Young Mormons Aren’t Blue — Just A Little Less Red
(ANALYSIS) Almost three years ago, in one of my first posts on Graphs about Religion, I ran an article with the headline: Young Mormons Are Abandoning the GOP.
The most important piece of data analysis in that post came from the Nationscape survey — a weekly study conducted between 2019 and early 2021. The total sample size was over 477,000 respondents, which means there were nearly five thousand Latter-day Saints in the dataset.
I just ran a quick analysis of that LDS sample, looking at partisanship broken down by age.
Here’s what that data looks like visualized:
The conclusion here is pretty straightforward: Older Mormons are strongly Republican. In the Nationscape survey, nearly 70% of 60-year-old Latter-day Saints aligned with the GOP, while about 20% identified as Democrats and the remainder called themselves Independents. But as you move down the age ladder, that partisan gap starts to narrow.
Among 40-year-old Mormons, about 60% are Republicans and roughly 30% are Democrats — a 50-point gap among older Latter-day Saints shrinks to thirty points. And among young adults, the divide gets even smaller, down to just 10–15 percentage points. The logical conclusion: the GOP is losing ground among what has traditionally been a rock-solid voting bloc.
Of course, that Nationscape data is a bit dated now. It was collected before Joe Biden took the oath of office and long before Trump’s bid for a second term. So, let’s revisit this question using more recent data.
To start, I replicated that first graph with data from the most recent waves of the Cooperative Election Study (2022–2024). The total sample size is around 150,000, which gives us roughly 1,500 Latter-day Saints to work with.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
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.