2024 Election Post-Mortem: Latter-day Saints

Are young Mormons abandoning the GOP?

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating here - whenever I tweet a graph that contains a couple of the largest religious groups (evangelicals, Catholics, non-religious), the first question that comes in the comments is inevitably - where are the Latter-day Saints? I can be hyperbolic at times, but I am not exaggerating this at all. It’s this weird little sociological thing that only I can see because I’m one of the few who’s analyzed data on smaller religious groups.

What makes this even more peculiar is that I rarely get comments asking about other very small religious groups like Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. I bet in the last five years on social media, I can count those types of comments on one hand. I’ve easily had 100x as many people asking about the LDS. For what it’s worth, I’ve tried to figure out why this is the case and I can never find a satisfactory answer. My best guess is that LDS are both fastidious about record-keeping and just happy to see themselves being included in the conversation about American religion. But feel free to opine about this in the comments.

All that preamble to say that I know this post is going to get a lot of readers in places like Utah and Idaho because I am going to tell you all the story of what happened with the Mormon vote in the 2024 election and put it in the context of LDS voting patterns over the last five election cycles. Let’s start where we always do — with vote choice since 2008.

The LDS have not been turning out in huge numbers for the Democrats in a long time. 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. But the 2016 election result was one that I think about a lot because the LDS were undoubtedly tepid about the possibility of Donald Trump as president. While 84% of Mormons voted for the Republicans in 2012, that dropped to 52% in 2016. But it’s not like Hillary Clinton was beloved, either. Instead, a whole bunch of Latter-day Saints threw their support behind Evan McMullin and he actually received more votes than the Democratic nominee.

But 2020 and 2024 were different because there really weren’t any viable third-party candidates - each was clearly a two person race. So, Trump’s share went from 52% to 66% in 2020 and then he got the exact same share in the 2024 contest. It’s striking how nothing at all changed in the last two election cycles in the Mormon vote. But I just don’t know what the LDS baseline is if we have a generic matchup between a replacement-level Democrat and Republican. I mean, McCain got 73% but Trump did seven points worse. So does Trump underperform? I can’t say for certain.

However, maybe looking at the partisan composition of Mormons may help shed some light on this.

Okay this graph is interesting in light of the prior one. The conclusion, in my mind, is unmistakable - the LDS electorate is not so strongly tied with the Republican party now. In 2012, three quarters of all Mormons said that they were affiliated with the GOP and just 16% were Democrats. But in each subsequent election year those numbers have shifted ever so slightly. In 2024, just 58% of Latter-day Saints were Republicans and 25% were Democrats. Compared to 2012, the GOP is down 17 points and the Democrats are up 9. But the share who are Independents has essentially doubled, too.

I would describe this as a very mixed portrait of results, really. In 2016, 64% of LDS were Republicans but Trump only got 52% of their votes. 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. I need to investigate that a bit more.

This is the partisanship and ideological composition of Latter-day Saints during the last three election cycles.

The top right square are conservative Republicans and that’s always been where a bunch of LDS place themselves. It was 50% of all of them in 2016 and it’s still very high at 46% in 2024. So I don’t see a lot of evidence of movement there. And there’s just never been that many liberal Mormons in the electorate, either. It was 9% in 2016 and it’s 10% now. So it’s not like we are seeing a tectonic shift to the left.

The only thing that really jumps out to me is the middle row of values - those are LDS who identify as ideologically moderate. It was 30% of the sample in the 2016 election, 31% in 2020, but then rose to 38% in the 2024 data. That’s certainly a noticeable shift and most of it came from the ‘conservative’ row across the top - that went from 61% in 2016 to 50% in 2024.

Let’s follow that thread just a bit more by looking at the voting behavior of just those Latter-day Saints who say that they are ideologically moderate. 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. 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.

It should come as little surprise that a whole bunch of moderate Mormons favored Evan McMullin in 2016. In fact, that election was almost perfectly divided among Trump, Clinton, and the Third Party candidates. From that one data point, I think it’s reasonable to assume that LDS moderates were exactly that - electorally divided. However, the last two election cycles tell quite a different story.

In 2020, nearly 60% of moderate Mormons favored Biden. He bested Trump by 27 percentage points, and only a small handful supported third-party candidates. I think that’s a pretty good data point to support the idea that moderate LDS were actually pretty heavily Democratic, they just didn’t want to see themselves that way. However, the 2024 result throws a lot of cold water on that. Trump did fourteen points better, and Harris did nine points worse. In essence, the moderate Mormon vote in 2024 was about as evenly divided as it could be. I really do think that this is the definition of a ‘swing voting bloc.’ It’s not huge, of course. Remember that LDS are about 1% of the population and about 30% of them are moderates. But it’s still an interesting slice of the electorate.

But could all this be changing? I’ve written before about the fact that there’s a pretty big generational divide in the Mormon church. More specifically, young Latter-day Saints don’t seem so enamored with the modern Republican party while their parents are about as Republican as it gets. I used data from 2019-2021 to make that claim before, so let me see if that replicates using data from the last couple of years.

This is the Cooperative Election Study’s last three waves of data (2022, 2023, and 2024). The total survey sample size was 144,500 and of that about 1,600 identified as Latter-day Saint. And, to my great relief, the data here tells the exact same story as from my prior analysis. Among the youngest Latter-day Saints the partisan gap is small. About half identify as Republicans and 35% say that they are Democrats - a 15 point difference. The trend lines run pretty much in parallel between 18 and 40 year old Mormons.

That gap widens among older LDS voters. By the time you get to 55 year old Mormons, about two-thirds of them are Republicans and only 20% are Democrats. The partisan gap is twice as wide here as it was among Mormons who were 30 years younger than that group. And then each line continues to move in opposite directions. Nearly 75% of retired Mormons are Republican and less than 15% are Democrats.

Does this actually show up in electoral behavior, though?

While the prior graph would lead one to the conclusion that the GOP may have some big problems with the Latter-day Saint vote in future elections, this one should dampen those concerns quite a bit. Yes, younger LDS voters are less enamored with the Republican party. In both 2016 and 2020, less than 40% of Mormons between the ages of 18 and 35 supported Donald Trump. But in the 2024 contest he did significantly better - earning 56% of their votes. That same general trend is also there for 36-50 year olds - Trump’s share increased in the 2024 contest compared to the prior two elections.

Older Mormons are big Trump supporters. That was slightly less true in the 2016 election, but from that point forward Latter-day Saints who are at least fifty years old have supported the GOP in huge numbers. In fact, this group of voters is as Republican as white evangelicals on election day.

What do I make of religion and politics in the context of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? The LDS are Republicans. They may be slightly more reluctant Republicans, but they are still going to be a solid GOP voting bloc for decades to come. I can maybe be convinced that Trump was a net negative in the 2016 election and possibly in the 2020 cycle, but I think by 2024 a big chunk of LDS had warmed to him.

You can see a couple of big shifts as evidence of this. Trump did a whole lot better with moderate Mormons in 2024 compared to their prior two election cycles. Additionally, he managed to make some big gains among younger Latter-day Saints, too. I know there are some in the exmo community who were hoping to see a true shift of the LDS toward the Democratic Party, but I just don’t see that happening in this data or anytime soon.

Code for this post can be found here.