"A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan"
This is why Mitt Romney will never be President:
"A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan," [televangelist Bill] Keller declared in his daily e-mail devotional last May. His reasoning went like this: Romney's election would serve as a giant advertisement for a competing religion, Mormonism, which Keller and others believe has falsely portrayed itself as another form of Christianity in an effort to find converts. "He would influence people to seek out the Mormon faith," Keller predicted of a Romney presidency. "They would get sucked into those lies and they would eventually die and go to hell."
Though Keller's rhetoric is extreme and his predictions are controversial, his biblical reasoning is mainstream for many of the nation's Christian evangelicals, who make up about 40 percent of the Republican Party. Large denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention have long considered Mormonism to be a cult, not a true path to salvation. National polling paints a stark picture of the problem. According to a recent Pew Center poll, 25 percent of Republicans say they are reluctant to vote for a candidate who is Mormon. Among white evangelicals who attend church weekly, 41 percent are reluctant to vote for a Mormon.
Almost two generations ago, the GOP decided to court evangelicals as a voting bloc, pandering to their typically dark, Hobbesian view of the world. The GOP manipulation of evangelical paranoia and sanctimony paid off handsomely, as long as the GOP candidate made at least a pretense of being one of them. To the vast majority of evangelicals in the US, however, no Mormon can ever pass their peculiar version of the snicker test. Since the GOP continues to insist on pandering to that crowd, 40 percent of their party will likely stay home instead of voting against the religious beliefs they've been convinced are the same as political convictions.
If Romney is the GOP nominee, the evangelicals will stay home in droves come November 2008, and it will be ample reward for the Republican Party's insistence on conflating religion and politics. This will be their just dessert for perverting the separation of church and state.
Karma's a bitch.