Despite all the media attention to Mitt Romney being a Mormon, he was not the first Mormon to run for a major party's Presidential nomination... what two tried before him ?

Joseph Smith jr

Good trivia.

I will take that as one, and reword my question a bit :

What two Mormons, prior to Mitt Romney, made a serious run for the Presidential nomination of one of the two current political parties ?

Okay, this one is obviously dead, and, in all likelihood, my wording was faulty, so I will answer it :

The previous two were George Romney (Mitt's father) and Mo Udall of the great state of Arizona.

Methinks I ask too many trivia Q's considering how few people care enough to pop in and try to answer these days

Spit, I knew Romney's dad immediately. (Upon coming back from a trip to Vietnam, he declared that he had been "brainwashed." That ruined his already slim chances at the nomination, but he was correct; we were all brainwashed by our government then about how well we were doing in Vietnam.) But I didn't know Udall was a Mormon.

Interestingly, there was concern about Romney's qualifications to be President. Romney was born in the Chihuahua, Mexico to Gaskell Romney, an American of English ancestry, and wife Anna Amelia Pratt, born to a New England and Scottish father and a German mother. Romney's grandparents were polygamous Mormons who fled the United States because of the federal government's opposition to polygamy. Many people, not understanding the qualifications for President as given in the Constitution, expressed concern that he was a a US citizen. McCain went through the same this year, having been born in the US Panama Canal Zone.