Can a good Mormon be a good Democrat?

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Adam Brown

It’s true that most Utah Mormons are Republicans, but it’s not true that most Utah Mormons think good Mormons cannot be good Democrats.

On election day, BYU cooperated with other universities to field the Utah Colleges Exit Poll. On the version used in Utah House districts 48 (Beck vs Christensen) and 63 (Sanpei vs Jarvis), I was able to ask this question:

To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following: A person cannot be a good Mormon and a good Democrat.

Respondents could “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree.” From interactions I’ve had with a few folks, I expected to find that a sizable minority of Mormons would agree with the statement, especially Mormon Republicans.

I was wrong. Just about everybody in this state rejects that statement, whether Mormon or not, whether Republican or Democrat, as shown in the figure below. For each group, the blue portion of the bar shows you what percentage reject the statement (click to enlarge):

Whether looking at all respondents (yellow box), Republican respondents (red box), or Democratic respondents (blue box), the pattern is the same: Self-declared “very active” Mormons “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with the statement at roughly the same rates as people who are not Mormon.

Weirdly, though, Mormons who called themselves something other than “very active” (such as “somewhat active,” “not very active,” or “not active”) are more likely than “very active” Mormons to agree that good Mormons cannot be Democrats. I have trouble explaining this finding. Perhaps Mormons who don’t go to church much have picked up from Mormon culture the rightward pull but haven’t heard the repeated over-the-pulpit letters declaring that “principles compatible with the gospel may be found in the platforms of various political parties.”

If you have lived in Utah long, you have probably encountered people who believe, contrary to repeated church statements, that the Republican Party is somehow church-sanctioned. To be fair, of course, you may have also encountered a few Mormon Democrats who feel that the LDS faith requires a lean to the left. But from this poll, it looks like the overwhelmingly majority of Utahns reject these sorts of arguments.

It’s true that most Utah Mormons are Republicans, but it’s not true that most Utah Mormons think good Mormons cannot be good Democrats.

Update: Some folks are concerned that maybe people didn’t answer this question honestly. I worried about that too, so I included a handful of other questions on the exit poll intended to more subtly detect whether folks act like Mormons can’t be Democrats even if they won’t admit it. I’ll post that data in a few days. Stay tuned.

Update 2: Here’s the link to the follow-up post.

About Adam Brown: Adam Brown is an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University and a research fellow with the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. You can learn more about him at his website.

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Is Utah’s turnout low because it has so many young voters?

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Adam Brown

Utah’s youth are not to blame for Utah’s lower-than-average turnout.

In my last post, I showed that voter turnout in Utah is worse than the lieutenant governor’s statistics imply. I admit that the graph I used then was a bit complicated. Here’s a far simpler one. For each even-numbered year since 1980, I’ve subtracted the national average turnout rate (as % of VEP; see my last post) from Utah’s turnout rate. A positive number means that Utah’s turnout was higher than the national average. A negative number means that Utah’s turnout was lower than the national average. Here’s the chart (click to enlarge):

Utah's turnout vs the national average

Utah's turnout vs the national average (click to enlarge)

Utah’s turnout was consistently higher than average from 1980 until 1994. (That’s a 0.4, not a 4.0, in 1994). From 1996 on, Utah has been consistently lower than average. But you can see that it wasn’t 1994-1996 that was decisive. Rather, there was a gradual decline in Utah’s turnout rates after 1982 that has only recently leveled off.

Please take a moment to understand what that chart shows. It shows the difference between Utah’s turnout and the nation’s average turnout. The declining numbers don’t show that turnout nationally is falling. They show that turnout in Utah is falling relative to turnout everywhere else. This problem of falling turnout is Utah’s problem, not the nation’s.

So what is happening in Utah (but not elsewhere) that explains this fall?

Utah’s chief election administrator, lieutenant governor Greg Bell, blames Utah’s youthfulness. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Bell blamed that on the many young voters in Utah, the state with the nation’s lowest average age. Mark Thomas, Bell’s state election director, said only about one-third of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 29 voted this year. “That’s 40 percentage points behind other age groups, so that dragged down our overall numbers,” he said.

The chart above disproves this argument. Yes, Utah has a younger population than other states, but that’s been true since 1980. In the 1990 census, the national median age was 32.8, 8.6 years older than Utah’s median of 26.2 In 2000, the national median was 35.3, 8.2 years older than Utah’s median of 27.1. In 2008, the national median according to Census Dept estimates was 37.6, 9.1 years older than Utah’s 28.5.

The nation’s average age has been around 8 or 9 years older than Utah’s average age throughout the time period shown in the chart. It doesn’t make sense to say that this difference suddenly explains Utah’s lower-than-average turnout. If that were true, then why did Utah have such high turnout 20-30 years ago?

Punchline: Utah’s youth are not to blame for Utah’s lower-than-average turnout. So what is? I’ll come back to that in a future post.

Thanks to Michael McDonald for the turnout data.

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Is Utah’s turnout up or is it down?

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Adam Brown

When measured correctly, Utah’s voter turnout was a paltry 35%, and it wasn’t the best for a midterm since 1994.

The official word from the lieutenant governor’s office is that turnout was great in 2010, the highest for a midterm election since 1994. Several Utah newspapers have passed that report on without asking themselves whether it’s true (e.g. Daily Herald, the Spectrum). It’s not.

Okay, technically it’s true. If you measure turnout as the percent of registered voters who show up, then turnout was at a respectable sounding 51.6 percent. But that’s a silly way to report voter turnout.

When researchers study turnout, they measure it as the percent of eligible voters who show up.1 Eligible voters (in Utah) are citizens, 18 or older, and not currently incarcerated. Because soldiers, missionaries, and others living abroad may have difficulty casting a ballot, we can be generous and remove them from the eligible voter count also.

When measured correctly, Utah’s voter turnout was a paltry 35%, and it wasn’t the best for a midterm since 1994. Check out the chart below, plotting Utah’s turnout against average nationwide turnout (data from Michael McDonald at George Mason University).

Utah's turnout vs national averages, 1980-2010

Utah's turnout vs national averages, 1980-2010 (click to enlarge)

Why would the Lt. Governor’s method show that turnout in 2010 was higher than 2006, 2002, and 1998, but this method shows that turnout in 2010 was worse than in all those years except (barely) 2006? Apparently, some people have given up on voting to the point that they no longer even bother to register. And that should bother people who are in charge of running elections.

Turnout percentages are one measure of democracy’s health. If people believe that elections are important, they will register and vote. Estimating Utah’s turnout by looking only at registered voters is like estimating Utah’s average wealth by looking only at those who are employed.

Kudos to the Tribune for reporting clearly on these issues.

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Why is Becky Lockhart the new speaker?

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Adam Brown

Don’t be too quick to conclude that leadership style alone decided the Speaker’s race, or that outside actors were decisive, or that money bought the Speaker’s race. It looks like Lockhart could have won on ideology alone.

Officially, the battle for speaker was not decided on ideological grounds. In explaining her narrow victory over David Clark in the Speaker’s race, Becky Lockhart explained that many House Republicans were simply tired of Clark’s “heavy hand.” Maybe. But it seems likely that ideology also played a role.

If we set aside other factors, we would expect that House Republicans would elect the most “representative” House Republican as their leader–that is, the member whose views most reflect the caucus’s. Political scientists call this the median voter theorem. The theorem isn’t perfect. This logic assumes, for example, that personality and leadership skill have no role, which is almost certainly untrue. But bear with me for a moment and see what an ideology-based analysis suggests.

Utah House Republicans shown from most moderate (top) to most conservative (bottom). Clark is in red, Lockhart in blue. Yellow highlighting indicates the median member. If there is an even number of legislators, then there are two medians. Click to enlarge.

Based on interest group ratings of each Utah legislator,1 David Clark’s views placed him exactly in the middle of the House Republican caucus ideologically at the end of the 2008 legislative session. It was only natural, then, that House Republicans would make him speaker prior to the 2009 session. This appears to be a perfect manifestation of the median voter theorem. (Click the small thumbnail image at right to see a table showing how this works. The thumbnail’s caption explains what’s going on.)

Following the 2010 legislative session, interest group scores still placed David Clark closer to the middle of the House Republican caucus than Becky Lockhart (see the middle column in the table). Based on this, we might have expected Clark to stay on as Speaker.

But then something happened. In November, House Republicans picked up 5 seats formerly held by Democrats, increasing the House Republican caucus from 53 to 58 members. Many of these newcomers appear to be conservative, not moderate (e.g. Lavar Christensen).

Moreover, 10 incumbent Republicans either voluntary retired (e.g. Sheryl Allen) or lost in primary challenges (e.g. Steve Mascaro). Every departing Republican was more moderate than Clark, and many of the newcomers strike me as more conservative than him. If we assume that all the newcomers are at least as conservative as Lockhart (not a stretch, although I can’t be sure until after the 2011 session), then Lockhart would lie exactly at the center of the new House Republican caucus. (See the right-hand column in the table.)

Add in non-ideological issues like those “heavy hand” complaints, and you swing a couple additional votes (e.g. Mel Brown). But it looks to me like Lockhart could have beat Clark based on ideology alone.

Punchline: Don’t be too quick to conclude that leadership style alone decided the Speaker’s race, or that outside actors were decisive, or that money bought the Speaker’s race. It looks like Lockhart could have won on ideology alone. The new House Republican caucus chose a more conservative leader because the caucus itself is more conservative. Other explanations give Lockhart herself too little credit.

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Are voters biased against Mormons?

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Adam Brown

Quoting from James Rydberg at YouGov’s Model Politics blog (emphasis is mine):

A recent YouGov survey asked 1000 respondents if they would be willing to vote for “a generally well-qualified person” nominated by their party if they learned that candidate had one of the following characteristics. These characteristics range from criminal actions to the candidates’ faith, but consisted primarily of characteristics the public generally views negatively. …

This certainly does not mean that these characteristics determine an election, but this can provide some guidance to candidates: Mitt Romney may not need to worry about his faith, but Tom Cruise might.

You’ll see that Mormons come out mostly neutral, but atheists, Muslims, and scientologists fare worse.

I’d be curious to see, though, whether Republican respondents rated Mormons differently than Democratic respondents.

Update (Nov 24, 2010): Rydberg tells me that there’s not a big partisan difference. In fact, when Republicans and Democrats are asked separately, Republicans are slightly more favorable toward Mormons (but very slightly).

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Is Utah the most Republican state?

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Adam Brown

Utah is #1 most Republican, #9 most conservative, and also #17 most conservative.

On election day, Utah’s Republicans increased their veto-proof legislative majorities by 5 seats in the House and 1 in the Senate. Does that make Utah the most Republican state?

Hard to say. You could compare states by seeing how many legislators are Republican, which favors Idaho over Utah. Or you could just look at the voters. But even there, voters send mixed messages.

In terms of how many voters tell pollsters that they are Republican, Utah is indeed the most Republican state. But in terms of how many voters tell pollsters they are conservative when asked to identify their own general ideology, Utah ranks #9. And if you look at how many voters take conservative stances on specific policy questions, Utah ranks #17.

The weird thing is that all those data come from the same set of polls. So Utah is #1 most Republican, #9 most conservative, and also #17 most conservative.

These numbers come from a study that looked at polling data from 2008, but I’d imagine that things haven’t changed much since then. You can read more about the study here.

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Why did Mike Lee send those emails?

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Adam Brown

In 2008, some political scientists from Yale found that they could boost turnout considerably (by 8.1 percentage points) if they warned folks that everybody on their street would receive a postcard after the election reporting who had voted and who had not.

Apparently, somebody on Mike Lee’s campaign staff follows the political science research–but not as closely as he should.

Shortly before election day, Republican Senate candidate Mike Lee reportedly sent an email to his Republican supporters urging them to remind their neighbors to vote. Emails like that aren’t uncommon. But Lee’s went a step further. Each recipient received a list of neighbors’ names and contact information. The email indicated that the names belonged to registered Republicans who had not turned out in a recent election.

Some folks who received these emails were disturbed. They found it strange that Lee would publicize other voters’ turnout records and contact information. (Read more in the Daily Herald.) So why did Mike Lee do it?

I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing that Mike Lee had a staffer who follows the political science literature. In 2008, some political scientists from Yale found that they could boost turnout considerably (by 8.1 percentage points) if they warned folks that everybody on their street would receive a postcard after the election reporting who had voted and who had not. That’s a huge effect, and the postcards were inexpensive to send. (Read more about this study.)

An 8.1 percentage point boost in turnout is enough to swing a competitive election (not that Lee’s was competitive). No wonder Lee tried it.

There’s one problem. The folks who published the originally study mentioned in a footnote that they received many angry phone calls and letters from people who were upset that their voting histories had been made public. Maybe Lee’s campaign missed that footnote. Press coverage made it sound like they got some blowback of their own.

More recent research has tried to find other ways of exploiting this “peer pressure” effect without provoking negative blowback. If future candidates want to try something like what Lee did, they might want to read up on this more recent research. I have reviewed this more recent research elsewhere.

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A new blog

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Adam Brown

I created this blog with the intention of bringing a non-partisan, political science perspective to Utah politics. In the near future, I plan to invite a few colleagues to contribute also. My goal is not to post partisan opinions or to push certain policies. Instead, I hope to publish two kinds of posts:

  • Original research about Utah politics. Political science professors regularly conduct polls and other studies of Utah politics. Some of these studies make their way into academic journals, but many of these findings would be interesting to Utah’s politicos. I hope to use this site to publicize them.
  • Research-based commentary on Utah politics. Frequently, we’ll read in the paper about how the best-financed candidate won more votes, or how 2010 was an anti-incumbent election year, or how the nuances of the legislative process may have made it harder for some bills to pass. As it happens, there are large research literatures within political science on many of these questions. I hope to occasionally share these insights to shed light on how politics works.

All posts will be written by political science professors. Occasionally top students may be invited to post, but student posts will be clearly marked as such.

Although I do not plan to post opinion pieces, I should state very clearly that my views are my own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, religious leaders, wife, cats, dogs, or fish. Okay, I don’t really have cats, dogs, or fish. But you get the point. The same is true of anybody else that posts here.

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