Latter-day Saint voters are less overwhelmingly Republican than they  once were but have warmed to President Donald Trump significantly,  according to a new analysis of how members of the faith voted in recent  elections.

The research, released Monday and done by political scientist Ryan Burge,  an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, looked at the  partisanship and voting behavior of members of The Church of Jesus  Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2008. He found a significant split in  party affiliation between older and younger members of the faith, as  well as an almost even break in party support among Latter-day Saint  voters who consider themselves to be ideologically moderate.

“The  LDS have not been turning out in huge numbers for the Democrats in a  long time,” Burge wrote. “Mormons were certainly no fans of Barack Obama  — he only received 24% of their votes in 2008 and did even worse when  matched up against Mitt Romney in 2012.”

Romney, one of the  country’s most prominent Latter-day Saints, received 84% of the  Latter-day Saint vote in 2012, the highest percentage of votes cast for a  Republican by members of the faith in the recent election years Burge  considered.

And, in 2012, according to Burge, three-quarters of  all Latter-day Saint voters identified themselves as being affiliated  with the GOP, while 16% said they were Democrats. But 12 years later,  just 58% of Latter-day Saint voters self-identified as Republicans,  while 25% identified as Democrats and 17% identified as independents, up  from 9% in 2012.

It was the 2016 election, the researcher wrote,  that seemed most telling, as the Latter-day Saint Republican vote that  year dropped more than 30 percentage points, down to just 52%. “But it’s  not like Hillary Clinton was beloved, either,” he noted. That year,  like Romney in the previous presidential election, a fellow member of  the faith was on the national ticket.

“A whole bunch of Latter-day  Saints threw their support behind [third-party candidate] Evan  McMullin,” Burge wrote, “and he actually received more votes than the  Democratic nominee.”

Trump, however, ultimately won 52% of the Latter-day Saint vote that year.

And  without a prominent third-party candidate running in 2020, 66% of  Latter-day Saints voted for Trump in 2020 and again in 2024 — even as  the share of Latter-day Saint voters identifying as members of the GOP  fell.

“In 2016, 64% of LDS were Republicans but Trump only got 52%  of their votes,” Burge wrote. “In 2024, 58% were Republicans but Trump  got 66% of the vote. It seems that there’s just a lot of slippage  between partisanship and actual voting behavior happening here.”

Trump,  in 2016, won Utah — the church’s world headquarters — with 45.5% of the  vote. Clinton received 27.5% of the vote in the state, while McMullin  won 21.5% of the Utah vote. In Utah’s next presidential election, Trump  won just over 58% of the vote share, while Biden won 37.6%. Trump’s  margin increased slightly in Utah in 2024, when he garnered 59.4% of  Utahns’ votes.

Latter-day Saints who identify as ideologically  moderate, meanwhile, split almost evenly in 2024, as 46% voted for Trump  and 50% voted for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. This, according to  Burge, was a rightward swing since 2020, when 32% of moderate Latter-day  Saints voted for Trump and 59% voted for Joe Biden.

“I’ve always  had a hunch that this group of people are the ‘canary in the coal mine’  when trying to understand religion and politics,” Burge wrote. “Lots of  people like to think of themselves as intellectually superior because  they take a middle road, but an election is a binary choice. You’ve got  to pick one side or the other and that will tell you a lot about their  political allegiance.”

Burge also found that young Latter-day  Saints are “less enamored” with the Republican Party than their older  counterparts — but that they too have warmed to Trump, who had a 16%  jump in support from 2020 to 2024 among Latter-day Saint voters between  ages 18 and 35. There was a similar trend among Latter-day Saint voters  ages 36 to 50.

And since a dip in 2016, Latter-day Saints over 50,  he concluded, have emerged as a solidly Republican voting bloc. “[T]his  group of voters,” he wrote, “is as Republican as white evangelicals on  Election Day.”