The idea that a Republican candidate for president could have a “Mormon problem,” as many headlines and Trump himself have alleged, is remarkable—and not just because an estimated 70 percent of LDS voters lean right. For at least their first hundred years as a religious group, Mormons were largely regarded by their fellow countrymen as foreigners and threats. The history of Mormon persecution in the United States may be unsettling for those who aren’t familiar with it: The governor of Missouri once ordered the extermination of all Mormons in the state. The Church’s founder, Joseph Smith, was murdered by a mob in 1844. The group was involved in multiple wars with neighboring settlers and the United States government, started and stoked by fears of its religious teachings.

But gradually, Americans got more used to the idea of Mormons, particularly after the Church put an end to the practice of polygamy and Utah was admitted to the U.S. as a state at the end of the 19th century. By the mid-20th century, a Mormon man, Ezra Taft Benson, simultaneously served as Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture and part of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, the main governing body of the LDS Church. In 1968, a prominent Mormon businessman, George Romney, ran for president of the United States, and even though he didn’t beat out Richard Nixon for the nomination, he got tapped to be his former opponent’s secretary of housing and urban development. Around this time, “observers agree that Mormons received unprecedented positive press,” wrote the Brigham Young University professor J.B. Haws in his 2013 book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind. “Mormons had so successfully shed the ‘pariah’ label that, instead of painting them as a threat or a menace, national reporters characterized Latter-day Saints as upstanding, moral, and patriotic people—and, if anything, a little quaint.” During Romney’s presidential run, few reporters focused on his identity as a Mormon, Haws found.

When Mitt Romney ran for president in 2012, though, this certainly wasn’t the case; most Americans seemed either amused or bemused by his faith. The stage show The Book of Mormon, which satirizes the LDS Church, had recently opened to acclaim; The New York Times Style section even ran a piece on what it means to be a “hip” Mormon. Yet, party officials and members of the media wondered widely at the time whether Romney would have a “religion problem,” finding himself unable to attract conservative evangelicals who were skeptical of the LDS Church. According to Pew research, roughly one-fifth of American voters said they were uncomfortable with Romney’s faith, and half either didn’t know or didn’t believe that Mormonism is a Christian religion.

Romney ended up losing his bid for the White House based on the larger racial and age-based deficiencies of his coalition, not because other religious conservatives refused to vote for a Mormon. Even though he lost the election, perhaps he accomplished something else. “Maybe 2012 did help us solve the Mormon problem,” said Max Perry Mueller, a professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. “They aren’t an ‘other’ anymore, and that’s what’s amazing.” Trump’s own rhetoric may be a blunt instrument for measuring which groups have become “normal” by putative white, middle-class American standards: While he hasn’t hesitated to toss out insults about Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jews, and the disabled, he has praised and pleaded with Mormons for their votes.