Here’s a stat that might surprise you after the commanding lead Donald Trump took in the election: According to exit polls, while he saw major gains among Latino voters, Black voters, even young voters, here in Arizona at least, he got less of the Mormon vote than he did four years earlier.
Voters who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have traditionally been a Republican stronghold in Arizona and across the country, but, they have also been skeptical of Trump — often on moral grounds.
From Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake, to John Giles, who’s on his way out of the Mesa Mayor’s Office, LDS leaders have often been the loudest opposition to the now president-elect. And LDS voters have been reticent to turn out for him.
In 2016, Trump’s share in Utah’s 2024 election was just 45%. This year, it was 59%.
Samuel Benson, national political correspondent for the Deseret News in Utah, which is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
SAMUEL BENSON: We always talk about that 2016 race in which Donald Trump really struggled to win over Latter-day Saint voters. And it's worth remembering that for decades Latter-day Saints have been a staunchly Republican and conservative voting bloc. I mean, it's been, you know, 60 years since 1964 that a Democrat won the state of Utah. That was Lyndon B Johnson.
So you have decades upon decades of Latter-day voters in Utah and across the mountain west supporting Republicans. But then when Trump enters in 2016, that dam begins to break and it's largely over issues of character and morality. They're upset about his stance on immigration and what he's saying about Muslim refugees and migrants in particular. They're upset with some of his, you know, personal scandals and his extramarital affairs. And so he finishes below 50% in Utah in 2016.
And then we see a big jump when he runs in 2020 then similar levels in 2024. And a lot of people are saying, you know, what happened was, was there this shift or this acquiescence to Trump? And that might be part of it. I think another big part of it is, is just the reality that there was a third party candidate on the ballot in Utah in 2016, who is very popular.
And Evan McMullin won about 20% of the vote and there wasn't a strong third party candidate in 2020 or 2024.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. OK. So we saw a bigger percentage of the vote go to Trump, but the third party candidate wasn't on the ballot this time around.
BENSON: Correct.
GILGER: Do you know at this point, Sam, like how the LDS vote has shaken out?
BENSON: So it's really hard to know because lot of Latter-day Saints are such a small percentage of the population nationally. We're only about 2%of the national electorate. And so any exit poll you have either isn't going to include a lot of Latter-day Saint sample or they're not going to go into much detail on them or lump them with other Christian voters.
The only exception I found this early and again, we're only, you know, about two weeks out from the election, and so better exit polls will come out as, as we get farther and farther away from from Election Day. But so far Fox News in conjunction with the Associated Press did an exit poll where they included Latter-day Saint voters or Mormon voters. And I'm particularly interested by how Harris and Trump performed in Arizona. That of course was one of the two states that both candidates really targeted Latter-day Saint voters. You know, Arizona and Nevada being the two battlegrounds in 2020.
So in that Biden-Trump year, Donald Trump won 80% of the Mormon vote in Arizona and Joe Biden finished with 18%. But in 2024 so this past election cycle, Harris got 24% of the vote and Trump only got 75%. So it's not a huge shift. It's only about 6% points higher. But when you're talking about a group that's about 6% of the electorate in Arizona, that's a big shift. It could have made a difference. But of course, by the time Arizona got the results and the race was all but over.
GILGER: That's fascinating. Ok, so there was a shift even in Arizona in these very specific ways and that makes sense, right? Because the Harris campaign, as we've talked about on the show with you before, has made a very concerted effort to reach out to LDS voters in Arizona, specifically women.
BENSON: That's correct. Yeah, it was interesting to watch how the Harris campaign approached Latter-Day Saint voters. Both campaigns eventually got together some sort of Latter-day Saint coalition, meaning that they had folks on the ground that were surrogates of sorts for the campaign and were speaking directly to people in their faith group. But the Harris campaign did it first.
And I think that was simply recognition that if Harris wanted to win Arizona and perhaps to a lesser extent, Nevada, they would have to put together kind of unique coalition like Biden did when he won both of those states in 2020. And a big part of that are kind of the conservative voters who are disgruntled with the Trump era of the Republican Party. And I think Latter-day Saints in many senses are the poster children for that.
I mean, her top surrogates in the state, former ambassador and Senator Jeff Flake, Mayor John Giles in Mesa, both Latter-day Saint leaders, both individuals who are Republicans, but haven't supported Trump in any of his three elections on top of the ticket. And so that's what we saw and then of course, targeting female voters as well. I mean, suburban women carried Biden in 2020 in Arizona. There's no question about that. And Harris overperformed Biden in that sense, but it was other issues that led to her loss.
GILGER: Very interesting. OK, so I wanted to ask you about the Jeff Flakes, the Mitt Romneys, the John Giles, right of the world, these LDS leaders in politics who have been very outspokenly against Trump, sort of principled traditional conservatives. Are there a lot of those left in LDS politics in Utah as well or is this kind of a dying breed?
BENSON: That's the question, Mitt Romney retires next month, you know, his, his term ends in the Senate. And so once he leaves, there will not be a single Latter-day Saint office holder in the U.S. Senate or the House who didn't support Trump in the 2024 election. So once Latter-day Saints were kind of these, you know, this bulwark against perhaps the Trump word lurch in the Republican party. But with Romney's exit, we just don't have that anymore.
In Utah, you talk Governor Spencer Cox, who both in 2016 and 2020 was a fierce Trump critic even earlier in this cycle. He was saying he wasn't going to support Trump and he was disappointed in his party for supporting Trump. He eventually came out and endorsed Trump as well.
And so there's kind of this dearth of leaders in leadership positions within the Republican party or officeholders, either at a statewide level or a national level that are lottery saints that are opposing Trump. And even folks like you mentioned, like ambassador Flake or Mayor Giles either aren't in office anymore or won't be at the end of this year.
GILGER: Very interesting. So tell us about that shift, right, in somebody like the governor of Utah, like, what are the pro Trump or at least the LDS politicians who have endorsed Donald Trump say to voters who they know very well may be turned off by many of these things you mentioned about him.
BENSON: Well, Cox is such an interesting case study because he did it in a way that wasn't like many of the other folks who have endorsed Trump. He didn't host like a grandiose press conference or put out a big statement. It was actually somewhat accidental. He sent a letter shortly after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last July to Trump simply saying that I want to help you unite the country. He viewed the assassination attempt as, as this kind of a turning point in the election cycle. He thought Trump had an opportunity to lower the temperature in our divisive politics. And he thought and expected Trump to use it as an opportunity to do so.
Now, of course, that isn't what happened. That letter ended up getting leaked. We reported on that and then Cox later in a, in a news conference, it just kind of a routine monthly news conference announced that he was voting for Trump. But aside from that instance, and then Cox later going to Arlington National Cemetery with Trump and then attending one Trump rally, he really wasn't a present figure on the Trump campaign. But it was kind of a unique situation that I think as, as we get farther and farther away from this presidential cycle, it'll be worth following up with Cox and understanding what went into that decision in that calculus and did it pay off?
