Mormons Could Help Kamala Harris Win Arizona

In battleground Arizona, one group of voters could help swing the race for Vice President Kamala Harris: members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mormons had been among the most loyal Republican voting blocs until Donald Trump took over the GOP. Trump’s campaign struggled to win over LDS voters in both 2016 and 2020, and polling shows more than half have negative views of Trump.
President Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020 by some 10,000 votes. His gains among Latter-day Saints in Arizona may have amounted to about 18,000 votes, according to polling by Y2 Analytics.
With more than 440,000 Latter-day Saints living in Arizona, their votes could help Harris secure Arizona’s 11 Electoral College votes in November.
A group called Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz has been ramping up its efforts to elect Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“We’re doing a mix of activities: outreach over social media, organizing events online like August’s national call that drew an audience of over 1,400 people, and in-person gatherings in key states such as Arizona and Nevada to volunteer for the campaign,” Rob Taber, the group’s national director, told Newsweek.
Taber described Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz as “a big tent made up of Republicans, independents, and Democrats” who see Harris “as a breath of fresh air.”
Many Latter-day Saints “are ready to turn the page on the Trump era,” he said. Harris “stands for pro-family policies, especially on the cost of housing, protecting in vitro fertilization, and lowering the number of women who die in or shortly after childbirth. We also align much more closely to her balanced approach to immigration reform and appreciate her willingness to tackle price-gouging while promoting entrepreneurship.”
But “most fundamentally, she respects the Constitution, including accepting the results of our elections—which is crucial for making the American experiment work.”
Speakers on the organizing call on August 6—the day Harris announced Walz as her running mate—spoke about how their faith compels them to vote for the Democratic presidential ticket in November.
Among them was an Arizona Republican who recently endorsed Harris for president: John Giles, the mayor of Mesa, a city once ranked as the most conservative in the country.
Trump is “more than willing to compromise the rule of law and the United States Constitution to further his own gains,” Giles said on the call. “I think that we have a particular mission as Latter-day Saints to step up and point those things out to our friends inside the church and outside as well.”
He urged people to help “our mission to hopefully duplicate what happened four years ago and have a Democratic victory in Arizona in the presidential election.”
Giles had called on his fellow Arizona Republicans to put “country over party” and reject Trump in an op-ed for The Arizona Republic in late July. “This year too much is at stake to vote Republican at the top of the ticket,” he wrote.
Jacob Rugh, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at church-run Brigham Young University, said on the call that data suggests LDS voters are set to back the Harris-Walz ticket “more than any other presidential ticket in 60 years.”
The surge in support could be especially significant in Arizona, where areas of Maricopa County with the most LDS chapels were most likely to flip to Democrat in 2020, Rugh told Newsweek.
“If the trends we found in 2020 in the heavily LDS East Valley of Maricopa County (greater Phoenix area) continue, more and more suburban Phoenix precincts will flip blue and more and more votes will trickle in for Harris in what will no doubt be another close election—where every vote counts,” he said.
Rugh noted that LDS women have been particularly active in organizing on the ground to reject Trump.
“This is just one of many groups,” he said. “Many have organized online and offline.”
The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is “a breaking point for LDS voters who believe the American Constitution is divinely inspired and that the Capitol attack was an illegal attempt to subvert that constitution they revere so much,” Rugh added.
“We know from the detailed audits that well over 100,000 Arizona Republican voters cast a straight ticket GOP vote in 2020 with the one exception of NOT voting for Trump. Those numbers will rise for sure in the aftermath of January 6th.”