There is ZERO evidence that any statistically significant numbers of Republicans didn’t vote for Romney because he was a RINO or Mormon - if that was true, that would have shown up in the Bible Belt states...
After Romney lost the election, I read several opinions that it might have been because he did not get the full support of the conservatives and/or Evangelicals. I figured the best way to test that theory would be to compare his vote count with another republican candidate in my home state of Louisiana. I started by comparing the raw unofficial votes (provisional ballots haven’t been counted yet, but all precincts have reported) for Romney and the incumbent conservative Republican US Representative John Fleming, who was running in the 4th Congressional District.
Some background info about this district: The newly redrawn 2012 district covers all of western Louisiana except for the southern parishes near the coast. It is deep in the Bible Belt with a large mix of Protestants, Evangelicals, and Catholics. It is quite conservative. John Fleming won the district easily in the 2010 election and is so popular that no Dem even bothered to run against him in the 2012 election (a little known Libertarian was the only other candidate).
In most parishes within this district, Romney got MORE votes than Fleming, the opposite of what would be expected if conservatives/Evangelicals had turned their back on Romney. So much for that theory!
So where did these extra votes for Romney come from? I suspect that many of them came from Indies and maybe even a few Dems who voted for the moderate RINO Romney instead of the Marxist O, but still couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the very conservative Fleming.
Reference links to the LA SoS site for the 2012 election:
http://staticresults.sos.louisiana.gov/11062012/11062012_46972.html
http://staticresults.sos.louisiana.gov/11062012/11062012_46257.html
thanks for the update on this issue
I keep saying that we all need to tell Romney and his inner circle to do two things
“look at yourselves in the mirror and tell all the pundits to quit pointing fingers at scapegoats outside of the your team & the RNC”
the only thing the pundits are doing is getting all kinds of different Conservatives to point fingers at each other
even if they are “Conservative” pundits maybe that’s what they are trying to do in the first place