I know it, you know it, we all know it: The political party Utahns vote for has a lot to do with religion.
Let’s dive into the data, shall we?
It turns out that straightforward religion and political party cross tabs are harder to find than you might think. In particular, the U.S. census doesn’t ask about religion, having been banned from doing so since 1976. And a surprising number of polls, even of Utahns, either don’t ask or don’t report religious cross tabs. For example, Dan Jones & Associates, one of the state’s most prominent pollsters, doesn’t release this information in recent polling.
(On the other hand, some polls consider religion to be the most important demographic factor. For example, when I received a controversial poll about downtown Salt Lake City’s sports and entertainment district — we still don’t know who commissioned it — the only demographic information required to finish the survey was the respondent’s religious identity. I found that interesting.)
But at least one large-scale survey does ask about religion repeatedly: Harvard’s Cooperative Election Study. It’s conducted annually, with bigger sample sizes in even-numbered election years than their odd-numbered counterparts. We’ve used the CES before in a number of articles, and doing it again makes sense here.
The CES asks a bunch of political questions, being an election study and all. The field we’re going to use actually involves asking people twice what political party they affiliate with. First, people are asked: “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, or what?”
If you leave the questioning there, a huge number of people (more than a third) consider themselves independent, other, or not sure. Those people are then asked, “Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican or Democratic party?” They still have the option to answer “independent” to this question, but asking again gets over half of folks to say they’re leaning one way or the other.
For the religion question, participants are asked, “What is your present religion, if any?” I coded anyone who said “Mormon” as a Latter-day Saint, and anyone who answered otherwise as “Non-LDS.”
How did it shake out?
The results are relatively clear: while Utah’s Latter-day Saints consider themselves to be overwhelmingly Republican, its non-Latter-day Saints don’t. This likely will not stun you. Indeed, non-Latter-day Saints are more Democratic than the national average.
Is there a trend occurring here? You can see a little bit of noise in the graphs, especially when we look at the results in the lower sample sizes of the odd election years. The data does seem to show a small downward trend in the number of Latter-day Saints who consider themselves to be Republican. But there aren’t wild movements in the past decade-plus of data in any other respect.
The lack of movement was interesting to me in contrast to another related but different metric: party affiliation among Latter-day Saints by age. Religion data scientist Ryan Burge compiled that information in a post earlier this year:
There’s a more significant change there. Where 50% of the youngest consider themselves to be Republicans, roughly 70% of the oldest do. There’s also much more Democratic uptick among young Latter-day Saints than older ones.
But, of course, these are graphs representing different things. For one, the CES data in the first graph looks only at Utah Latter-day Saints, while Burge’s graph looks at Latter-day Saints nationwide.
Most importantly, individual political preferences famously change over time; that younger Latter-day Saints are more likely to be Democratic was probably also true a decade ago. The evidence from our first graph would show that it’s unlikely that Latter-day Saints, as a demographic, are going to turn blue soon.
I’d be interested in a longer-scale approach, especially one that looked at Utah’s midcentury history in which the state wasn’t always a reliable red vote. If anyone has good, solid data from older eras with a significant sample size, feel free to email me.
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