Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have long played an outsized role in national politics. It’s unsurprising, then, that researchers are eager to determine where U.S. adherents of the global church are headed in this age of polarization and populism.

Will they stick with the GOP despite some uneasiness with its current leader, President Donald Trump? What is the impact of generational turnover and disaffiliation on the views of those who remain in the pews?

Here are three new analyses that attempt to answer these questions — all of which hold implications far beyond the church’s ranks.

A missing partisan divide

Across the world, gender divides have translated more and more into political divides as Generation Z women veer left at the same time men in their teens and 20s careen right — a phenomenon many attribute to the result of young people spending less time together and more time with their screens.

So it was with a sharp intake of breath that Alex Bass, the data scientist behind the Mormon Metrics website, recently reported that he could uncover no such divergence among U.S. Latter-day Saints.

Yes, there had been a shift in alignment in the Cooperative Election Study data he analyzed going back to 2007, but one broken down by age only, not gender. Specifically, Bass found that Latter-day Saint men and women below age 40 are more moderate than their above-40 counterparts, who trend more conservative.

The data provides no authoritative narrative for this “missing gender gap,” as Bass has termed it. But the researcher ventures a hypothesis in an analysis of his findings.

If experts are right about the reason for the growing chasm seen elsewhere, then maybe, he surmises, the church’s practice of grouping young, single people into their own wards (congregations) deserves some attention.

“Perhaps,” he writes, “the singles ward provides a space for young Latter-day Saints to understand and build connections across gender in a way that keeps their politics in lockstep even as they drift further from the older generation.”

LDS support of Trump trumps most other faiths

Latter-day Saint support for Trump has generally fallen in the range roughly of 5 to 15 percentage points lower than for other GOP presidential candidates in recent decades. Nevertheless, the comeback commander in chief hasn’t fallen fully out of the graces of members.

As of last October, Latter-day Saints ranked second — only after white evangelicals — in the percentage who said they approved of Trump’s handling of the job of president.

That’s according to an analysis of Cooperative Election Study data by political scientist Ryan Burge at Washington University in St. Louis. In all, 57% of Latter-day Saints (compared to 71% of white evangelicals) gave the president a thumbs-up in the poll that predated the launch of the Iran war, while 38% assigned Trump a failing grade.

Although the margin of error was plus or minus 6.5 percentage points, the finding mirrors the 58% of Utah Latter-day Saints who told pollsters earlier this year that, if the election were held today, they would vote for Trump.

That represents a comfortable majority, but it remains a sizable slide from the 66% of Latter-day Saints who cast ballots for Trump in 2024.

Young liberals struggle to stay

According to a new study out of church-owned Brigham Young University, political ideology is one of the biggest predictors of young people “deidentifying” from the church in their early 20s.

The findings were based on longitudinal surveys of members as they transitioned from their late teens to early 20s. Of the 709 who identified as Latter-day Saints in 2020, 92 had exited the faith four years later (Notably, this was not the sample the researchers used to determine “active retention” rates, or those who still attend services, which they put at 42% of adults.)

Researchers dug around in the leavers’ survey answers and found that a disproportionate number were liberal. Wanting to control for other factors like race and education, they excavated further.

What they discovered was that being “troubled” by the church’s stances on a range of social issues — primarily same-sex marriage, which the faith has long opposed, and abortion — appears to be the driving factor.

In all, 28% of those who “deidentified” said they “strongly agreed” that the church should accept same-sex marriage, versus 5% of those who “strongly disagreed.”

The study authors also analyzed data collected by the Pew Research Center. Turns out, said study co-author Justin Dyer, “extreme conservatives” are also more likely to head for the door when compared to moderates and more mainstream conservatives.

“Disaffiliation looks like a ‘J-shaped curve,’” he said. “High for the very conservatives, lower for the conservatives, lower for the moderate and then highest for the liberals.”