Utahns dislike TV’s ‘Mormon Wives,’ blame developers for high housing costs and are OK with tanking

The numbers tell the story.

That philosophy has been the bedrock of my work for over a decade now. I believe you can get a truer understanding of the world by examining the clues it leaves behind — and more often than not, those clues come in the form of data.

The “Moneyball” approach helped me work my way up to become The Salt Lake Tribune’s Utah Jazz beat writer. Now, I’m turning my focus to data reporting full-time.

For those of you who read my non-sports work in the wake of the pandemic, simply expect more of that. For those who haven’t, know that I’m always trying to get to the heart of any issue through the numbers … while making it as easy to understand as possible. That means fun charts, humorous asides, and, yes, even an exclamation point from time to time!

Let’s start with a recent poll that tackled everything from nuclear energy to “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”

Utah’s not a very frequently polled state — the large margins in our federal political races usually mean pollsters take their surveys elsewhere. So when I hear a ding in my inbox about a new poll that surveys us here locally, I tend to get pretty excited.

This one comes from Overton Insights and covered 50 different topics. Polls aren’t perfect — and this one certainly has limitations, which we’ll discuss below — but they do give us a better understanding than just our anecdotal bubbles or, worse, guessing.

About this poll

You probably haven’t heard of Overton Insights, but maybe you’ve heard of its ownership: the Libertas Institute, a libertarian think tank run by Connor Boyack.

Overton hired a Nashville company called Targoz Market Research to conduct a multi-modal poll of 1,000 registered voters in Utah about the issues last month.

To be clear, a poll being sponsored by an outwardly biased political group scares me. But there’s enough quality here to consider it.

For one, Targoz is a known quantity as a pollster: There are 454 Targoz polls in Nate Silver’s database, to give you an idea of the scale. He gives them a B- rating when measuring their accuracy against voting outcomes, which is below average, but not horrendous. Interestingly, their polling has typically skewed somewhat Democratic by about 1.1 percentage points, according to Silver’s numbers.

For a poll like this, 1,000 registered voters is actually a pretty decent sample size, and the crosstabs do look to reflect real-world Utah demographics. The pollsters were recruited from two different sources: an online panel recruited about half, while the other half were invited via SMS texting. Doing both, not just online, is pretty good practice.

And Targoz polls paid for by Overton have generally fit results found by other pollsters — when asking about presidential approval ratings in 2025, for example. Some of the findings in this poll also, frankly, probably don’t fit the Libertas Institute’s mission statement (for example, that just 3.8% of the respondents were libertarian-leaning).

Maybe most importantly, Overton asked about stuff that we just don’t know much about from other sources, and so this poll probably can teach us something even if it is wise to add in some significant margin of error and a grain of salt.

Is Utah going in the right direction?

Respondents were nearly evenly split on whether Utah is going in the right direction or the wrong direction overall:

However, answers were dependent on other factors. For example:

Religion also seemed to play a role: Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said Utah was headed in the right direction by a 49%-27% margin, while those outside of the church said they thought Utah was headed in the wrong direction by a 51%-30% margin.

Most Utahns don’t want the Legislature controlling political boundaries

This is the second poll this year that has shown that, overall, Utah residents prefer it when the Legislature doesn’t control political boundaries.

Overton asked: “In Utah prior to 2020, the state legislature was solely responsible for drawing and approving congressional and state legislative district boundaries. Critics argue that this approach can favor the political party in power, while supporters say it reflects results of the previous election. Overall, do you approve or disapprove of this system?”

This poll did say Republicans were more likely to approve, by a 47%-32% margin. But Independents (18%-67%) and Democrats (7%-82%) were very, very tilted against the Legislature drawing boundaries. Interestingly, there were no statistically significant differences between urban and rural respondents.

Utahns blame rentals, developers for unaffordable housing

Something we can all agree on: 93% of people said they were worried about housing affordability in Utah. But what people actually feel is causing the high prices was most interesting.

The most common leading causes, respondents said, were:

Less than 10% of respondents attributed the leading cause to rising land prices or government red tape.

I was surprised to see that it was Republicans who were more likely to blame developers artificially raising prices as the leading culprit, not Democrats (by a 23%-20% margin). Generally, I tend to think of GOPers as having more belief in the free market to prevent this kind of artificial inflation, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Utahns widely support nuclear expansion via Operation Gigawatt

Both Republicans (69%-17%) and Democrats (44%-36%) supported Gov. Spencer Cox’s Operation Gigawatt in the poll.

It’s worth noting here how this question was worded, including both ties to Cox and a short description of the pros and cons — I don’t hate the wording, but there are associations made here.

“Utah’s Office of Energy Development is currently executing on an initiative of Governor Cox called Operation Gigawatt to, among other proposals, expand nuclear energy facilities in Utah. Supporters say this could provide clean energy and reduce reliance on foreign sources of fuel. Opponents raise concerns about safety and environmental risks. Do you support or oppose this plan?”

But support of Gigawatt came from essentially every demographic group: rural and urban alike, men and women, LDS Church believers and nonbelievers, rich and poor.

Voters lean toward not using taxes for Major League Baseball

Hey, a couple of sports questions! Great for nerds like me.

The idea was opposed by both Republicans and Democrats; independent voters were most likely to oppose it by a 55%-34% margin. Those with household incomes under $50,000 were significantly less likely to support the taxation plan: only 33% did. And perhaps surprisingly, urban and rural voters felt equally about using their taxes for a proposed stadium, even though rural voters would naturally live farther away from the proposed benefit.

Jazz fans, tank note

When asked if the “approve or disapprove of the direction of the Utah Jazz franchise,” most Utahns said they were in favor, by a 37%-15% margin. (The second-most popular answer was " I don’t follow the Utah Jazz," which got 33% of responses.)

Now, I would have preferred different wording: Those who approved of the team’s direction might have been either in favor of the team losing games on purpose in order to get a better draft pick, or might have approved of the team being improved this year when compared to last year on the court. But the 15% disapproval number does seem to reveal that those who believe that the Jazz’s franchise is in a rough place constitute a significant minority.

By the way, more respondents said John Stockton (36%) was the greatest Jazz player of all time than those who said Karl Malone (30%). Adrian Dantley, the only other player in the poll and the objectively wrong answer, got just 1%.

Utahns would prefer those Lives stay Secret

Utah’s approval ratings for the Hulu series “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” are in — and they’re not positive.

16% of Utahns say they’ve watched the show about a group of young MomTok influencers. But there’s a big gap between the Latter-day Saint community and others: only 12% of Latter-day Saints say they’ve watched it, compared to 21% of other Utah voters polled.

Those who had either watched or just heard of SLoMW were then asked if they had a favorable or unfavorable view of the show.

Only 6% of Latter-day Saints said they viewed the show favorably. And even those who were non-LDS didn’t tend to like it, by a 22%-46% margin.

It was the youngest adults who liked it most: 29% of Utahns aged 18 to 34 had a favorable opinion of the show, compared to just 4% of those 55 and over.

Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com.