Utah Mormon Vs. Non-Utah Mormon Voting Gap
Preliminary Update on Mormons and Voting in 2024
Introduction
You may have heard, Trump won in the election. And, yes, he decisively won.
The polls were actually quite close in most races - election results for states falling within the margin of error. The issue in the polls was the error should be random, but the polls were consistently wrong in underestimating Trump across the board. As always, more work to be done in making better election models etc.
For those interested, I also created an election model, and I too underestimated Trump. Excited to compare the actual results in hopes of helping my model perform better the next election!
But, enough about this… Let’s look at some data on how mormons voted in 2024.
Data
While we have to wait some time before the Cooperative Election Study comes out, you may have seen that Fox News and the Associated Press have an interactive tool showing their survey results. They also have data from 2020, so you can compare 2020 vs. 2024.
I read through their methodology statement and found it to be quite rigorous. They have a large sample and they weight on multiple levels. At first, I thought this was an exit poll, but it isn’t. Its a large poll from two different online survey panels. Exit polls would be particularly problematic in Utah with many people voting by mail.
Charts
Did Utah Swing toward Harris?
So, lets start with the elephant in the room… did Utah swing toward Harris? There were some graphs floating around with preliminary data showing this.
The answer is No. It did not. A few votes are still being counted in Utah, but most are now reported. Every single state swung toward Trump. However, if you look at the table below the map, Utah is one of five states that swung the least toward Trump. Interestingly, New York swung the most toward him.
How Did Utah Mormons Vote Vs. Non-Utah Mormons?
Well, there is actually a bit of a story here. When we look at the data filtered to Utah Mormons, there isn’t much change at all. Slightly more voted for Trump which mirrors what we see at the state-level.
However, when we look at how the overall Mormon vote changed, we see a gap. Note, this isn’t from Romney to Trump like a previous post, this is from Trump 2020 to Trump 2024
All Mormons voted similarly to Utah Mormons in 2020, but in 2024, we see a sizable shift toward Harris among Mormons overall. This means, of course, that non-Utah Mormons moved away from Trump while Utah Mormons stayed. This is interesting because from what I understand, typically Utah Mormons and Non-utah mormons are pretty similar in most ways.
I can only see the topline results in the Fox News Voter Analysis, so once other results are available where I have access to more data I can investigate this trend further.
Utah Voter Turnout
While the US Elections Project does not have an estimate of voter turnout, Florida Election Lab does. So, I added data points there from my previous chart.
It looks like from 2020 turnout has decreased both in Utah and nationally. National turnout decrease makes sense as fewer places have vote-by-mail options in 2024 compared with covid 2020, but I’m not sure why Utah voter turnout decreased.