Dear Mormon Voters of the American West (But Actually, Mainly Just Arizona): Let's Try This One More Time, Okay?
[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]
The presidential election campaign will come to an end 50 days from today. A lot could change in 50 days, but probably won’t. Ours is a deeply divided nation, as anyone who pays attention to politics already well knows, and that division is significantly the result of structural and sociological factors which there is no reason to believe anything less than divine interventions, at least in the short-term, could alter. Now, as a Mormon actually believes that occasionally there really are divine interventions into history, I do in fact hold out hope for some dramatic change in our calcified political culture. But assuming such is not likely, I, like all the other Latter-day Saints for Harris/Walz out there, have to look in the meantime for small ways that we--and today, I mean specifically my religious tribe--can make whatever meaningful differences we can over the next seven weeks or so.
Thankfully, there’s actual evidence in support of that hope. More than eight years ago, I speculated hopefully on the possibility that American Mormon voters, fully two-thirds of which consistently cast ballots for Republican candidates--and yes, that number has declined slightly in recent cycles, but it still remains mostly constant--might actually balk at the appalling Donald Trump carrying their party’s banner as a presidential candidate, and vote for a non-Republican in sufficient numbers to actually interfere his path to victory. None of that happened.
Instead the Mormon corridor, Idaho through Arizona, embraced the Orange Man, or at least contained a majority of voters who concluded that a narcissistic, vindictive, paranoid, borderline racist and sexist liar, adulterer, and con man was a better choice for the presidency than someone who wouldn’t appoint opponents of abortion rights to the Supreme Court, and directed their states’ Electoral College votes accordingly. (We can curse that stupid 18th-century leftover another time; I made my case against it over a decade ago, and haven't changed my mind since.) And the nation, including all us American Mormons, got the Trump administration as a reward. Which thankfully came to an end in 2020.
What changed in 2020? Again, as everyone who follows politics knows, the changes that mattered were overwhelming in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The place that my people--or rather, the portion of my people who recognize that supporting Donald Trump for president is, as my blogging colleague Sam Brunson recently argued, basically antithetical to any proper understanding what it means, as a 21st-century American, to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ[1]--had in those changes was extremely minimal. But that’s not the case for Arizona, the fifth of the seven so-called “battleground states” which Biden was able to get win back from Trump nearly four years ago. There, Arizona Mormons mattered. And they need to again.
This isn’t anything new to the political junkies out there, or even just ordinary folks who pay attention to political news. The role which Latter-day Saint voters--and especially, when you really drill down on the demographics, white married middle- and upper-middle-class female Latter-day Saint voters--played in Biden’s 2020 electoral college victory, and could play in Harris potentially prevailing in the Grand Canyon State in 50 days, has attracted the attention of Newsweek, Daily Kos, Axios, Esquire, NPR, Politico, and more. The numbers, after all, don’t lie. It seems likely that about 6% of all the votes cast for a presidential candidate in 2020 in Arizona were cast by members of the Mormon church; that makes for about 200,000 votes, and Biden won that state by less than 11,000, whereas Trump had prevailed over Clinton in 2016 by over 60,000 votes. Did an ideological or political minority among Mormon voters more generally make up the majority of that 70,000+ vote switch in 2020? Did they make up a plurality of it? Did they merely contribute to that switch? Whichever way it was, it was a noticeable difference, one which the sensible minority of LDS voters across the state and elsewhere are rightly busy building upon as I write.
Of course, it would be nice to believe this could be replicated elsewhere in the Mormon corridor, but Utah and Idaho are, frankly, lost causes for at least another generation or more. (I suspect that the entrenchment of a long-standing local conservative LDS leadership culture in states with a much higher relative portions of self-identifying Mormons—42 % in Utah, 26% in Idaho—works against the likelihood of dissident LDS voters being able to leverage their ballots productively within their own groups, but I don’t have the data to judge.) That’s not to mitigate the praise owed to multiple organizations in both states that have been fighting the good fight. Mormon Women for Ethical Government, for example, a wonderful organization with chapters throughout the Mormon corridor and beyond, didn’t exist in 2016, but since that time has done important educational and empowering work among LDS voters and others (officially non-partisan work, to be sure, but given that they describe Donald Trump as “a U.S. president who used his position to generate anger, willfully deceive the public, divide our nation, and weaken our systems of government,” it’s really not hard to see where they stand).
But it is in Arizona, the land of life-long Republican and convinced Harris-supporter John Giles, the Mormon mayor of Mesa, where these kinds of grass-roots actions may genuinely make a difference. Not a huge one; as Giles himself admitted--to his frustration--to the Mormon Land podcast, most of his (and my) co-religionists are too committed to Fox News-enabled narratives about the immigrant or the transgender threat to actually take step back and consider how wrong-headed their continued allegiance to a party led by Donald Trump actually is. That’s why he hopes his party will suffer a resounding defeat come November, so the GOP can--or so he hopes, anyway--start to rebuild itself into something actually constructive. Again, barring some kind of divine event, that almost certainly won’t happen, unfortunately. But little victories matter, sometimes even matter in a big way.
Consider: what if Trump’s current 1% advantage over Harris in Arizona--which even the Trump campaigns knows is soft, resulting in a desperate scramble to activate every low-propensity MAGA Republican voter they can find--drops by half, or even disappears, over the next three or four weeks, with wise LDS voters knocking doors, making calls, placing signs, donating funds, politely signaling in church meetings, and overall just basically modeling for their fellow church members (again, perhaps mostly white, college-educated, middle- or upper-middle-class married female church members) that being a supporter of Vice President Harris and Governor Walz doesn’t turn you into anything disturbing, certainly not anything as disturbing as one of Trump’s ridiculous and pathetic rants last Tuesday? What if they consistently leaned into, in private conversations and social media posts, the LDS Church’s own profoundly (though of course never formally) anti-Trumpish statements and actions when it comes to immigration, posing it against Trump's insistence that suburban women desperately want to be protected from dangerous, low-income, non-English-speaking people moving in next door, and by so doing slowly turn at least a few more faithful, committed, believing, church-attending Mormons in Mesa and Chandler and Gilbert and Tempe and Tucson towards reason, thus evaporating much of Trump’s advantage across the state? That would force the Trump campaign, in the final month of the campaign, to make some hard choices, either of which would benefit the GOP's electoral defeat in the state: they could double-down on securing Arizona, pulling needed resources out of Pennsylvania or Georgia, or they could stick with their current plan, and potentially let Arizona trend away from them. Which, if you do the Electoral College math, would make it possible for Harris to still win even if she ends up capturing only three of the remaining six battleground states. (Well, actually four, because Harris will carry Nevada, as Clinton did in 2016 and Biden did in 2020; the LDS vote won’t make that much difference there, but between them and Hispanic voters and union members, it’ll be enough to win. Harry Reid’s reach, bless his soul, remains long.)
So anyway, Grand Canyon state Mormons, this is your moment: be the White Horse that never showed up in 2016, but which charged through Arizona in 2020, and needs to do so again. Do something vital for the health of our country, despite the majority of our tribe not agreeing with you. It’s important, darn it.
[1] While I’m in complete agreement with Sam, I personally wouldn’t put things that way, because I think not voting to make a fascist-adjacent crook president of the United States, while obviously the morally correct position, is also a terribly low measuring bar for determining what, politically speaking, it means to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Religious fan of socialism and communalism that I am, I’m not even sure you can live, much less vote, as a 21st-century American, with our daily lives awash with so much technological excess, economic selfishness, social exclusion, and environmental disregard, and still be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank goodness I believe God is going to save us all anyway, because damn, we all (myself most definitely included) will surely need it.
