This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aim to inform readers across the state.
Latter-day Saint voters are less overwhelmingly Republican than they once were but have warmed to President Donald Trump significantly, according to a new analysis of how members of the faith voted in recent elections.
The research, released Monday and done by political scientist Ryan Burge, an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, looked at the partisanship and voting behavior of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2008. He found a significant split in party affiliation between older and younger members of the faith, as well as an almost even break in party support among Latter-day Saint voters who consider themselves to be ideologically moderate.
“The LDS have not been turning out in huge numbers for the Democrats in a long time,” Burge wrote. “Mormons were certainly no fans of Barack Obama — he only received 24% of their votes in 2008 and did even worse when matched up against Mitt Romney in 2012.”
Romney, one of the country’s most prominent Latter-day Saints, received 84% of the Latter-day Saint vote in 2012, the highest percentage of votes cast for a Republican by members of the faith in the recent election years Burge considered.
And, in 2012, according to Burge, three-quarters of all Latter-day Saint voters identified themselves as being affiliated with the GOP, while 16% said they were Democrats. But 12 years later, just 58% of Latter-day Saint voters self-identified as Republicans, while 25% identified as Democrats and 17% identified as independents, up from 9% in 2012.
It was the 2016 election, the researcher wrote, that seemed most telling, as the Latter-day Saint Republican vote that year dropped more than 30 percentage points, down to just 52%. “But it’s not like Hillary Clinton was beloved, either,” he noted. That year, like Romney in the previous presidential election, a fellow member of the faith was on the national ticket.
“A whole bunch of Latter-day Saints threw their support behind [third-party candidate] Evan McMullin,” Burge wrote, “and he actually received more votes than the Democratic nominee.”
Trump, however, ultimately won 52% of the Latter-day Saint vote that year.
And without a prominent third-party candidate running in 2020, 66% of Latter-day Saints voted for Trump in 2020 and again in 2024 — even as the share of Latter-day Saint voters identifying as members of the GOP fell.
“In 2016, 64% of LDS were Republicans but Trump only got 52% of their votes,” Burge wrote. “In 2024, 58% were Republicans but Trump got 66% of the vote. It seems that there’s just a lot of slippage between partisanship and actual voting behavior happening here.”
Trump, in 2016, won Utah — the church’s world headquarters — with 45.5% of the vote. Clinton received 27.5% of the vote in the state, while McMullin won 21.5% of the Utah vote. In Utah’s next presidential election, Trump won just over 58% of the vote share, while Biden won 37.6%. Trump’s margin increased slightly in Utah in 2024, when he garnered 59.4% of Utahns’ votes.
Latter-day Saints who identify as ideologically moderate, meanwhile, split almost evenly in 2024, as 46% voted for Trump and 50% voted for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. This, according to Burge, was a rightward swing since 2020, when 32% of moderate Latter-day Saints voted for Trump and 59% voted for Joe Biden.
“I’ve always had a hunch that this group of people are the ‘canary in the coal mine’ when trying to understand religion and politics,” Burge wrote. “Lots of people like to think of themselves as intellectually superior because they take a middle road, but an election is a binary choice. You’ve got to pick one side or the other and that will tell you a lot about their political allegiance.”
Burge also found that young Latter-day Saints are “less enamored” with the Republican Party than their older counterparts — but that they too have warmed to Trump, who had a 16% jump in support from 2020 to 2024 among Latter-day Saint voters between ages 18 and 35. There was a similar trend among Latter-day Saint voters ages 36 to 50.
And since a dip in 2016, Latter-day Saints over 50, he concluded, have emerged as a solidly Republican voting bloc. “[T]his group of voters,” he wrote, “is as Republican as white evangelicals on Election Day.”
