Mormons Are Disassociating With The GOP
Looking at Mormon Party Identification Since the 80s
Introduction
Recently, a few articles have come out about how Mormons are less favorable toward Donald Trump than previous Republican candidates. Specifically, they say the distaste still lingers here in 2024 and younger Mormons may be moving away more quickly than other younger folks. While we won't dive into the age X party affiliation breakdown given our limited sample size with the GSS, let's look at some overall trends.
Data
The data in this post is from the GSS which has data from 1978 to present. Unfortunately, due to the limited sample size of the GSS (having a few thousand respondents each wave), it can be difficult to see trends. For this chart, I combined the data by decade to try and see a trend. Each data point for mormons represent around 150-200 people, but it should be interpreted with caution as the respondents are spread out over a decade after all. The hope is that we will be able to see large shifts and trends for our question. Perhaps at a later date, I will use the CES data which has larger samples to look closer at some of these trends.
Chart
Let's talk about some takeaways looking at our chart...
In the US overall, the number of true independents has increased ~7 percentage points since the 1980s taking from the Democratic party.
For Mormons, we see a similar trend with true independents increasing; however, Mormons who previously identified with both parties are leaving it seems.
Though, it is important to remember to interpret these with caution as these Mormon datapoints are being combined over a decade with only ~ 150 people for each data point. I look forward to confirming these results with other datasets with a higher Mormon sample size.
Discussion
Why are more people identifying as independents? Why could this trend be especially pronounced among Mormons?