house race

Lummis Woos Wyoming Mormons

By Tom Rea, Wyofile.com, 10-22-08

Republican congressional candidate Cynthia Lummis, a devout Lutheran, said that when she was growing up in Cheyenne many of her closest friends were Mormons, and during her college years she twice considered converting, taking all the introductory lessons for membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Locked in a tight race with Jackson Hole Democrat Gary Trauner for Wyoming’s sole US House seat, Lummis is hoping Wyoming’s Mormon population—constituting at least one in ten voters—will put her over the top against a formidable opponent.

In September, Lummis got a boost when former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Mormon who won his party’s Wyoming caucus, endorsed her. Many former Romney activists, LDS and non-LDS alike, now toil in her campaign. Coupled with Trauner’s admittedly poor showing in strongly Mormon areas of the state during his 2006 bid for the seat against Barbara Cubin, LDS support might seem to give Lummis an edge.

A poll released Sunday by the Casper Star-Tribune rates the Lummis-Trauner contest a dead heat, with Trauner at 43 percent and Lummis at 42 percent, and 9 percent undecided. An earlier poll, reported Oct. 13 by WyoFile, showed the race at 42-42, with 16 percent undecided.

But Wyoming Mormon leaders caution that the LDS vote, although generally Republican and conservative, is by no means monolithic. There’s a strong, if minority, tradition in Wyoming of Mormon Democrats, they say.

And the church itself directs its bishops every election season to read statements from the pulpit making clear that the church hierarchy never endorses candidates, and members are free to vote their consciences.

In his failed presidential bid, Romney initially tried to keep religion out of the campaign, noting the U.S. Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office. But continued questions about his faith and the role it would play in his administration caused him to face the issue directly. He gave a national speech about his religion early in December 2007, just weeks before the Iowa, Wyoming, and New Hampshire caucuses and primary.

Still, many analysts believe his campaign may have foundered precisely because he was Mormon. An early poll showed 25 percent of Republican voters nationwide would be unlikely to vote for a Mormon.

Despite outspending his opponents, Romney came in second in New Hampshire behind John McCain, and second in Iowa behind Arkansas Gov. and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee. Romney also fared poorly in primaries across the South. In both Iowa and the South, evangelical Christians make up a substantial part of the Republican vote.

But Romney did well in the West, winning primaries and caucuses in Alaska, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah—reddest of all the red states and also the most Mormon—where he got 90 percent of the GOP vote.

Many of the volunteers who boosted Romney to his January victory in Wyoming’s Republican caucuses have been working with Lummis for six months or more, she said last week. And they bring with them a grassroots expertise that has proven extremely valuable, she said.

She called her ex-Romney volunteers ‘a very mixed group of LDS and non-LDS folks.”

They’re drawn to her campaign not so much for religious reasons as for her politics, which she said appeal to people who consider themselves fiscal and social conservatives.

Lummis’ opponent, Gary Trauner, said his campaign isn’t doing much specifically to court Mormons, and admits that in 2006 he got few votes in strongly Mormon parts of the state—Star Valley and the northern Bighorn Basin, for example. Still, he’s been campaigning there consistently; he was in the Bighorn Basin late last week.

Romney won 8 of the 12 available GOP delegates at the Wyoming GOP caucuses January 5. His campaign in Wyoming was run by Alexa Andrews and her father Coleman Andrews, and by Matt Micheli.

Micheli is a Cheyenne lawyer for the firm of Holland and Hart. He’s LDS and son of former state Agriculture Director and longtime legislator Ron Micheli, of Wyoming’s heavily Mormon Bridger Valley. Coleman Andrews is Romney’s longtime business partner and close friend. The Andrewses are not Mormon.

Matt Micheli is also volunteering for the Lummis campaign. Alexa Andrews was a paid staffer in the early months of the campaign, but has now moved to California. Coleman Andrews is not working on the Lummis campaign.

Micheli said the Romney campaign used “no LDS connection or network” to put together a system of volunteers in every Wyoming county. These volunteers probably included a higher percentage of Mormons than Wyoming’s population does, “but certainly the organization was not LDS-centric,” he said.

Romney won in Wyoming because he came here twice, drew big crowds, and his supporters took names at those events and put together a hardworking organization, Micheli said.

Lummis said she had contributed some money to the Fred Thompson campaign in 2007, while it was officially still exploratory. However, her husband, Cheyenne lawyer and former Democratic state legislator Al Wiederspahn, did contribute money to the Romney campaign, she said.

Romney finally abandoned his national campaign in early February, after a lackluster showing on Super Tuesday.
Lummis said she drove to Jackson in March and met with Alexa Andrews. “She was ready to help us in April learn how to use their grassroots strategy,” Lummis said.

After that, Micheli said, “we invited [the former Romney volunteers] to help us on the Lummis campaign. ...  A fair number agreed and have been volunteering to help Cynthia.”

Lummis said she’s always been comfortable around Mormons. Some of her best and oldest friends are Mormons, from when she was in high school through her years in the Legislature and as state treasurer, to now.

She is a strong Lutheran; she attended Trinity Lutheran School through the eighth grade. She goes to the same Lutheran church she was born and baptized into, “and hope to be buried in,” she said.

Her brand of Lutheranism—Lutheran Church Missouri Synod—is full of German-heritage Lutherans like herself and is very conservative, she said.

More liberal Lutherans, generally those of Scandinavian heritage, generally belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Lummis said.

“They came more from Scandinavian countries where they had more socialist cultures,” she said. “It’s so funny how these ethnic characteristics carry through in political ways.”

Being entirely American in its invention, the Mormon Church is not divided by such ethnic considerations, she said. But she believes there is lots of overlap between LDS values and the values in her kind of Lutheranism, she said.

In college, she said, she became powerfully drawn to Mormonism, and nearly converted, twice.

“I took all the Mormon Church missionary lessons ... The next step for me would have been baptism. And I did it more than once.”

When she was a student at the University of Wyoming, she often hung out at the LDS Institute with her close Mormon friends, she said.

Religion’s role in Wyoming politics is unclear, perhaps because, as University of Wyoming history Professor Phil Roberts noted recently, Wyoming is not really a very religious state. It is the second-least religious state in the nation, behind only Oregon in its proportion of the population that is unchurched, Roberts said.

At least one Mormon leader in the state noted that his co-religionists are not monolithically Republican. Kevin Larsen teaches Spanish and Religious studies at UW, and he served for many years as bishop of the Spring Creek Ward in Laramie. He’s a Democrat, and his wife runs the Laramie chapter of MoveOn.org, he told me.

There was a messianic streak to Romney’s campaign that Larsen didn’t much care for. “And when Mitt says we ought to double the size of Guantanamo, that’s the wrong approach, for my money,” Larsen said. “Just speaking for myself here,” he added.

There’s also a historical anti-Mormon strain in Wyoming politics and culture, expressed publicly sometimes by drunken football fans in Laramie when the Cowboys play BYU.

Despite Wyoming’s large Mormon population, there’s never been a Mormon governor, congressperson, or U.S. Senator, and only a handful of Mormons have ever been elected to statewide office. (The most recent may have been Velma Linford, originally of Star Valley, state superintendent of public instruction from 1955 to ‘62.)

Afton Mayor Alan Stauffer, in Star Valley, served fourteen years in the Wyoming House and rose to the position of majority whip before he ran for the GOP nomination for state superintendent in 1990. He lost that year Diana Ohman.

Stauffer is LDS.

In the 1800s, Mormons were almost universally Democrats, Stauffer said.
“That’s because Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party turned on the church back in Illinois,” he said. Republicans loudly opposed what were called “the twin relics of barbarism --slavery and polygamy,” Stauffer said.

When statehood for Utah finally seemed possible in the 1890s, Mormon leaders knew the U.S. Congress wouldn’t want to admit a one-party territory to statehood.
So they simply divided the population in half, Stauffer said, going door to door and telling one family they were now Republicans, the next family Democrats, and so on. Over the years Utah has had nearly as many Democratic governors as Republican, he said.

The tradition of Mormon Democrats continues in the West today, with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Democratic first cousins and congressmen Mark Udall of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico. Scions of an LDS family with roots in pioneer Utah and Arizona, the Udalls both are running for the Senate this year. (Mark Udall was raised Presbyterian and claims no church affiliation now; Tom is LDS.)

Stauffer said that when he ran statewide for superintendent in 1990, he naively assumed his religion wouldn’t matter. His old friend State Sen. Boyd Eddins of Smoot, also LDS, warned him otherwise, Stauffer said.

“There were legislators that had been my friends and allies for years,” Stauffer said. “One told me to my face when we were at the [Republican] convention, We can’t vote for you, you’d put all your damn Mormon friends in office,” Stauffer said.

“There are a group of people out there who think Mormons aren’t Christians, and that really annoys us,” he said.

“I think Romney faced that nationally,” Stauffer said, “but he has maybe plowed the way for others.”

He added he didn’t think Romney’s endorsement would hurt Lummis, however.

At least one other Star Valley Mormon family was glad to see Lummis win Romney’s support. Sunday’s Star-Tribune story cited three Republicans who’d been surveyed in the recent poll. Two said they plan to vote for Trauner.

But a third, Lyal Radford of Star Valley, supports Lummis.

Contacted Sunday at their home in Thayne, Lyal Radford, 78, and his wife Virginia, 70, said they are LDS and that they support Lummis; Virginia Radford has already voted absentee.

“I am [for Lummis],” she said, “and more so now that I know Mitt endorsed her.” She added that she’s only been Mormon for four years, though she’s been married to her Mormon husband 53 years. “He worked on me all his life, and I just got there,” she said. “But that’s another story.”

This story was first published by Wyofile.com Tom Rea is a writer and editor in Casper. His most recent book is Devil’s Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the Story (Univ. of Oklahoma Press 2006). Rea’s next project for WyoFile is a series of stories on Wyoming’s Mormons.

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