When I think of Romney these days it’s hard not to recall a story of our frontier ancestors, both early Mormon settlers in northern Arizona. Our great-grandfathers were friends and bonded over the fact they were both arrested for polygamy at the same time, in 1884. When Mitt’s ancestor, Miles P. Romney, couldn’t afford bail, my paternal great-grandfather, William Jordan Flake, lent him $1,000, but Romney never repaid him. Instead Miles P. lit out for Mexico with his wives and children, while my great-grandfather spent six months in the Yuma Territorial Prison before returning to the families that awaited in the town named after him. Later he became one of the first Arizona state senators, perhaps laying out a political path for his progeny: Former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake is also one of his descendants.

Mitt and I have yet another connection, stranger and even more powerful than polygamist ancestors. It’s something every child growing up in a Mormon household in the 1950s had drilled into their heads.

“One day,” we were told, “the Constitution of the United States will hang by a thread and a Mormon, or group of Mormons, will save the nation.”

This was not a casual statement. It was repeated over and over, year after year, in Mormon congregations across the land; it wasn’t only Mitt and I who heard it. It didn’t matter if you grew up like Mitt, the privileged son of the governor of Michigan; or like me, the daughter of a shoe salesman in Ogden, Utah; or like my friend Rae, the child of ranchers moving sheep around the West. This is what we were all taught — that one day the U.S. Constitution, revered by Mormons as a document inspired by God, would become so deeply endangered and torn asunder that it would also tear the nation apart, and it would be up to Mormons in powerful positions to save us.