How Mormons Fit Into The Religious Right
The Pew Political Typology by Religion
Perhaps some of you in this newsletter know, but I am a fan of typologies. In fact, nearly a year ago I made my own for Mormons (categorizing 4 groups of Mormons from mathematical clustering). Pew Research Center released their 2026 Political Typology ahead of the midterms where they divide the American public into 9 categories. I couldn’t resist and I emailed Pew for some breaks for Mormons specifically and other religions as well. So, today we’ll explore how Mormons break out on Pew’s Political typology and compare and contrast with a few other religious groups.
As a quick reminder or quick intro to their typology if you haven’t seen it, here are the groups and a short summary about each…
Leftward Progressives (7%): Young, intensely progressive across the board; often skeptical of the institutional Democratic Party.
Loyal Liberals (11%): Highly educated, affluent, and reliably mainstream Democratic; strong supporters of global alliances and the social safety net.
Left-Out Left (12%): Democratic-leaning but economically strained; deeply cynical about the political system and the future.
Order and Opportunity Left (18%): The largest group; leans Democratic on the economy but favors strict immigration, law and order, and economic individualism.
Tuned-Out Middle (9%): Young, diverse, and financially stressed; largely disengaged from politics and news with highly mixed, moderate views.
Pragmatic and Polite Right (11%): The oldest group; economically conservative but moderate on race and foreign policy. Highly prize political civility and institutional decorum.
Unconventional Right (12%): Conservative on culture and immigration, but younger and more moderate on abortion and the safety net; somewhat ambivalent about Trump.
Faith First Conservatives (12%): Highly religious and deeply conservative; want government policies to actively reflect and support traditional moral values.
No Apologies Right (9%): Combative, populist conservatives; champion intense nationalism, hardline immigration restrictions, and absolute military superiority.
If you are curious where you fit, take the quiz to find out for yourself!
So How Do These Groups Break Out By Religion?
As with most of our data points for a small mormon population newsletter, for the survey Pew clustered on, there were 136 Mormons putting the margin of error at +/- 11.5pts. So interpret these results suggestively. However, I still think we can see some interesting insight.
Let me point out a few things…
For Mormons, the Faith First Conservatives and Pragmatic and Polite Right are the most dominant political types, and if you read the summaries for those types, I feel like they represent the current political landscape of Mormons pretty well. Also interestingly, there are more Mormons in the tuned-out middle group than the US overall which I can also see.
The most obvious comparison for this newsletter is White Evangelicals vs. Mormons. And honestly, it’s a pretty good way to sum up how Mormons fit into the Religious Right. Mormons are about half as likely to be “No Apologies Right” and “Faith First Conservatives” and more likely to be the “Pragmatic and Polite Right” compared to white evangelicals. This is another great way to show some of the political divergence between Evangelical Christians and Mormons. Mormons breakout more similarly to Catholics composition-wise, but Mormons are a bit more likely to be conservative. I’ve actually written about this trend before!
What do you think about this chart? Are there trends or insights I missed? Let me know what you think below and see you next week!
There is no code this week. It is a chart made from an excel file Pew Research Center sent me!
That’s cool Pew would share data with you! Seeing how different the LDS distribution is from everyone else but white evangelicals is really interesting. And the tuned out people, it tracks haha.
Appreciate you sharing the cool data you get on Mormons!