Substantive and statistically viable surveys of Latter-day Saints can be hard to come by, and nearly all the ones that exist represent attempts to summarize nationwide trends within the faith (a 2024 study by the B.H. Roberts Foundation, for instance, broke down responses based on region).
But a new poll from the Libertas Institute, a libertarian think tank helmed by firebrand Connor Boyack, breaks the mold. With 504 respondents identifying as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the 1,000-person survey of Utah voters offers a rare, zoomed-in view of some of the political and policy leanings of believers in the Beehive State.
The poll, conducted by Overton Insights, highlights the contrast between Latter-day Saint voters and others in the state in terms of the politicians and the parties they support. It also underscores real similarities across the religious divide regarding issues that are important to Utahns.
Let’s dig in.
Utah LDS voters and partisan politics
Latter-day Saints generally have, on the national level, been less enthusiastic in their embrace of the right-leaning populism powering the Make America Great Again movement led by President Donald Trump.
One way this has shown up is in the growing number of members eschewing party identification.
According to the Cooperative Election Study, a behemoth of a survey held in the highest esteem, 17% of Latter-day Saints nationally identified as political independents in 2024, nearly twice as many as in 2012, the year Latter-day Saint Mitt Romney lost in a matchup with President Barack Obama.
Fast-forward to today, and 24% of Latter-day Saints in Utah say they’re independent, per the new poll (with its margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points). Some 30% of non-Latter-day Saints in Utah said they were independent.
Independents, however, are hardly a monolith. Sure enough, a little more questioning from surveyors reveals a 40% to 19% split between those who lean Republican versus Democrat among Latter-day Saints — and the almost exact opposite for all other respondents.
Also of note are signs that the number of independents probably underestimates all the Utahns who feel that the political parties in America today don’t suit them. The Overton poll indicates that 39% of Latter-day Saints consider themselves “politically homeless” — as the survey defined it, those who feel unrepresented by either Republicans or Democrats.
That 39% split is about the same as the percentage of non-Latter-day Saints (40%) who describe themselves as “politically homeless” in the poll.
“We often frame political homelessness as a unique crisis for modern Latter-day Saints,” data scientist Alex Bass, author of the newsletter and website “Mormon Metrics,” told The Salt Lake Tribune. “But [the study] shows it is actually the statewide baseline.”
Utah LDS voters and LDS politicians
Party identification is only one way to measure partisanship. Just as — if not more — telling is what individuals say when pressed about specific politicians.
Generally speaking, Latter-day Saints in Utah are happy with those who have won statewide races in recent years — all of whom are members of the state’s predominant faith.
Whether that’s because Latter-day Saints grade their own on a curve or simply because of good old-fashioned partisanship is hard to say. All of the politicians the poll asked about are Republican, as are 68% of the Latter-day Saint respondents.
Every senator — Mike Lee, John Curtis and the recently retired Romney — score the exact same 57% approval among Latter-day Saint survey takers. This is true despite Lee, with his antiestablishment style, and Romney, the epitome of an institutionalist, serving as the poster boys of the GOP’s warring wings.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Meanwhile, Gov. Spencer Cox, a man who seeks to split the difference between these two conservative identities, leads with 61% approval among his coreligionists.
Non-Latter-day-Saints are more split on their opinion of Utah’s statewide leaders. These respondents give Romney the highest marks at 44% approval, followed by Cox at 38%, Lee at 35% and Curtis at 34%.
Utah LDS voters and Trump
Ultimately, there is no litmus test that can replace voting — and the Overton poll asks about this, too, giving respondents a chance to say whom they would vote for if the 2024 election were held today. Here, the responses between Latter-day Saints and non-Latter-day Saints are about as stark as they get.
In all, 58% of Latter-day Saints say they would vote for Trump, compared to 40% of non-Latter-day Saints.
In contrast, 19% of Latter-day Saints say they would vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. For all other respondents in Utah, that number is 44%.
Finally, 22% of Latter-day Saints say they would cast ballots for someone besides these two candidates, 7 percentage points more than the rest of those polled.
The news isn’t all good for the current president, however. While still a majority, the 58% of Utah Latter-day Saints who would vote for him today is 10 percentage points lower than those who say they punched his ticket in 2024, a hair lower than the 66% of Latter-day Saints who did so nationally.
“That means there is a 10-point ‘hold your nose and vote’ gap for those who voted for Trump when it counted,” Bass said, “but who clearly feel conflicted or ‘politically homeless’ about it in the abstract.”
Another possibility: There is a contingent who voted more enthusiastically for Trump in 2024 but have changed their mind since.
Even so, the decrease in Trump’s support among Latter-day Saints is echoed by a similar decrease in backing for congressional Republicans overall. An overwhelming 72% of Utah Latter-day Saint poll respondents say they voted for the Republican candidate for Congress in their district in 2024. Today? Fewer than 6 in 10 (59%) say they’d vote for the GOP contender.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Utah LDS voters prioritize housing
Respondents also were asked to select potential priorities for Utah’s Legislature in the current session.
One of the strongest takeaways from this polling is that, when divorced from the partisan pull of specific candidates or parties, the views of Latter-day Saints and others in Utah are similar. In seven of the 10 priorities the pollsters ask about, no statistically significant difference exists between the two groups.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
The exceptions:
• Access to homeownership, where 59% of Latter-day Saints support making this a priority compared to 49% of others.
• Increasing privacy from government surveillance, where 29% of Latter-day Saints considered this a priority compared to 40% of others.
• Reducing regulations for small businesses, which saw 31% of Latter-day Saints consider the issue a priority compared to 24% of other voters.
One measure Latter-day Saint voters in Utah widely support is allowing families to build accessory dwelling units, like garage apartments or backyard cottages, on their property. Fully 84% say landowners should be able to do so, compared to just 8% who said no. Latter-day Saints, by a 56-point margin, also support the ability of landowners to split their lots.
That viewpoint is generally at odds with policies promoted by Trump’s federal government, which has largely argued for the primacy of large suburban lots and against housing density.
The poll, though, doesn’t ask about more significant increases to housing density, like the building of multiplexes or apartment buildings on properties currently zoned for single family homes. Those measures are supported by a majority nationally but by a lesser margin than ADU changes or lot splits.
“There is a stereotype that suburban conservatives are NIMBYs (not in my backyard), a view articulated by Donald Trump,” Bass said. “But this data calls that into question for Utah.”
And especially among the state’s Latter-day Saints.
“It suggests that…the drive for housing flexibility,” he said, “is about property rights and family autonomy.”
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