Sure, I'll grant you all that. But what you're not demonstrating is cause and effect. I'm not sure you're wrong, but I'm not sure you're right, either. You haven't demonstrated that Mormons won't vote for non-Mormon candidates.
All I'm saying is that empirically you have to be Mormon to win the major state-wide elections. It's possible this is a case of correlation rather than causation. But without doing huge amounts of research and study, it certainly is easy to explain via causation.
Go adjust that for the incumbent victory % and your whole argument will fall on its face. We've really had only two Senate elections in 25 years. Bob Bennett was in from 1993 until 2010. Hatch has been in since nineteen seventy ****ing seven. It's extremely hard to overthrow any incumbent in Utah. They really have to screw up.
Of course, all the incumbents for Governor and Senator have been LDS so it is literally impossible to do a comparative study.
The guy Hatch replaced beat out the BYU president for his second term. If anything, Utah turned down the more staunch LDS candidate.
Which is hardly the same comparison as LDS/not-LDS. If the issue in Utah sometimes comes down to "who is more/less LDS" then that speaks volumes in and of itself.
I'm throwing out everything up until 1950 as well. Utah gained statehood around the turn of the century. No **** they were voting in Mormons back then.
Actually empirically there was more reglious diversity prior to 1960. J. Bracken Lee was non-Mormon and governor from 1949-57. George Dern was a Congregationist and served from 1925-1933. And from 1917-1921 Utah even had one of the first Jewish politicians ever elected governor. If we go back that far, Utah even had Catholic Senators.
But here's the thing, you're willing to spot that they were voting in Mormons previously (when it's less true) and resist that's the case now (when there aren't counter-examples). That seems to smack of a particular bias as to what the state was and is.
Your little statistic is nothing without context. You're building an argument on your own biases. Why don't you poll Utah Catholics and see how they vote (hint: they tend to be more conservative than Utah LDS, and strongly favor the conservative "LDS" candidates).
**Edit** Mormons are a highly charged when it comes to politics. That's another adjustment you'll need to make to give your statistic at least a little credibility.
**Edit** Tomorrow I'll ask a staunch republican who is very involved in Utah politics about past primary challengers to see if there have been serious any non-LDS challengers.
It's not a real study. It was a specific response to the "coincidence" hypothesis proposed by Stickler designed to show that mere chance is an unlikely explanation.
Franklin, let's put it this way: I'll be movable on this issue when Utah actually elects a non-Mormon to one of these offices. Until then the evidence all goes one direction and we're just goofing around in the sandbox trying not to see something that's obvious.
at any rate kicky, the bottom line is that your posts indicate a sense that because this message board is based in a city and state that is dominated by the LDS church, those who post here should have opinions that align with the opinions of the LDS church.
No, merely that hating on Alabama on this particular issue is not a place where people from Utah have a particularly strong vantage point from which to shoot arrows.
I'm not sure where you're going with your comments.
Mo, I could copy and paste this response for 80-90% of your posts. Considering you've already spotted that the state is "dominated by the LDS church" then obviously you're already among the converted.
What a waste of a career.
