Introducing: Mormdep
"Mormon Depolarization", and the race to win Utah
A campaign is a job interview. A candidate or party makes a pitch to voters comprised of promises about policy, evidence of credibility, and personal appeal. Sometimes the pitch follows ideological lines, but sometimes it’s religious or ethnic. Different groups are likely to have different needs, and we shouldn’t cringe or shy away from it. As long as the pitch is rooted in respect, I don’t believe it’s bad or wrong for an outsider to make that pitch along demographic lines.
With that out of the way, let me introduce a new pitch we are making here at Floor Fights: LDS voters should leave the Republican Party and vote strategically with Democrats.
Moreover, the Democratic Party should invest time, attention, priority decisions, and resources into winning suburban and urban LDS voters who might split from the Republican Party.
President Trump owes a major portion of his 2024 victory to increased numbers of black men voting Republican. The process of black men voting against the Democratic party was called “Racial Depolarization”, or “Racedep” in some online circles. This swing in voting behavior was a result of a long period of cross pressure on cultural issues, the failures of the Democratic Party to address this group’s needs, and a unique cultural moment wherein right wing politics appealed to young men of all races.
While this might not be a permanent realignment, and the benefits for this group seem so far to be mostly symbolic and aesthetic, there is a clear relationship here. There is a group ill suited for the coalition they are a part of, attention is given and space is made for that group by a different coalition, and a significant portion of this group changes allegiances.
The same is possible with Mormon voters. LDS youth were the group with THE biggest leftward swing in the 2024 election. Provo Utah, home of Brigham Young University, saw a 50+% swing to the left in 2024. Utah is the youngest state in the country, with a median age of 31.5. Utah has had solid showings for an independent candidate from Evan McMullin in presidential and senate campaigns, and after Trump’s insane AI Jesus tweets he has hit new lows in the state, a drop driven by religious voters sick of his antics.
Enough LDS voters could be persuaded to vote strategically against the GOP to swing major elections and change the face of politics in LDS-heavy states. This would be a process of Mormon depolarization. Mormdep.
Achieve a little mormdep, just a little, and you get big gains in Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado.
And of course, the upside of investing time, attention, consideration, and resources in places previously thought unwinnable is that you can never predict where political talent might come from, or what your investment might turn up.
Who knows, maybe an LDS Democrat from a swing house seat is just what America needs in 2044.