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After months of keeping a low profile, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is stepping up his campaign activity. As his rivals’ poll numbers rise and fall, Romney has been at or near the front of the pack all along — with his support stuck at around 25 percent.

The lack of a serious challenge to Romney has been one of the biggest surprises of this year’s Republican primary campaign.

Conservative activist Erick Erickson, who runs the RedState website, says that while there has been nearly a dozen televised debates, there has been very little debate about Romney’s record.

“A lot of the vetting that Republican voters would normally do, he hasn’t gone through,” Erickson says. “They’ve been so focused on the anti-Romney — who’s going to be the alternative?”

One candidate after another has auditioned to be the anti-Romney: They have shot to the top of the polls, then fizzled. But even the best-funded of them all, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, has chosen to run ads attacking President Obama, not Romney.

While there have been a handful of anti-Romney ads from Republicans, an analyst for the Campaign Media Analysis Group says there has been “no focused negative assault on Romney.” And that has given Romney a free pass to focus on the man he considers his true rival: Obama.

“I think the president fails to understand America,” Romney has said. “I don’t think he understands what makes America work. I think he honestly believes that a government in Washington with well-intentioned bureaucrats can do a better job guiding the country than can free individuals and free enterprises.”

Democrats On The Attack

Because there hasn’t been a concerted Republican attack on Romney, the job has fallen to the Democrats.

“It’s very important, I think, for them to do it, given how inept the Republican challengers are in raising the issue … you know, he’s a flip-flopper and there’s a character problem,” says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

Greenberg says he can’t think of another campaign in which the incumbent president’s party has gone after a potential opponent so early.

Democrats are also trying to magnify a perceived disconnect between Romney and ordinary Americans.

In an ad made by Priorities USA, an independent Democratic super PAC, the narrator intones: “While Romney doesn’t want millionaires like him to pay a nickel more, he doesn’t see the big deal with letting taxes go up by $1,000 for hard-working Americans.”

The Obama campaign considers Romney to be the likeliest nominee. And Romney plays that up, tweaking the president’s campaign for having an “obsession” with him.

Curbing Enthusiasm?

A relatively unimpeded path to the nomination should be every candidate’s dream. No one wants to end the primary season beat up and broke.

But sometimes a vigorous nominating battle is a good thing, says GOP strategist Ed Rogers.

“You want to have as much momentum, excitement and intensity as possible,” he says. “Usually you get there by having a tough contest … that produces some drama and some defining moments, and then that person comes out of the primaries with a pretty sharp edge. But if you just sort of flop around and everybody else dies, it doesn’t give you the push and the momentum that you would like to have.”

That’s more or less what happened to Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008 — while Obama had a drawn-out fight to the finish with fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton and emerged a stronger candidate for it.

A relatively tame Republican primary also means Romney will never have to fight to convince conservatives he is one of them. And that worries Erickson of RedState. He’s no fan of Romney, but he wants to beat Obama.

“I don’t think you will ever see passion for Mitt Romney,” Erickson says. “He will be the accepted nominee to beat Barack Obama and that will be it.”

Then Again …

Although many GOP leaders believe Romney’s nomination is all but inevitable, Rogers, a veteran of Republican primary politics, thinks it would be a mistake to make that judgment now.

“Leading at 25 percent, by definition, suggests that your lead is very fragile and people are still looking,” Rogers says. “I think more than half of what’s going to drive votes next year lies in front of us — not behind us. … Right now, mostly it’s a bunch of activists and media kind of chasing each other around, where the true rank-and-file voters really haven’t engaged.”

But they will soon. The first votes are cast in Iowa on Jan. 3.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Through the ups and downs of the Republican presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has remained in effect the front-runner.

He has done so even without holding as many rallies, town hall meetings or meet-and-greet events as some of the other candidates. He’s also done fewer media appearances.

In the 2008 election cycle, Romney did 177 events in Iowa — the first state to begin the presidential nominating process — according to a database maintained by The Washington Post. This year, Romney has done only 13 events in the state, according to The Des Moines Register. That’s far fewer than his rivals.

Of course, Iowa is not Romney’s focus this time around. Instead, his campaign is putting far more energy into New Hampshire, where Romney has a home, and which holds the nation’s first primary on Jan. 10, a week after the Iowa caucuses.

So, how much have New Hampshire voters seen the former Massachusetts governor?

“Romney this year has been doing his best to fly under the radar,” says political scientist Andy Smith, who directs the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

“He’s been leading in polls for two-plus years, he’s been the most popular candidate, he’s had the highest favorability ratings,” says Smith. “And I think what he’s doing is essentially playing a game of running out the clock here.”

That means no whistle-stop tours through small towns, and a minimum of question-and-answer sessions with voters or reporters — and few high profile interviews, as Chris Wallace recently noted on Fox News Sunday.

“We have now interviewed all the major Republican candidates in our 2012 ‘One on One’ series, except Mitt Romney,” Wallace said. “He has not appeared on this program or any Sunday talk show since March of 2010.”

That adds up to 20 months of saying no to free air time. But the Romney campaign says describing its strategy as low-key is ridiculous.

A campaign official said the former Massachusetts governor has done countless editorial board meetings with newspapers and more than 20 town hall sessions in various states.

And it’s true that Romney is not entirely absent from the spotlight. On Friday, he held an event in Manchester, N.H., though he did not take questions.

Still, Romney’s tally of “20-plus” town hall meetings pales in comparison to a candidate like Rick Santorum, who has 15 public events between Friday and Monday, including eight town halls.

Political strategists on both sides of the aisle say the low profile is working for Romney.

“The one thing you hear amongst Republican circles, is you don’t hear anyone saying he’s running a bad campaign,” says Ed Goeas, a Republican strategist who runs The Tarrance Group.

Goeas notes that voters are seeing much more of all the candidates this year than they did in 2008 because of frequent televised debates. Romney has been in 10 already, with five more coming before the year is out.

“So, 15 debates squeezed in a pretty compact time period is eating up, I think, a lot of the candidates’ time, by all accounts,” Goeas says.

Last summer, when Romney was out of sight for a while, Politico coined the term “Mitness Protection Program.” The Democratic National Committee revived the phrase this week, noting that out of Romney’s seven New Hampshire appearances this month, he has only taken questions once.

Democratic strategist Geoff Garin says when the rest of the Republican candidates are constantly shooting themselves in the foot, all Romney really needs to do is stand back and avoid the shrapnel.

“If you look around at the other Republican candidates, they are making big mistakes that are costing them a chance at the nomination, and Romney himself, when he’s been out there, has had a number of flubs and embarrassing moments,” Garin says.

Among those: being heckled this summer after telling an Iowa audience that “corporations are people,” and telling a group of jobless Floridians in June that he, too, is unemployed.

“Why risk those things,” asks Garin, “if you’re very likely to be the last man standing in a very weak field of Republican candidates?”

And with the time that he saves on the campaign trail, Romney can spend his days raising money and gathering endorsements — both of which may be more useful down the road.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

As one GOP presidential candidate after another bounces up, and then down, in the polls, Mitt Romney has established himself as the slow and steady front-runner for most of the race.

Even if he’s not thrilling the Republican Party’s conservative wing, the former Massachusetts governor has managed to hover at or near the top. That’s also true in the leadoff caucus state of Iowa, despite waging a low-key campaign.

The latest candidate to jump up in the polls, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is in Iowa four out of five days this week. Romney, meanwhile, has announced he will be in the state the day before Thanksgiving — only his fifth public visit to the state all year.

A Smaller, Leaner Operation

Last week in Davenport — one of the Quad Cities straddling the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa and northwest Illinois — Romney said he wants Iowans to get better acquainted with him.

“There are things on TV, right? There’s even Monday Night Football, right? There are all these things, and yet you’re coming out to get a look at someone who’s running for president and saying, ‘I’m gonna take some time to get to know this guy, because Iowa’s gonna have the first say as to who our nominee should be, and that person has got to be able to beat Barack Obama and get America right again,’ ” he said.

He didn’t take questions after his stump speech, but he asked the crowd of a few hundred people to stick around and shake his hand.

David Kochel is a consultant for Romney’s campaign in the Hawkeye State.

“We have a small operation as compared to four years ago. Right now, we have four [paid] staff and me,” he says. “We’re relying a lot more on volunteers.”

Kochel won’t say how much smaller the operation is this cycle. But in addition to spending less time in Iowa, he says, Romney is spending a “fraction” of the $10 million he shelled out here during his 2008 campaign — more like a few hundred thousand dollars.

The strategy, Kochel says, is different this time around, because Iowans already know who Romney is.

“Romney wasn’t known four years ago, and Iowa was a good opportunity for him to break through,” he says. “We needed to spend a lot of time here, and resources, to introduce him to Iowans. And so we advertised early, we put a lot of focus on the straw poll … and we were successful with that. But it’s an expensive strategy.”

‘What He’s Doing Is Working’

In 2007, Romney was the clear winner of the unofficial but much-talked-about Iowa Straw Poll. But he finished a disappointing second in the real contest — the Iowa caucuses — 9 points behind former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. The campaign skipped this year’s straw poll and has yet to buy any ads there.

All that has some Iowans wondering whether Romney is serious about winning Iowa. Des Moines attorney Doug Gross was Romney’s state campaign chairman in 2008. He hasn’t thrown his weight behind anyone yet and says he wants to see how the Republican field sorts itself out.

“The other thing I’m waiting to see, is see if he commits himself to the state of Iowa,” Gross says. “It’s difficult for me as an Iowan to get behind, wholeheartedly, a person who’s not attempting to compete in my state.”

Ultimately, how Romney campaigns in Iowa may not matter all that much. The most recent Des Moines Register poll had Romney at 22 percent to businessman Herman Cain’s 23 percent lead. That was before Romney’s latest visit, and before allegations of sexual harassment emerged against Cain.

Gross says Romney may do just fine in Iowa despite the low profile, given that his opponents are, as he puts it, “self-immolating.”

“I mean, so far what he’s doing — at least to his mind — has got to appear to be working,” Gross adds. “The oldest rule in politics is: Don’t get in the way of someone destroying themselves.”

Even so, Kochel says Romney will be “campaigning vigorously” in Iowa, but he adds that he’s keeping a bigger picture in mind.

“We have a whole country to focus on. Some candidates have the luxury of focusing on just one state — that’s not our campaign,” he says. “We’re focused on the country and winning the nomination.”

Copyright 2011 Iowa Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.iowapublicradio.org.

Mitt Romney’s current run for the White House has not included a big presence in the first state that will actually vote: Iowa, which holds its caucuses on Jan. 3.

He failed to meet expectations at the Iowa caucuses in 2008. So for 2012, his campaign has focused instead on New Hampshire as the key to a series of primary victories that they believe will result in the former Massachusetts governor’s winning the GOP nomination.

But on Thursday, Romney was back in Iowa. He was campaigning in Sioux City when the news broke out of Libya that ousted leader Moammar Gadhafi had been killed. The candidate gave reporters a brief reaction to the news.

“I think it’s about time. Gadhafi — a terrible tyrant that killed his own people, and murdered Americans and others in the tragedy in Lockerbie. The world is a better place with Gadhafi gone,” he said.

Romney and other Republican candidates have been critical of President Obama’s decision to intervene in Libya. But Thursday, he did not answer a follow-up as to whether Obama deserves credit. At the town hall meeting, Romney found plenty of other things to criticize Obama for. Mostly, the focus was on the economy.

“America needs leadership,” he said. “I say again: I like the president; I think he’s a nice guy. But he’s never led before.”

This was Romney’s first trip to Iowa since the August state fair week. This time, he was in the conservative west side of the state, an area where he did poorly four years ago. At Thursday’s town hall, he seemed wary at first.

“I know there are friends in the audience,” he told the crowd. “I see some Romney stickers on, although I’ve learned that sometimes those are just camouflage.”

But in the 30 minutes of questions and answers that followed, there were no direct attacks, no stinging critiques of the Massachusetts health care reform law he signed known as RomneyCare. Questions were mostly routine — on cutting government, taxes and the budget.

Romney himself did not mention any of his opponents for the nomination by name. And onstage, he strove to stay above what has become an increasingly aggressive GOP campaign. With the Iowa caucuses now just over two months away, there will be a lot of ads like a new one from the Rick Perry campaign that draws parallels between Romney’s health care plan and President Obama’s health care law — using Romney’s own words against him.

But even though Romney kept to the high road at his town hall Thursday, at the very same time, his campaign was launching a new website devoted entirely to a scathing review of Perry’s record, CareerPolitician.com.

At one point on Thursday, Romney was quizzed about why he has spent so little time in Iowa. Attorney Matt Winter, 28, wanted to know if this is finally the start of a real effort by Romney in the state.

“Look,” said the candidate, “I want to get the support of Iowans. I’m in Iowa — this is not my first trip to Iowa, as you know. And I will be here again and again. … I’d love to win in Iowa. Any of us would.”

Winter said it’s important to him that candidates take Iowa seriously. But he also says he’s a moderate and sees Romney as such — though that’s a word Romney will never utter on the campaign trail. He’d much rather be seen as inevitable.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Just as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney tries to overcome unease about his Mormon faith in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, a new ad campaign promoting the religion is drawing attention.

“I’m a Mormon” billboards and television commercials aimed at improving the religious group’s public image have surfaced over the past week in states almost certain to be battlegrounds for next year’s presidential contest.

But don’t expect to see Romney in a commercial proclaiming “I’m a Mormon.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly called Mormons, says its ad campaign has nothing to do with the candidate. (Federal law prevents nonprofit organizations such as the LDS church from participating in political campaigns.)

“It’s really not related,” Latter-day Saints spokesman Dale Jones says. “We’ve been doing media since the ’70s. This is our latest iteration. …The idea is to get people to see who we are, rather than who people say we are.”

Negative perceptions in America about the Mormon church have persisted virtually since its founding, in 1830, by Joseph Smith.

Last year, three out of every four Protestant pastors in America said they believe Mormons aren’t Christians, according to a survey of 1,000 ministers conducted by Lifeway Research, a unit of the Southern Baptist Convention.

A Challenge To His Ambitions

Romney’s religious faith has long posed a challenge to his political ambitions. His first presidential bid, in 2008, withered not only because of voters’ doubts about his conservative credentials, but also because of widespread concerns about his faith held by conservative Christians, who form a large and critical voting bloc in Republican primaries.

Earlier this month, at the conservative Values Voters Summit in Washington, a prominent Baptist minister from Texas took a swipe at Romney and his religion while praising rival presidential candidate Rick Perry, governor of Texas. The Rev. Robert Jeffress, who has expressed his support for Perry’s candidacy, told reporters that Mormonism “has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity.”

When the issue came up in Tuesday night’s GOP debate in Las Vegas, Romney offered perhaps his most vigorous defense yet of why his faith should not matter at the ballot box:

That — that idea that we should choose people, based upon their religion, for public office is what I find to be most troubling, because the founders of this country went to great length to make sure, and even put it in the Constitution, that we would not choose people who represent us in government based upon their religion; that this would be a nation that recognized and respected other faiths, where there’s a plurality of faiths, where there was tolerance for other people and faiths. That’s bedrock principle.

But the issue is clearly on voters’ minds. A Pew Research Center/Washington Post survey released Tuesday asked Americans to describe Romney in a single word. They most frequently offered “Mormon.”

Lingering Concerns

Pew has tracked voter attitudes about religion for several years.

“The same groups that expressed reluctance about voting for a Mormon candidate in 2007 are expressing reluctance today — and those are white evangelical Protestants. In the early states, where evangelicals make up a pretty high percentage of a primary electorate, it becomes a factor,” says Carroll Doherty, associate director for the Pew Research Center.

There are other signs that some voters have lingering concerns about Romney’s religion.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released last week indicates that voter attitudes, indeed, have changed, at least among Republican voters. Some 66 percent of Republican primary voters said they “feel comfortable” with Romney’s religion, versus just 13 percent who said they aren’t comfortable.

By comparison, in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken in 2007, as Romney embarked on his previous presidential run, only 39 percent of Republican primary voters felt comfortable with his religion. Another 26 percent said they weren’t comfortable.

In last week’s poll, the comfort level among all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, was 47 percent. That suggests Romney still has to win over the broader public, which will come out for the general election.

Mormons As Everyday People

The Latter-day Saints’ own research has found that more than half of Americans “know little or nothing about us,” Jones says.

In response, the church crafted the ad campaign and established the informational website Mormon.org. The church hopes the campaign will dispel misconceptions, emphasize that the church is Christian and spark discussions about the faith between members and nonmembers.

The church declined to say how much it is spending on the campaign. Television spots are airing on daytime and evening programs, including news shows.

The church’s previous ad campaigns focused on promoting families. This is the first effort that promotes individual members, portraying them as everyday people. The campaign showcases profiles of a diverse mix of young, active and vibrant-looking Mormons, rather than the traditional image of missionaries wearing white button-down shirts and riding bicycles. The ads make no mention of the LDS theology.

Ads steer viewers to the website, which allows visitors to look up Mormons by name, gender, race or ethnicity who “share your personal experience.”

The ads began airing in 2010 in nine cities, such as St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, Fla. In the past week, the campaign was expanded to 12 cities, including Phoenix; Atlanta; Denver; Spokane and Seattle, Wash.; San Antonio; Omaha and Lincoln, Neb.; and Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and South Bend, Ind. Jones says the cities were chosen because each has significant populations of Mormons.

The ads are scheduled to run until spring 2012, by which time the Republican primaries could be reaching a climax.

Several of the states where the ads are airing are projected battlegrounds for both the Republican primaries and the general election next year. But the church says it took steps to avoid any appearance of political partiality.

“We made it a point to stay away from states that had early primaries,” Jones says. “That goes back to being politically neutral.”

The LDS church counts more than 14 million members worldwide, and more than 6 million in the U.S. It is ranked as the fourth-largest denomination in America, according to the National Council of Churches.

LDS membership is most abundant in the West, particularly Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Colorado and California, and officials say the numbers are growing steadily in all parts of the country.

Membership is thinnest in the South, also known as the Bible Belt for its large population of evangelical Christians, who have traditionally mistrusted Mormonism.

As more prominent Mormons take on higher profiles, LDS officials hope that mistrust will fade away. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, are Mormons. So is rival Republican hopeful Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, who continues to campaign in virtual obscurity as an also-ran in the polls.

Political observers say Romney’s bigger problem may go far beyond his religion: He is still having trouble convincing primary voters of his conservative bona fides on social issues. Conservatives haven’t forgotten the moderate stances he held on abortion and gay rights during his failed 1994 bid for a Senate seat in Massachusetts, or that he’d been a registered independent before entering the race.

And, of course, he still has to answer for the state health care law he signed as governor of Massachusetts. The plan was a template for President Obama’s plan, reviled by conservatives. (In the Pew Research Center/Washington Post survey, the second- and third-most commonly used words to describe Romney were “health care” and “flip-flop.”)

A Romney campaign spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.

But the fact that this is Romney’s second presidential bid may help him overcome some of these obstacles.

“There is a greater familiarity with him, with the fact that he’s been on the national scene longer now,” says political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University in Atlanta. “Just like with John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism, the first time you have a major national candidate from a certain faith — really, Kennedy was the first Catholic since Al Smith in 1928 — it raises some concerns. In the past, a candidate’s religion was far more important than it is now.”

Abramowitz says doubts among conservative Republicans explain Romney’s inability to rise in most polling, in which he has remained in the range of 23 percent for a few months.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appears to be headed into the 2012 GOP presidential primary season as the consistent, if not overwhelming, favorite for his party’s nomination.

But there remains great discomfort among a wide swath of party members over the striking similarity of the Massachusetts health care reform legislation Romney signed in 2006 as governor, and the federal health care overhaul President Obama put his signature on last year.

While Romney has alternately distanced himself from and taken credit for the Bay State law, his role in what former opponent Tim Pawlenty called “Obamneycare” could be a major obstacle to winning the GOP nomination.

The Massachusetts plan includes the requirement that individuals purchase insurance — which is also the most controversial aspect of the federal legislation. Legal challenges to its constitutionality are expected to ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

According to research from PolitiFact and the Kaiser Family Foundation, here are five other ways the two plans are similar — and five ways they are different.

Similarities

• Both have individual mandates that impose a tax penalty on people who have the financial ability to buy insurance but don’t. Federal penalties start at $695 annually, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher. In Massachusetts, penalties range from $228 to $1,212, depending on family size and income.

• Both require health care “exchanges” (in Massachusetts, the exchange is called the “connector”) designed to create a competitive health insurance market that gives individual and small business consumers a choice of private plans, rules that facilitate price comparison and plan transparency.

• Both leave intact employer-provided insurance systems — Medicare plans for the nation’s seniors, and Medicaid for poor and low-income citizens.

• Both would fine companies that don’t offer employee heath insurance, with exceptions for small businesses. Massachusetts requires companies with more than 10 employees to offer insurance; the national law sets the limit at 50 employees.

• Both provide subsidies to low-income individuals and families to help pay for health insurance coverage.

Differences

• The federal plan has a stated goal of attempting to lower health care costs; Massachusetts had no such stated goal.

• The federal plan includes a patients’ bill of rights, and provisions designed to promote public health.

• The federal plan includes the so-called CLASS Act, a voluntary insurance program offered to workers for long-term care in the event that they become disabled when they get older. (The Obama administration last week delayed the program’s rollout because it isn’t financially self-sustaining as designed.)

• The federal plan would expand Medicaid to cover poor, able-bodied adults who are not parents in addition to poor children, elderly, pregnant women and those with disabilities. The Massachusetts plan expands Medicaid coverage to more children.

• To pay for the new coverage, the federal plan imposes taxes on a variety of sectors, from drug and medical device makers to health insurers. Massachusetts relies largely on federal matching funds.

Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.