2024 Election Post-Mortem: Latter-Day Saints
(ANALYSIS) 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, nonreligious), 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 100 times as many people asking about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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 Latter-day Saints — commonly known as Mormons — 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 voting patterns over the last five election cycles.
Let’s start where we always do — with vote choice since 2008.
Latter-day Saints have not been turning out in huge numbers for the Democrats in a long time. They 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 church members were undoubtedly tepid about the possibility of Donald Trump as president. While 84% of Latter-day Saints 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.
OK, this graph is interesting in light of the prior one. The conclusion, in my mind, is unmistakable: the Mormon electorate is not so strongly tied with the Republican party now.
In 2012, three quarters of all Latter-day Saints 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.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.