Christian Sager

Thinking with Ryan Burge: Concerning young Latter-day Saints, third parties and life post-Trump

Thinking with Ryan Burge: Concerning young Latter-day Saints, third parties and  life post-Trump

There are times, when you are reading Ryan Burge on Twitter (which journalists should, of course, be doing) and you see signs that he has read some religion-news related item somewhere that has caused him to do that thing that he does — sift through lots of poll numbers looking for a new angle.

What we have here is a pair of tweets linked to a Christian Sagers think piece at The Deseret News that I had missed. The headline: “Are Latter-day Saint voters turning blue?”

That’s blue as in learning toward the Democratic Party, not feeling sad or depressed. That would be a huge news story hinting at other possible changes among centrists on moral and cultural issues.

Burge send me this comment containing what he thinks is the key question about this possible news twist.

The big question is: have younger LDS really abandoned the Republican Party? I don't think that we will ever know for sure until Trump is off the ballot completely.

So where to begin? Here is the overture in Sager’s piece, noting that a recent:

Cook Political Report concludes that all four of Utah’s congressional districts are among the most Democratic-trending in the country. Latter-day Saint voters in Arizona doubled their Democratic turnout from 2016.

Meanwhile, a Democratic activist group with whom I spoke recently is optimistic about converting Latter-day Saint women, traditionally Republican, who it believes to be rejecting the GOP in greater percentages than other religious demographics.

That candidate Donald Trump fared so poorly among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2016 was met with astonishment in national media coverage and a flurry of conjectures that Latter-day Saints were up for grabs.

And yet, the political status of the Latter-day Saint voting bloc doesn’t fit into a tidy narrative. Yes, there are signs that some Latter-day Saints are reconsidering the modern GOP, but at the same time there are suggestions that Latter-day Saints remain reliably Republican.

Sure enough, there are other complications that need to be considered when looking at conservatives in this Donald Trump-warped political age.


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