It doesn’t matter how you slice it.
An analysis of some of the most robust and current data on Americans’ political views is decisive: No group has lurched leftward faster in their political party identification during the past 20 years than members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
That’s according to a new YouGov analysis of data collected from 2007 to 2025 by the Cooperative Election Study, an annual and nationally representative survey averaging 60,000 respondents in even years, and around 10,000 to 25,000 in odd years.
Combine the survey’s 2007-2009 findings (sample size 1,009 Latter-day Saints) and the support for Democrats comes to 17%. For Republicans, that number is 68%, a 51-point split favoring the GOP. Do the same for 2023-2025 (sample size 1,042 Latter-day Saints) and the divide shrinks to 23% for Democrats and 56% for Republicans, a 33-point gap. (The margins of error on both samples were a little more than 2 percentage points.)
This substantial erosion among red-tilting members, tied with a modest increase for blue leaners, means today’s U.S. Latter-day Saints are significantly more purple than they were 20 years ago.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Not so fast
The finding comes with a few caveats.
First, Latter-day Saints had little competition for the top spot in terms of leftward movement. Of all the educational, racial, age and religious groups YouGov analyzed, only two other cohorts, white men with college degrees and atheists, moved in the Democrats’ direction in the years since Barack Obama’s presidency.
A second caveat: Mitt Romney.
The Republican politician and church member announced his first campaign for the White House in February 2007. That November, when pollsters were busy interviewing respondents, the former Massachusetts governor was still very much in the running.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Then-Sen. Mitt Romney speaks at the Utah Capitol in 2024. His presidential runs had an impact on Latter-day Saints' party allegiance.
It’s hard to say how much Romney’s run shored up support for his party among his fellow Latter-day Saints. Research is scant on the period before. But given the well-documented jump during his 2011-12 campaign, when he became the first Latter-day Saint to top a major presidential ticket, there’s reason to believe his White House pursuit provided a boost.
Finally, most Latter-day Saints still back the GOP, and they remain the second most Republican-leaning faith — but not by the margins that once made them the nation’s most reliably red religious group.
Nevertheless, the degree of the swing — 18 points, or more than the other two left-moving groups combined — is noteworthy, observers of Latter-day Saints and politics agree, raising the question of what is driving the trend and whether it is likely to continue.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
The Trump effect
Much has already been said about Latter-day Saints’ lukewarm response to President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, evidenced most clearly in voting data.
Members’ support for Trump has ranged from 52% in 2016, the year Latter-day Saint Evan McMullin ran as an independent, to 66% in 2020 and 2024 — a comfortable majority, to be sure, but well below Romney’s estimated 78% in 2012, John McCain’s 72% in 2008 and George W. Bush’s 80% in 2004.
In a survey published in January, 58% of Utah Latter-day Saints indicated they would vote for Trump if the election were held today.
“Lots of factors involved here,” Latter-day Saint McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, posted on social media in response to the new data dump. “But it really seems possible that Donald Trump has single-handedly wrecked the Republican Party’s multigenerational stranglehold on LDS voters.”
Data scientist Alex Bass, author of the Mormon Metrics newsletter and website, agrees — at least in part.
“Even committed Mormons appear to have grown averse to the Republican label in the Trump era — not because their policy views changed,” Bass said, “but because Trump-era Republicanism conflicted with distinctly LDS cultural values around civility and institutional trust.”
A generational divide
True to wider trends in Generation Z, young church members are disproportionately wary of the Republican identifier, and sociocultural anthropologist Brittany Romanello believes she might know why.
“Racial issues, including immigration, are a huge part of young members identifying as more progressive than their predecessors,” said Romanello, co-author of a 2024 study on the political views of young adult Latter-day Saints in Arizona.
They are significantly more likely than older members to be multiracial themselves, the University of Arkansas researcher observed, or married to someone of another race. And while Trump has made significant inroads with racial minorities, Democrats remain the favored party among members of the Black (plus 54 points), Asian (plus 26 points) and Hispanic (plus 11 points) communities, per the latest survey data.
Pair this with younger Americans’ more progressive attitudes regarding gender and sexuality and the result, Romanello said, is a growing number of self-described independents engaged in split-ticket voting.
“Many youth are exposed to more information about other community members and non-LDS groups now more than ever,” she said, “and therefore their worldview and the information and messaging they are getting is much more diverse.”
As liberal Latter-day Saint advocate and influencer Allison Dayton put it: “They don’t understand or want sameness surrounded by a fortress. They grew up with the world in their pockets, and they want to go out and be part of it.”
Here, however, a caveat is once again warranted.
“Many” and “more” do not equate to all, and even those supportive of LGBTQ+ rights or immigration don’t necessarily feel any particular allegiance to the left.
As political scientist Ryan Burge has observed, around 40% of Latter-day Saints between ages 18 and 35 identified as Republican in 2024, but 56% voted for Trump.
That led Burge to conclude at the time that, at least in practice, “Young Mormons aren’t blue. They’re just a little less red.”
Looking toward the future
Finally, it’s impossible to accurately interpret the shift in political identification, Mormon Metrics’ Bass said, without understanding another taking place concurrently in religious identification.
As the researcher pointed out, the percentage of Latter-day Saint respondents who are likely to pray daily, attend services weekly and call religion central to their lives has dropped 13 percentage points over the past 20 years to 39% today.
“As less committed members grow as a share of the pool,” he said, “the aggregate shifts left mechanically.”
The question, then, is whether this trend of decreasing levels of devoutness continues. If yes, Bass predicts Republican affiliation will follow suit.
“But nationally there has been some evidence of secularization slowing down,” he noted, “and even stagnating over the past few years.”
Brigham Young University sociologist Jacob Rugh, on the other hand, views the leftward momentum as likely to continue — at least as long as the Republican Party embraces MAGA.
Rugh, in a social media post discussing the Cooperative Election Study findings and recent election returns, said he believes the trend will persist.
One reason, he said, is generational change.
Another is the fact that, increasingly, educational attainment has become the dividing line in politics, with greater time spent in a classroom tied more and more to a rejection of the GOP. In other words, today’s college-educated Latter-day Saints (and non-Latter-day Saints) are becoming more independent and, to a lesser extent, Democratic than their predecessors.
Add to this indications that Latter-day Saints, especially women, are obtaining more schooling than in previous years, he said in an interview, and it’s hard to see how the church’s U.S. membership doesn’t become increasingly blue in years to come.
Much of it, said senior researcher for YouGov Brad Jones, a BYU graduate, will likely depend on factors beyond the church’s walls.
“It’s difficult to untangle how much of this is Trump specifically,” he said. “It’s possible there’s a more palatable candidate for Mormons and the shift changes.”
— Tribune data reporter Andy Larsen contributed to this story.
Tamarra Kemsley has been a reporter at The Tribune since 2021 but has been covering religion and politics since 2019. Her work has appeared in Religion News Service, the New York Post, and Religion & Politics. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Brigham Young University and a master’s in Islamic studies from Hebrew University.