"The Romney strategy with the speech appeared to be to try to kill two birds with one stone - to placate voters who are apprehensive about him as a Mormon or as a flip-flopper," said Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at Fordham University, to AP.
"But I am not convinced he was successful in doing either," Panagopoulos said. "At the end of the day, it is very difficult to change voters' pre-existing beliefs, and it would probably take a much more powerful speech than the one Romney delivered today."
Meanwhile, Bill Bennett, a CNN contributor, commented, "I can see this speech he just gave being given by any of the Republican candidates and most of the Democratic candidates, frankly," according to CNN. "I'm not sure he was responding to the concern 'what about this Mormon thing?'
"I think he will probably get more questions on it, not fewer," Bennett said.
An AP-Yahoo poll last month found half of all respondents said they have problems with supporting a Mormon presidential candidate, including one-fifth who said it would make them very uncomfortable.
Moreover, 36 per cent of white Republican evangelical Christians said they were less likely to vote for a believer in Mormonism, which many view as heretical, according to an August poll by the Pew Research Center.
"I don't think his Mormonism is a deal breaker for most Americans, but only Mitt Romney can close the deal," Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told ABC's "Good Morning America".
When asked if he thought Mormons were Christians, the prominent Southern Baptist conservative responded, "No, I do not."
Along with many Christian evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention does not consider Mormonism to be part of historic orthodox Christianity.
Romney did not go into specifics about Mormonism during his speech, saying to do so would amount to a "religious test", but acknowledged differences exist between the beliefs of Christian evangelicals and that of his church.
"I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the saviour of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths," he said, adding that these differences are "not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance", as reported by AP.
"Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree."
