Why Are Latter-day Saints Moving Left?
New Yougov report shows that LDS have moved 20 points left the last 15 years while everyone else moved right.
Why Are Latter-day Saints Moving Left?
YouGov released a report last week with a striking chart. Throughout the period from 2007 to 2025, Latter-day Saints shifted nearly 20 points toward the Democratic party while nearly every other religious group shifted right. They went from the most Republican religious group in America to the second most Republican, moving in sharp opposition to White Evangelicals who continued consolidating around the GOP.
Pretty shocking! But is it what it seems?
Regular Mormon Metrics readers may already have some intuition about what’s driving this. I’ve written previously about the McMullin-to-Democrat pipeline — how a meaningful share of Mormons who abandoned Trump in 2016 have since drifted toward the Democratic party rather than returning to the GOP. In that same post, I’ve written about how younger, more educated, and single Mormon women have continued moving away from Trump while older and non-white Mormons have partially warmed back up. And I’ve written about how Mormon and Evangelical political compasses, once nearly identical, have diverged significantly since 2016.
Today I want to show how all of those threads connect — and suggest that it could be an underlying driver of the same thing: the decline of religious commitment among Latter-day Saints.
Two Things Are Declining At The Same Time
As Mormon Metrics readers know, I have been tracking a long-term decline in LDS religious practice and commitment. What I hadn’t fully explored until now is how closely that religious decline tracks with the political one.
When we plot both trends together, the correlation is striking. As the share of deeply committed LDS members has declined, so has Republican identification — nearly in tandem. The two lines move together so consistently that they appear to be measuring the same underlying phenomenon from two different angles.
To understand why, we need to look at who actually makes up the LDS sample.
Net Republican Advantage: Change in the estimated % that identifies or leans toward the Republican Party minus the % that identifies or leans toward the Democratic Party in each time period.
The Pool Is Changing
For this analysis I draw on three religious engagement clusters adapted from the Mormon Typology Report and translated to the Cooperative Election Study data.1 These three groups have very different political profiles. Devout Traditionalists are firmly Republican. Cultural Mormons hover near the political center. Adaptive Believers fall somewhere in between. And critically — those political positions have been pretty stable for years. On economic and social policy attitudes measured through political compass analysis, the clusters have barely moved over time.2
So if the groups themselves haven’t changed politically, what’s driving the aggregate shift?
One answer is composition. The share of LDS respondents who qualify as Devout Traditionalists has declined steadily — from 52% of the LDS sample in 2008-12 down to just 39% by 2021-25. Meanwhile Cultural Mormons have grown from about 21% to 31%.
This matters enormously for the aggregate numbers. Every time someone drifts from the Devout bucket into the Adaptive or Cultural bucket, they move into a less Republican group.
This is the first explanation for the 20-point shift.
But, There’s More Going On Then Only A Compositional Change
When you look at party identification by cluster over time, in the core devout groups we can see some movement.
Cultural Mormons are essentially flat throughout the entire period — hovering around 10-15% net Republican advantage regardless of what’s happening in the broader political environment. They were never strongly Republican and haven’t changed. That’s consistent with the compositional story.
But the Devout and Adaptive lines are not flat. Both decline away from the Republican party, particularly after 2016. Devout Traditionalists went from about 67% net Republican advantage to around 50%. Adaptive Believers dropped even more sharply, from about 48% to around 30%.
Here’s the key insight: when you look at those same groups on a political compass measuring actual economic and social attitudes, they don't seem to have moved much. What changed is their willingness to wear the Republican label — likely not what they actually believe. Latter-day Saints may not have changed what they believe, but they did change what they’re willing to call themselves.
That’s not realignment. That’s dealignment.
Who Is Actually Moving?
So which Latter-day Saints are driving both the religious and political shifts? The answer turns out to be the same people.
Look at these two charts side by side (both from previous Mormon Metrics analyses). The first shows the Mormon age gap in voting — young Mormons collapsing toward Democrat post-2016 while older Mormons hold their Republican vote. The second shows the Mormon age gap in religious engagement — young Mormons losing Devout status fastest while older Mormons hold steady.
The pattern is almost identical. Same age groups moving. Same direction. Same timing. Young Mormons are losing their Devout status while they are losing their Republican vote. Older Mormons are holding on both dimensions.
This isn’t a coincidence. It’s the same people doing both things simultaneously. The 18-30 cohort that dropped from 57% Devout to 37% Devout is the same cohort that is now hovering near zero net Republican vote share. The 31-45 group that dropped from 55% to 38% Devout is the same group showing the steepest political movement away from Trump. Meanwhile the 66+ group is flat on both — still about 47% Devout, still firmly Republican.
Religious disengagement and partisan loosening are happening to the same people, in the same age groups, at the same time. Whether one is causing the other is a question this data can’t fully answer. But the connection is hard to ignore.
Two Explanations Not One
Putting this together, at least two distinct things help explain the LDS leftward shift in party identification:
First, composition. The Devout bloc is shrinking as secularization draws more LDS members toward lower religious engagement. Because lower engagement members are in aggregate less Republican (in the data we have), the overall shifts left mechanically as the pool changes.
Second, partisan dealignment. Even among high-practice members who are classified as Devout or Adaptive, the Trump era appears to have created some friction with their Republican identification. Their values and policy views may not have changed. But the Republican party’s direction under Trump conflicted enough with LDS cultural norms — civility, institutional trust, character in leadership — that some members stopped calling themselves Republicans even while remaining ideologically conservative.
These two mechanisms could be operating simultaneously and reinforcing each other. Secularization loosens religious attachment. Loosened religious attachment weakens the cultural infrastructure that kept LDS members reliably Republican. And Trump-era Republicanism gave members at every level of engagement a reason to reconsider the partisan label even if their underlying beliefs stayed put.
What Does This Mean?
I don’t think this is a piece about a new wave of liberal Mormons. Latter-day Saints are still +33 Republican. What I am arguing is that the decline in LDS Republican identification is deeply connected to the decline of religious engagement3 — and that the demographic groups I identified in previous posts as driving the political shift are the same groups driving the religious one.
But here’s what makes the LDS case genuinely unusual. Nearly every other major religious group in America moved more Republican over this same period. White Evangelicals consolidated further around the GOP. White Catholics followed. Latter-day Saints moved in the opposite direction — alone.
That asymmetry is the clue that secularization alone can’t be the whole story. If declining religious engagement were the only mechanism, you’d expect other secularizing groups to show the same leftward pattern. They don’t. Something specific to LDS identity is operating here. The most plausible explanation is that LDS institutional culture — its emphasis on civility, institutional trust, and character-based conservatism — created a values conflict with Trump-era Republicanism that simply doesn’t exist for White Evangelicals. The McMullin phenomenon in 2016 made that conflict visible. A meaningful share of Latter-day Saints, including committed ones, chose not to follow the broader rightward consolidation of religious America.
There are still important unanswered questions.
Is religious decline causing LDS members to leave the Republican party — or is aversion to Trump-era Republicanism accelerating religious disengagement? Or maybe there is a third thing that pulls on both of these? To take this analysis to the next level it requires tracking the same individuals over time. These are questions I'm actively investigating and plan to return to in coming posts.
Code for this post is available here.
Cluster definitions: Devout Traditionalist — attends weekly, religion very important, prays several times daily. Adaptive Believer — attends monthly or more, does not meet every Devout criterion. Cultural Mormon — attends church less than monthly. Definitions are approximations of the Pew Religious Landscape typology translated to available CES variables. All party identification figures use leaners counted with their leaned party. Data source: Cooperative Election Study cumulative file 2006-2024 plus 2025 individual year data.
A note on the political compass analysis: the specific survey questions used to construct the economic and social axes varied somewhat across election years as CES question batteries changed over time. While I tracked question consistency carefully across all 198 questions used in this analysis, the compass positions across years reflect partially rather than perfectly comparable measures. The broad stability in cluster positioning is robust to this variation but readers should interpret year-over-year compass comparisons as indicative rather than precise. A full accounting of which questions were used in each year is available in the supplementary Google Sheet linked here.
I also want to be clear that I’m not saying you can’t be a Democrat and a devout LDS member, surely that is not the case. I’m saying that lower levels religious practice and importance among LDS are correlated with weakened ties to the Republican party at the aggregate level.
Really great take here! Amazing research showing something that hasn’t really been dug into. Yes - Utah is shifting blue. No - Utah is not more liberal, it’s a reaction against Trump. This quote in particular nails it: “The most plausible explanation is that LDS institutional culture — its emphasis on civility, institutional trust, and character-based conservatism — created a values conflict with Trump-era Republicanism that simply doesn’t exist for White Evangelicals.”
Well done! 👏👏
"Is religious decline causing LDS members to leave the Republican party — or is aversion to Trump-era Republicanism accelerating religious disengagement? Or maybe there is a third thing that pulls on both of these?" I fall in the 46-65 year-old category and can resonate with the aversion of the Trump-era debacle. Having been raised LDS, in a very conservative John Birch/Phyllis Schlafly driven "I am the Priesthood" home, it was a tough road execrating this warped sense of conservatism from my mind and life. In my later years I have become one of the "everyone else" group. My move hasn't come so much because of secularization, (although it might be that open secularization is causing a deeper and more poignant thoughts about what it means to be human), but more out of a fear of seeing our faith and leaders take a more "we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings" type of approach. When a faith that claims to believe, teach, and live the teachings of Christ but fails to take a stand against the corruption that is so blatantly being paraded in the public forum, it causes one to take a second look. Why is it so difficult to speak up? To stand up? Is it that they are really concerned about the values and principles that are espoused from the pulpit, or is it a reputation they want to protect in a volatile political climate? I find it intriguing and encouraging that the Pope took a stand. It also made me wonder and question why the LDS leaders can't. Call it secularism, I call it clarity and it causes questions and concern. So, a third thing that pulls? The fear of wondering what the faith really stand for.