The Daily Populous Monday August 19th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by esquire.com and submitted by Coffee_n_wifi

I have pretty much given up on waiting for lots of people to advance The Washington Post’s mega scoop about the possibility that the Republican candidate for president might have been sublet to the government of Egypt. A consensus seems to be building that there is no “smoking gun” to prove that former attorney general Bill Barr squashed an FBI probe into the matter, which I guess is the most important part of the story, although Egyptian bankers hustling ten large in small bills into duffel bags and shipping them Trumpward seems fairly compelling in a Donald Westlake/Elmore Leonard kind of way. So, okay, let’s look at another story that’s largely sailing under the radar. The former president* seems to be losing the Mormons. From the American Survey Center:

In his past two elections, Trump vastly underperformed previous Republican nominees. In an interesting study, the American Communities Project found that GOP support in “LDS Enclaves,” a cluster of 39 counties in the Mountain West, cratered in 2016. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of voters in LDS Enclaves voted Republican in 2012, but that share dropped to less than half (47 percent) in 2016. It rebounded in 2020 but remained well below that of past Republican candidates. LDS voters nationwide followed a similar pattern, as I noted in a previous newsletter. Support for Republican presidential candidates previously topped 80 percent before dropping nearly 20 points in 2016.

It’s next to impossible for a Republican candidate to be so utterly, obviously rancid as to give LDS voters agita. But the former president* seems to have done it, and as Axios points out, it may be enough to be a significant factor in Arizona and even, perhaps, in Utah.

In a faith that stresses lawfulness, the Jan. 6 insurrection and rise of election denialism have soured some voters on the GOP, giving Harris a new advantage, Taber argued. During Tuesday’s call, BYU sociology professor Jacob Rugh pointed to a 2022 midterm analysis in which he concluded election denialism produced a bigger “penalty” in Utah than in other states, calling it a “breaking point” for some LDS voters.

I don’t care how giddy the past couple weeks have made the Democrats; they can’t possibly hope to win Utah. But Arizona is a different pile of sand. Losing a chunk of the Mormon vote in Arizona, either because the LDS voters stayed home or because they actually jumped the fence, would be a serious blow to any GOP hopes of regaining the state’s ten electoral votes. It would also be a major embarrassment to the Republican party. That, of course, assumes that the GOP is capable of embarrassment anymore.

brandido1 on August 19th, 2024 at 11:33 UTC »

Mitt Romney needs to step up here and campaign for Harris.

Maleficent-Car992 on August 19th, 2024 at 11:29 UTC »

The fact that anyone “religious” would vote for a greedy, lying rapist like Trump is proof that most religious people have no real morals or principles and nothing they say about anything matters in this world. Anyone religious voting for Trump can take their moral high horse and shove it. God bless!

buttmunch2024 on August 19th, 2024 at 10:08 UTC »

For some reason, they think racism and rape is off-brand for the GOP. They want that ranting old slob OUT.