto the Mormon vote in Nevada. Most media outlets seemed to delight in repeating that Romney got 94% of the LDS vote in Nevada. It was repeated time and again as I watched the coverage live and many pundits said/inferred that this factor accounted for Romney’s win. Actually, if you subtracted out every single Mormon vote for Romney he still would have won by a double digit margin and had nearly double the votes of either of his next two competitors.

But others seemed to express dismay that one religious group would be so absolutely monolithic in it’s support. However, they fail to recognize that Dems NV Exit polling shows that 3% of those participating in the Democratic caucus were Mormons. I’m guessing NONE of them voted for Romney (sarcasm intended).With voting totals around 115,000 in the Dem race (I saw that number on Fox News) that would come out to approximately 3500 LDS voters NOT voting for Romney in the Dem caucus.

By contrast, 25% of the GOP caucus in NV that were Mormon with nearly 45,000 total GOP voters — therefore around 11250 LDS voters and 94% of them were for Romney . . . but that means nearly 500 were not.

So, 4000 LDS in Nevada voted “Not for Romney” and 10,750 voted for Romney. That breaks down to 73% LDS for Romney and 27% LDS that were not for Romney. Not quite the absolutely robotic block-voting groups that many media outlets are trying to play up, but, still, a solid base for Romney in the western/mountain states.

An interesting counter-argument about such huge LDS support for Mitt is that LDS have absolutely NO reservations about or aversion to Romney based on his religion, and can therefore view him outside of that context (while most non-LDS cannot) and therefore judge him solely on his record, experience, and issue stances. Romney surely hasn’t “pandered” to the LDS base like Huckabee has to his Evangelical base. Historically speaking, there was no huge LDS groundswell of support for Orrin Hatch in 2000, or Mo Udall back in the 70s. Similarly, Harry Reid is a guy that only a tiny fraction of LDS would ever consider voting for based on co-religiosity. In Romney most LDS are able to see, outside of the context of him having a “weird religion,” that he is an incredibly competent, faithful, successful, and articulate leader with a record of conservative governance and broad-based executive experience…”