Most Mormons remain committed to conservative values but uneasy with President Trump’s ascendance, resulting in a complicated relationship with the modern Republican Party.
The Democratic Party is not presenting a viable alternative. Quietly, it is losing purchase with Mormons. The retirement of New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall raises the prospect that the next Congress could have no Democratic Mormons, if freshman Utah Rep. Ben McAdams loses his reelection bid, which is likely to be challenging.
So, Mormons are stuck with the GOP. But it’s an awkward fit. Trump’s tough stance on immigration, his willingness to insult other candidates, and his character flaws have all made it difficult for Mormons to embrace him.
“They expect decency in public life and in their personal lives,” Evan McMullin, a Mormon independent presidential candidate in 2016 and the founder of the conservative advocacy organization Stand Up Republic, told the Washington Examiner. “They’re sensitive to the persecution of immigrants and religious minorities and they expect honor in their leaders.”
McMullin won 20% of the vote in Utah, the best performance in that state by a third-party candidate since Ross Perot finished with 27% of the vote ahead of Bill Clinton in 1992.
Utah’s two Republican senators, Mitt Romney and Mike Lee, both Mormon, exemplify the fraught relationship between the church and the Trump-led GOP. Both have denounced Trump at times, while also working with him to advance shared conservative interests at other points.
Eight months before the 2016 election, for instance, Romney excoriated Trump in a speech in Utah, and soon after his election to the Senate, he criticized the president in an op-ed. Yet Romney, as a senator, has also backed Trump’s judicial nominees and supported his approach to China’s trade practices. Lee, for his part, called on Trump to step aside after the Access Hollywood tape emerged, in which Trump made lewd remarks about women, and tried to stop his nomination on the floor of the Republican National Convention. Since Trump’s election, Lee and the president have had a productive relationship tackling criminal justice reform.
Historian Matthew Bowman, an associate professor at Claremont Graduate University, compared Mormons’ aversion to Trump to their distaste for Clinton in the 1990s.
“There was a moral revulsion against Bill Clinton. He was perceived as immoral, as Donald Trump is perceived as immoral,” Bowman said.
Trump’s call to ban Muslims, in particular, has likely triggered sensitivities stemming from the Latter-day Saints’ history as a persecuted, migratory religious minority.
In a precursor to Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims, President Grover Cleveland called for a ban on Mormon immigration in 1883 out of fear that they would foster immoral behavior, such as polygamy. A half-century earlier, clashes between Mormons and the state of Missouri led that state’s governor, Lilburn Boggs, to issue an executive order that said Mormons “must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.” The order was rescinded in 1976.
Yet, Trump’s position on immigration also has more direct implications today given that Latinos are the fastest-growing group within the Mormon church, and Latin America is a fertile ground for converts.
Bowman said Latter-day Saint leaders “think of the kind of nativist, isolationist, closed-border rhetoric that Trump embraces as being hostile to the interest of the church and certainly hostile to the interests of the church not only today, but throughout history.”
Mormons pride themselves on patriotism but shun nationalism, a label Trump has embraced. One Mormon leader has explicitly condemned the ideology.
Speaking about Mormon women, Emma Petty Addams, the interim executive director of the nonprofit organization Mormon Women for Ethical Government, argued the 2016 election led some to wonder about the Republican Party’s commitment to protecting the institution of the family.
“Specifically with immigration and family separation and those sorts of issues, they’re seeing evidence that perhaps one party doesn’t have the monopoly on protecting the family like maybe it seemed in the past,” said Addams.
Matthew Burbank, a political scientist at the University of Utah, said that Trump may have dimmed younger Mormons’ attitudes toward the Republican Party.
“I think one of the things that the Trump candidacy and presidency has done is provided a little bit of a weakening to that typical socialization experience that many young people have in this state which is grow up thinking of themselves as Republicans, thinking of Republicans as the party of morality and propriety,” Burbank told the Washington Examiner.
But while Mormons’ wariness of Trump may have chafed at their attachment to the Republican Party, their distaste for him does not does not appear to have indicated a leftward shift.
“In terms of Trump’s performance in 2016 in Utah, I would say that the bulk of that had to do with just him as a candidate,” said Burbank. “I think for many Utah voters, and particularly I think Utah voters who are active members of the LDS church, there was a sense that this guy just isn’t the kind of person I think of when I think of a president.”
Utah had not voted Democratic since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but a survey from the summer of 2016 revealed only one-third of Mormons viewed Trump favorably. Trump won the state with less than 50% of the vote, performing almost 30 percentage points worse than Romney in 2012. Whereas Romney won almost 80% of Mormon voters across the country, Trump secured only 60%.
But Trump’s performance did not bring down other Republicans. Indeed, Lee won the support of 68% of voters, while Gov. Gary Herbert won 66%.
And as McMullin’s strong third-party performance revealed, many Utahns who disliked Trump were not comfortable backing a Democrat.
“People who did not want to vote for Trump, there was no way in hell they were going to vote for a Clinton, so they went for McMullin, but that was really a one-and-off type of situation,” said Utah Rep. Rob Bishop. He pointed to Perot’s second-place finish in Utah in 1992 as an example of how Utah voters will vote for a third-party candidate perceived as conservative.
The share of Mormons identifying as conservative has remained stable and high over the past 12 years, fluctuating narrowly between 57% and 61%. Political party identification has proven more volatile, but a majority of Mormons consistently identify as Republican or leaning Republican.
Mormon voters, and Utahns more broadly, began moving more decidedly toward the Republican Party in the latter part of the 20th century.
Utah overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896, a reflection of the rural, Western, agricultural populism present in the state, according to Bowman. That populist character remained through the New Deal era, evidenced by the fact that church President Heber J. Grant’s endorsement of Republican Alf Landon in the 1936 presidential election fell on deaf ears: Almost 70% of Utah voters backed Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Utah shifted to a more service-oriented, white-collar economy and away from agrarian populism.
Bishop pointed to South Dakota Democratic Sen. George McGovern’s candidacy in 1972 as a watershed for Utah voters.
“That’s when the Democratic Party shifted so far to the Left that Democrats in Utah left their party in droves,” Bishop said.
Besides not voting for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, Utah voters have not elected a Democratic governor since the early 1980s. The last Democratic senator was Frank Moss, who lost his 1976 reelection bid to long-time Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch.
The church’s opposition to same-sex marriage and generally conservative stance on LGBT issues may also explain, in part, the political preferences of most Latter-day Saints.
Ryan Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa, said the church’s stance on social issues has driven away some left-leaning Mormons. He cited a 2015 policy by the church, no longer in force, which prohibited children of same-sex couples from being baptized until they were 18 and disavowed same-sex relationships.
“All of the evidence suggests there was a bit of an exodus out of the church at that point, but it only would have been the left-leaning members,” Cragun told the Washington Examiner.
McMullin suggested that many Mormons may be moving away from the Republican Party, but most remain firmly committed to conservatism.
“Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have moved toward ideological extremes and that’s left a lot of Church members feeling politically homeless. Many tend to be conservative and they’re still committed to foundational American values. In fact, those values are central to their conservatism,” said McMullin.
Those values, according to McMullin, include a belief that all people “have equal value in the eyes of God; we’re created free and therefore governments should be accountable to us.”
Utah Rep. John Curtis, a Republican and former Utah county Democratic Party chairman, pointed to several components of Latter-day Saint culture which tend to lead them away from liberalism and toward the Republican Party.
“I think that there’s a number of cultural things for the church community that tend to feel more comfortable in the Republican Party. Abortion is one I think would really jump out. But I think even deeper than that, there’s a real entrepreneurial spirit, a real hardworking spirit,” Curtis told the Washington Examiner.
“There is an independence, there’s a little, probably, suspicion of government. We came out West to get away,” said Curtis.
