The United States has just been through a bruising campaign. Donald Trump won the Electoral College count by a comfortable margin and even captured the popular vote.
Early exit polls have shown members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints again overwhelmingly stuck with Trump, though his support among this religious demographic may have slipped since 2020.
So, what happened? What does the election say about the partisan breakdown among Latter-day Saints? And what might a second Trump administration mean for the global church and its members?
McKay Coppins, an award-winning Latter-day Saint journalist who covers national politics for The Atlantic and wrote a biography of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, helps to answer those questions and more.
Here are excerpts from that wide-ranging conversation on The Salt Lake Tribune’s latest “Mormon Land” podcast.
At this point, what do we know about how Latter-day Saints voted?
The early exit polls can tell us a certain amount, but they are not perfect — far from it. … Fox News, for example, had an exit poll that showed 63% of Latter-day Saint voters supporting Trump. That same poll, in 2020, had 72% or around there supporting Trump. The Cooperative Election Study data has the Latter-day Saint vote lower than that in 2020. But if you’re comparing apples to apples, it seems like Latter-day Saint support for Trump might have dropped or held steady. That’s notable only in as much as when you look at the whole [political] landscape, Trump improved — and, in many cases, dramatically — in most demographic groups. …That does suggest that Trump may have reached his ceiling [among Latter-day Saints] in 2020, [which is] 15% to 20% lower than traditional Republican candidates.
Right after the election, you wrote about how Trump’s crass rhetoric “has cheapened political discussions and desensitized voters to behavior that in another era they would have deemed disqualifying and a president.” Have Latter-day Saints who voted for him become similarly desensitized? How do they justify voting for a candidate who talks like this?
People that I know who voted for Trump would have been absolutely scandalized by the things that he said, even just in the final weeks of this campaign. Just look at the last six weeks of the 2024 election cycle. He spread lies about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. He said America was the garbage can of the world. He invited a comedian onto the stage to call Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. It goes on and on. Ten years ago, if Trump supporters had seen a Republican candidate talk like that on the presidential stage, they would have said, “There’s no way that person should be in the White House.” Now, not only did those people vote for him, for the most part, that stuff didn’t bother them at all. … People who are voting for Trump for the second or third time, at this point, long ago created a permission structure for themselves to support somebody whose character and behavior are far beneath the standards that they would have set for presidential candidates in the past. I actually asked Mitt Romney about this rationalization: “When I hire a plumber, I don’t ask to see his temple recommend. I just want to know if he’ll get the job done.” … When I asked Romney about the plumber defense, he got really agitated, and said, “Well, do you care if the plumber screams at your kids? Do you care if he rips you off? Do you care if he squeals out of your driveway?” Romney’s point was that character matters in every facet of life, And certainly, when it comes to a president of the United States, there’s no getting around the fact that his character trickles down to the rest of the country, right? A lot of people look to the leader of the country as an exemplar. And when he is as crass and vulgar and abusive and cruel as Trump is, it can’t help but have an effect on how other people behave. [Political discourse] was not great 10 years ago, but it is undeniably much worse now. Nobody is blameless, really, but Donald Trump is the kind of singular figure in modern history when it comes to lowering our expectations of presidential behavior.
Last year, the church’s governing First Presidency warned against straight-party voting, sending signals that U.S. members can and perhaps should consider casting ballots for candidates other than Republicans. Did that have any impact?
That messaging is really interesting and pretty at odds with the way that, frankly, most voters vote, and certainly traditionally how most Latter-day Saints have voted. I would like to see more of that messaging from the church. It will actually be in the church’s best interest, at least in America, to have a more politically open-minded and diverse membership going forward. Members’ overwhelming track record of voting for Republicans has made them less influential as voters, because [the party] could take those voters for granted. Political partisanship is not a good way to approach complex and important civic questions.
(Courtesy) Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins, author of "Romney: A Reckoning."
How do you think the church might react to Trump’s promised mass deportations, given its publicly stated immigrant-friendly policies?
If you’re looking for tensions between the church and the Trump administration, a mass deportation program is one where you could see some pushback, certainly from church members, but also even institutionally from the church. … If he follows through on it, I can imagine this drawing some pretty strong pushback from religious communities, Latter-day Saints included. …This would be one of those issues that would transcend partisanship and would draw some serious backlash.
The church never asks members about their immigration status, and many Utah Latinos are undocumented, while fully active in the church. Pragmatically speaking, wouldn’t that push the church to oppose mass deportation?
Mass deportations could sweep away families that are the backbone of various branches and wards throughout the country, and trigger backlash from fellow members in their wards and stakes. I served a [church] mission in Dallas, Texas, Spanish-speaking. And I know from firsthand experience that a lot of these members are really important to the functioning of these congregations. They do a ton of service, and a lot of them are undocumented. The church has made very clear it wants a humane policy of immigration enforcement that prioritizes keeping families together.
Some evangelical Christians see Trump as some kind of Christian “savior” and that God wanted him to be the president. Why aren’t Latter-day Saints talking like that?
I actually wrote a story for The Atlantic earlier this year about the prayers that were offered at the beginning of Trump rallies, most of them given by evangelicals. One of the running themes through those prayers is the idea that Trump has been anointed by God to lead this country, that he is kind of a biblical character, set apart to save the country from ruin. A lot of those same supporters have just talked themselves into the idea that Trump is a godly, almost prophetic figure like Paul or other kinds of straightforwardly heroic characters in the Bible. I have not seen that very much even among Latter-day Saint ardent supporters. They will say he’s doing great things for the country. And a lot of them did lean into the idea that God saved him from the assassination attempts, but I did not hear that he is a special figure anointed by God. The way that the church is set up in this hierarchical fashion, there isn’t quite as much room for a kind of non-Latter-day Saint politician to be slotted into that hierarchy….Latter-day Saints would feel uncomfortable with comparing him to a prophet, given their own beliefs about prophets.
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