How did Donald Trump lose the Mormons? According to a recent Pew poll, only 48 percent of Mormons now describe themselves as Republicans, compared with 61 percent during the last election cycle. For decades, Mormons have been the most reliably Republican religious group in the country. What happened?
Evangelicals, after all, seem to have made their peace with Trump. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, white evangelical Protestants “have become even more likely to identify with the Republican Party in recent years. Currently, about three-quarters of white evangelicals (76%) identify with the GOP or lean Republican.” That’s up 5 points since 2012.
Obviously one difference is that, this time around, Mitt Romney is not the GOP nominee. A Mormon, Romney inspired skepticism among some evangelicals. But there are other reasons that this year is different.
Writing for the Religion News Service, Jana Riess suggests that Mormons are becoming less reliably Republican because they are changing demographically and thus shifting to the left. “Mormons, as a people, are a little more likely to have a college degree than the national average. And people with a college degree, Pew finds, are more likely to affiliate as Democrats (53 percent) than as Republicans (41 percent).” Riess also notes that Mormons are disproportionately young, and young people tend to vote for Democrats.
Perhaps. But there is reason to believe that Mormons aren’t becoming less conservative: They simply can’t pull the lever for Trump. This was first evident during the Utah Republican caucus, where Trump came in third behind Ted Cruz and John Kasich. Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the country riled members of the church, the leadership of which took the rare step of responding, reiterating its position on the importance of religious freedom.
Whatever their similarities on moral and political issues, Mormons and evangelicals see themselves differently in the American landscape. “To a Mormon who thinks of himself as member of a religious minority, Trump’s language about Muslims” is a real problem, according to David Campbell, coauthor of Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics.
Trump’s position on immigration is also to blame. Mormons have joined with the Catholic church, among others, to back immigration reform. Utah even passed a guest-worker program a few years ago. While the political leanings of most Mormons might be anti-immigration, the church’s position seems to carry more weight. Indeed, Campbell says that the Mormon opposition to Trump is more evidence of something he and his colleagues saw in their research: “Mormons prioritize religion over politics. Evangelicals prioritize politics over religion.”
The book’s authors describe a series of studies in which Mormons were asked to describe their positions on issues like gambling, discrimination against LGBT people, and immigration after reading official statements by the church on these issues. Campbell says there was considerable movement on the topics, even among more conservative church members.
Then, finally, there is Donald Trump’s personal life. Though both Mormons and evangelicals profess strong support for marriage and the traditional family as well as opposition to divorce and infidelity, evangelicals seem more willing to accept the personal foibles of Trump. Part of this may be simply environmental. States with considerable evangelical populations—what we think of as the Bible Belt—have rates of divorce that rival or top the rest of the country. Rates of divorce in areas with high concentrations of Mormons are much lower. For Mormons, Donald Trump’s life still has the potential to shock.
Many social conservatives say they are willing to live with Trump’s personal faults because they believe that Supreme Court picks are what really matter in this election. And they say there is reason to believe that Trump will nominate people who will take the right positions on issues like abortion. Campbell notes that abortion is not the issue among Mormons that it is among evangelicals. While you might hear it mentioned in a litany of issues Mormons care about, “it is not a litmus test.”
Finally, it is worth noting that Gary Johnson, as former governor of New Mexico, is a known quantity to many Mormons, who are concentrated in the West. They may consider him a plausible alternative in an election where they don’t care for either candidate. Indeed, the Mormons have a history of looking to third-party candidates. In 1992, Utah was one of only two states where Ross Perot came in second.
In an election where Trump’s strategy seems to rest on getting an even higher share of the self-identified conservative and Republican voters than Romney or McCain received, it should worry Trump that this most reliable group might vote for a third party in large numbers—or just stay home.
Which isn’t going to cause Trump any trouble in the most Mormon of states: Trump isn’t at risk of losing Utah, where the current betting odds give him a 98 percent chance of winning. But next door, in Nevada, it’s a dead heat. The four percent of Nevada’s voters who are Mormon could well make the difference in who wins the state. And given that Nevada is one of the few states that could determine the outcome of the election, it’s not inconceivable that Trump’s Mormon problem could cost him the White House.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of The New Trail of Tears: How Washington
Is Destroying American Indians.
