Ex-Mormons Are the Most Republican Religious Leavers in America

Analyzing data from Pew's Three Religious Landscape Studies

Photo by Simon Huang on Unsplash

Ex-Mormons Aren’t Who You Think They Are

Every once in a while, I find a data point that conflicts with what I thought and makes me double-take. After triple-checking the code, when the finding holds up, these end up being my favorite moments — the ones where the data forces me to update what I thought I knew. Today I had one of those moments.

The dominant narrative — in podcasts, in books, in most coverage of religious disaffiliation — is that ex-Mormons are progressive, secular, and Democrat-aligned. This subset surely exists. But, Ex-Mormons are the only major religious tradition in America where Republicans outnumber Democrats among leavers, 41% to 37%, according to the pew religious landscape study in 2024.

If you've mostly heard from Democrat ex-Mormons, that's probably not an accident. Ex-Mormons who lean liberal — the memoirists, the podcasters, the Twitter voices — may be more likely to talk publicly about leaving the Church. The quiet ex-Mormons, the ones who drifted out, and kept voting Republican, may not be as public with their journey. This is availability bias: the most visible cases shape the mental prototype, even when they're not representative.

That said, ex-Mormons are still much more Democratic-leaning than current Mormons. Some of the reason it feels like there’s a huge political gap between Mormons and ex-Mormons is because there really is one — it’s just that “less Republican than current Mormons” still lands further right than every other religious leaver group in America. This is despite Mormons moving away from the Republican party in recent years.

I can hear the comments now asking about evangelical vs mainline traditions, so I have a few more charts in the footnotes, using 2014 data since not all the data is released for the 2024 version.¹

LDS are tied with Protestants for the largest political gap between current and former members. But the LDS gap starts from a much further-right baseline. Even after the longest political journey of any religious leaver group, ex-Mormons land further right than anyone else.

Mormons Are Moving Away From The Republican Party While Ex-Mormons Move Closer

Since we have three years of Pew Religious Landscape data, a natural question is how the political affiliation of ex-Mormons has changed over time. The answer is surprising: ex-Mormons have moved rightward over the past decade — from 32% Republican in 2014 to 41% in 2024.

The n-sizes here are small (a few hundred ex-Mormons per wave), so the 2014-2024 jump isn’t statistically significant in isolation. But it is interesting that ex-Mormons are now meaningfully separating from leavers of other traditions, who have stayed roughly flat or even moved slightly Democratic over the same period.

What makes this especially strange is that current Mormons have been moving the opposite direction. In my analysis of the Cooperative Election Study, I showed that Mormon members have shed Republican identification over the same period — pulling back from their 2012 peak. So the two LDS populations are diverging. Members are becoming less Republican. Leavers are becoming more Republican.

Where This Leaves Us

Three findings stack up here. First, ex-Mormons are trending the most Republican religious leavers in America — while still having a strong Democrat presence. Second, they’ve travelled the longest political distance from their religion of origin, but started so far right that even that journey leaves them right of every other leaver group. Third, the gap between ex-Mormons and other religious leavers seems to be widening, not closing.

The natural next question — which I’ll take up next week — is what kind of ex-Mormon is driving this directional rightward shift. Is it the Ex-LDS Evangelicals? Is it the Ex-LDS Nones? Older Ex-Mormons?

See you next week.

Code available for this analysis here.

1. Notably, Ex-Mormons have moved more Republican in the most recent time period, so once the data is released for protestant religious traditions, we can explore if Ex-Evangelicals are more Republican than Ex-Mormons.

In 2014, there was still the largest distance across all religions.