Utah voters reject Trump after lewd video

According to a poll released late Tuesday from Salt Lake City-based Y2 Analytics, Clinton and Trump are tied at 26 percent among likely voters in Utah. After the billionaire’s dramatic fall from grace in the majority Republican and largely Mormon state, independent candidate Evan McMullin is now at a statistical tie with the major party candidates at 22 percent. Fourteen percent of likely voters polled said they would support Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson if the election were held today.

“A third-party candidate could win Utah as Utahns settle on one,” Y2 Analytics founding partner Quin Monson told the Deseret News, a newspaper that has called for Trump to jump ship. “It’s quite the cacophony of voices coming from this state.”

Monson added the Trump campaign’s “implosion” has led voters to move away from the Republican Party and toward independent candidates. The Democratic and Republican nominees are remarkably disliked in the state and have unfavorability ratings of approximately 70 percent. The Utah-born Mormon McMullin is particularly popular among fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is winning the majority of those voters over Trump.

A majority of voters polled said they hoped Trump would renounce his candidacy after the hot mic conversation was released just before the second presidential debate. Nearly 95 percent of Utah voters have watched or heard about the video and those who have viewed it felt more strongly that Trump should abandon his campaign. Republicans are less certain whether their party’s candidate should stay or go.

Despite his earlier lead in some earlier polls, Trump said in August he faces a “tremendous problem in Utah” in a campaign appearance with evangelical religious leaders because the state “is a different place.”

The phone survey of 500 likely Utah voters was conducted Oct. 10-11 and has a plus or minus 4.4 percent margin of error.