Members of Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) in 2017. (Daniel Allott)
WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP issued an executive order shortly after his inauguration halting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, it prompted howls of indignation from liberal civil rights groups.1 But some of the loudest voices of protest came from members of one of America’s most conservative organizations—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, and other prominent Mormons condemned the order.2 The LDS church issued a statement implicitly denouncing the administration’s move.3
Many rank-and-file Mormons also opposed the ban, including Sharlee Mullins Glenn, a children’s book author living outside Salt Lake City. She felt that the ban heartlessly singled out Muslims for dis-favored treatment. After discovering that many other Mormon women were similarly appalled by the ban, Mullins Glenn launched a Facebook group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG).
The page began as a place for Mormon women “to vent frustrations and talk about ideas for saving the country,” Mullins Glenn told me. Within two weeks the group had more than 4,000 members. Over the next year, MWEG became part of what could be called the Mormon resistance movement. But unlike the progressive resistance movement that formed in the wake of Trump’s election, the women of MWEG weren’t marching in pussy hats or calling for Trump’s impeachment (at least not yet). In fact, the group’s leaders insisted they didn’t oppose President Trump at all. Rather, they said they were fighting the dishonesty and callousness they believe define his presidency and the descent into political tribalism they fear will become its legacy.
I found the women of MWEG to be a fascinating case study, highlighting two of the most important questions of the Trump era. First, how would female voters, and particularly well-educated suburban white women, respond to Trump’s presidency? Donald Trump won white women voters in 2016, but some polling suggests they might be the voters most likely to abandon the president. Second, in today’s hyper-polarized environment, is there any room at all for a group of women who aspire to stand as a bulwark against political tribalism?
I first met several MWEG members at Mullins Glenn’s home in Pleasant Grove, about an hour’s drive south of Salt Lake City, two days after Christmas in 2017. The women explained that Mormons have a history of being victims of government-sanctioned discrimination.4 As a consequence, they tend to support accommodating immigration policies. In 2011 majority-Mormon Utah became the first state to establish its own guest worker program.5 Utah is one of just a handful of states that allow illegal immigrants to drive.6
“The travel ban, the refugee, and the immigration issues hit close to home for us,” Mullins Glenn said. “We were once refugees, and so we feel very strongly about caring for people who are without a home and making sure families stay together.”
“I feel strongly, and our church teaches, that we look after people,” said Dalene Rowley, a lifelong Republican-turned-independent who worked on immigration policy for MWEG. “And I just feel like wherever people come from, they are part of the human family and we should accept them. And I didn’t find that in the Republican Party.”
Seventy percent of Mormons identify as Republicans or lean that way—the highest share of any religious group in America, according to a 2015 Pew study.7 But most Mormons are centrists on immigration. According to a 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 45 percent of Mormons believe immigrants strengthen American society, compared to 32 percent of Republicans. Sixty-one percent of Mormons support granting unauthorized immigrants a pathway to citizenship if they meet certain criteria, compared to 52 percent of Republicans.8
MWEG advocates for what it calls “ethical immigration reform.” In 2017 it published a fifteen-point document outlining its reform priorities, stressing the need for compassion and accommodation in reforming America’s immigration system.9 In an op-ed, Diana Bate Hardy, who led MWEG’s immigration committee, criticized the White House’s reform framework.10 President Trump had called for a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children in exchange for tougher border security measures, including $25 billion for a border wall with Mexico. Trump’s plan would have also ended the visa lottery and placed restrictions on family-based migration.11
Bate Hardy argued that Trump’s plan would “pit one group of immigrants against another … undermine this country’s commitment to basic civil rights and stir up anti-immigrant sentiments.”
Several MWEG members described themselves as accidental activists. But all seemed to have embraced their activism with the zeal of the newly converted.
“I was not politically active at all and then found myself in the position where I couldn’t do nothing,” said Linda Kimball, a Mormon convert who had recently moved to Utah.
“Our motto is we will not be complicit by being complacent,” Mullins Glenn added. “We feel we’ve been awakened.”
For several members, the awakening began not with Trump’s election but with the ousting of former Utah Senator Bob Bennett. After serving in the US Senate for eighteen years, Bennett, a centrist Republican and a Mormon, became a victim of the 2010 Tea Party revolt. He finished second among delegates at that year’s Republican state convention. Bennett blamed his loss on a “toxic … political environment.”12
“I looked around and said ‘I do not recognize this party,’” Mullins Glenn said about her feelings after Bennett lost. “This in no way represents me or who I am.’” Mullins Glenn had been a lifelong Republican but is now unaffiliated.
Trump’s election was the final straw for most of the women. “To see someone elected to the highest office in the land who is the antithesis of (Mormon) values, it was the breaking point,” Mullins Glenn said.
Donald Trump finished third in Utah’s Republican caucuses in 2016, earning just 14 percent of the vote.13 Trump went on to win Utah in the general election, but with only 45 percent—an enormous fall-off from the 72 percent that 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, a Mormon, had received, and even from the 62 percent that John McCain had won in 2008.14
Evan McMullin, a Mormon conservative, took 21 percent of the vote running as an independent candidate. Very few Utahns were prepared to vote for Hillary Clinton, who captured just 27 percent of the vote. But McMullin’s relatively strong performance was evidence that many were looking for a conservative alternative to Trump.
Many Mormons were also repelled by what they saw as Trump’s lack of integrity and poor judgment. Mormons commit to living lives of virtue, a concept most Mormons did not associate with Trump. In a poll of Utah voters during the 2016 campaign, just 14 percent felt Trump was a good role model for young people, less than half the 31 percent who considered Clinton a good role model. Sixteen percent of Utahns felt Trump was a moral person, compared to 25 percent for Clinton.15
“I just felt like (Trump’s) presidency was an affront to women,” Catherine Eslinger said. “The way this president speaks to and about women. I’m not saying that there aren’t men who aren’t upset about that too, but that fuels how we feel. And not just women but how he speaks about minorities, the disabled, there’s quite a long list. And we are very sensitive about that, and we couldn’t be complacent about that.”
Trump’s history of sexism was received much differently by Mormons than by other Christian denominations. When the Access Hollywood tape was released showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, most Christian conservatives remained silent or offered only mild criticism. But much of Utah’s Mormon political leadership withdrew their endorsements of Trump and urged him to step aside. As Salt Lake evangelical pastor Greg Johnson put it to me, “Evangelicals saw the video as sabotage and turned their anger towards Clinton, but most Mormons saw it as proof of Trump’s poor character.” Trump won a record 81 percent of white evangelical voters, but just 61 percent of Mormon voters.16
Mullins Glenn said she had voted for Barack Obama, Romney, and McMullin in the last three presidential elections. She added that she would have voted for Clinton in 2016 had McMullin not run. Rowley and Kimball both cast their ballots for Clinton, whom they saw as the lesser of two evils.
When I asked the MWEG women to name a Republican politician they admired, John Kasich, then the governor of Ohio, was mentioned more than any other. Kasich ran for president in 2016 as a moderate alternative to Trump.
MWEG believes there is power in a group of Mormon women coming together to enact political change. Mullins Glenn referred to it as “the power of the sisterhood. …In our church, there is a long tradition of female activism. Utah was the second territory in the union to give women the vote. We draw on that tradition.” A year after its creation, MWEG boasted 6,000 members and chapters in most states. Their members spend their time publishing policy positions, open letters, and op-eds; participating in pro-immigrant rallies; and lobbying. “One thing Mormon women know how to do is organize,” said Mullins Glenn. She said the group’s four active founders make the final decisions on the positions the group takes.
What I found most interesting about the women of MWEG was that despite their strong words about Trump, they insisted that the group was not anti-Trump. “Let me be clear,” Mullins Glenn said. “MWEG is a firmly nonpartisan group. We do have members who are registered Democrats, people who voted for Bernie, Clinton, Trump. We cross the political spectrum.”
“What we are most concerned about is not Trump per se,” another member told me. “It’s the way he is violating our norms and values.”
Some of the women clearly struggled with that distinction. “It’s a real internal workout to make sure we are not hating this man,” Kimball said. “The results of his actions are what alarm us. But separating them from the person is a real workout.”
When I asked the women if they would have started the group if Trump had not been elected, they responded with a chorus of “no’s.”
“We seek to unify instead of divide,” Mullins Glenn said. “We choose love over hate. We seek that common ground where all people of goodwill can agree. And unless an issue is clearly immoral or unethical, we don’t touch it.”
“Unless there is a clear breach of ethics, then we are not going to deal with it,” Eslinger added. “If there is a reasonable argument to be made on either side of an issue, that’s not something we worry ourselves with.”
But can people of goodwill not differ on the ethics and prudence of temporarily suspending travel and immigration from lawless countries known to be hotbeds of terrorism? Can people who choose love not also support more restrictive immigration policies?
MWEG’s focus on Trump and his actions made me wonder: Since the incivility and tribalism that has become a feature of American politics are not exclusive to Trump, would the women of MWEG be willing to call it out when it came from other sources? Would they even be able to identify it if it did? It also seemed odd to me that MWEG refused to take positions on two of the most important ethical and moral issues of our time.
“There are two issues we simply won’t go into pro or con, and those two issues are abortion and same-sex marriage.” Mullins Glenn said. “Those are two issues that the church has taken a stand on, and so we won’t.”
I left my first meeting with the women of MWEG wanting to believe they were committed to their stated mission of being “watchdogs against corruption and abuse of power” and “ambassadors of peace who transcend partisanship.” But I was not entirely convinced they would be able to remain nonpartisan. A year into Trump’s term, polls suggested Mormons’ view of Trump had not changed much at all. Gallup found 61 percent of Mormons approved of Trump’s job performance.17 But it was clear MWEG’s resistance had only stiffened. When I asked the group to describe Trump’s first year in office in one word, members used words like “horrified,” “destructive,” “disappointment,” and “dystopian.”
“I’m still having panic attacks,” Eslinger said, referring to the effect Trump’s election had on her. “I’m still waking up in the middle of the night.”
“He’s redefining normal,” Mullins Glenn’s daughter Erica said. “And that’s terrifying to me.”
***
The activists of MWEG weren’t the only Mormon women grappling with how to respond to the Trump presidency. Mia Love was another. In 2014, Love became the first black Republican woman ever elected to Congress. Representing most of Salt Lake City, the daughter of Haitian immigrants was hailed as the future of a younger, more diverse Republican party.18 Then Donald Trump came along, and Love was forced into a difficult position. She agreed with many of Trump’s policies. In fact, in 2017 and 2018, her votes aligned with the president’s policy preferences 96 percent of the time—more than anyone else in Utah’s six-member, all-Republican congressional delegation.19
But Love hadn’t endorsed or voted for Trump in 2016. She had joined other Mormon Republicans in Utah in urging him to step aside after the Access Hollywood tape was made public.20 And she later criticized Trump on select occasions, such as when he defended white nationalists at Charlottesville and when he referred to Haiti and several other poor nations as “shit-hole countries” from which America shouldn’t be admitting immigrants.21 This obviously struck a chord with her personally. Love called the remark “unkind, divisive, elitist” and un-American. She called on the president to apologize both to the American people and to the countries he “wantonly maligned.”
In 2016, Trump won Utah’s fourth congressional district, which encompasses parts of Salt Lake and three other counties in the middle of the state, with just 39 percent of the vote.22
Love’s criticism of Trump seemed to be a point of pride. “There isn’t anybody in the Republican Party who has called out the president more than I have,” she told me when I interviewed her at the Republican National Committee headquarters a few blocks from the US Capitol in the summer of 2018. She acknowledged that some constituents urged her to stop criticizing Trump. But she claimed most said, “Thank you for saying that because I was feeling it too,” she said.
Love was in many ways a conventional conservative Republican, earning high marks from all the leading conservative advocacy groups: 100 percent from National Right to Life, 83 percent from the Club for Growth, 93 percent from the Chamber of Commerce, and a solid “A” from the National Rifle Association.23 24
In her two terms in Congress, she had sponsored legislation to combat human trafficking, urged her party’s leaders to permanently repeal a medical-device tax that had hobbled medical-technology companies located in her district, and introduced a bill to stop taxpayer money from being used to settle workplace disputes in Congress. Her contribution to the immigration reform debate was called the RAC Act, which would have allowed young, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to earn a conditional five-year legal status.
Love’s 2018 Democratic opponent was Ben McAdams, the second-term mayor of Salt Lake County. McAdams presented himself as a wonky centrist more interested in fixing local problems such as poor air quality, homelessness, and rampant drug use than in scoring political points. He rarely waded into cultural battles or commented on Trump. His speeches were filled with platitudes about the need for “healing dialogue” and finding “common ground” to enact policies that respect “conscience” while “affording human dignity.”
Love portrayed McAdams as a liberal sheep in centrist’s clothing. She noted that during his time in the state senate, McAdams had been rated by the Salt Lake Tribune as the state’s most liberal state senator.25 She highlighted his ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, for whom he worked in low-level positions in the 1990s and early 2000s. Love also argued that McAdams, in the House, would become a tool of Nancy Pelosi. McAdams blunted that last line of attack by stating that he would not support Pelosi for House speaker.26 Utah Democratic Party Chairman Alex Cragun called Love’s attacks on McAdams “amateur hour” and claimed that she was all talk and no action when it comes to standing up to Trump. “She says, ‘I’m not Trump,’ but then goes on and votes for his agenda,” he said.
Love saw things differently. “The president doesn’t take a vote,” she said. “To be honest with you, it’s the president who has supported me 96 percent of the time.”
Love had broken with Trump on immigration and aluminum and steel tariffs. And she had also bucked party leaders on several occasions, such as when she voted against a $1.3 trillion budget and when she supported the “discharge petition,” which would have prompted a debate and votes on a sequence of immigration proposals.
National Democrats targeted her, raising money for McAdams in the hopes that it would be part of a “blue wave” that would wash away the Republican House majority.
Mitt Romney ran for US Senate that year, and Republicans hoped his presence at the top of the ballot in Utah would help drive up turnout. Then again, the last time Romney’s name had appeared on a ballot in Utah, when he ran for president in 2012, Love had lost a race for Congress, and McAdams had won his race for mayor.
Heading into the election, polls showed the race to be a dead heat. When I asked Love whether she would welcome a campaign visit by the president, she said, “I don’t need it. I’ve always been very good on my own.”
Then I asked her a question that seemed to catch her off-guard: “Will you support President Trump for reelection in 2020?”
“You know I, I don’t know what that’s going to look like,” she said. “You’re going to have to ask me in 2020. You never know.” Love’s muddled answer reflected her deep ambivalence about Trump. She was being criticized from her left for not being hard enough on Trump, and from her right for criticizing him at all. Love ended up losing her re-election bid by just a few hundred votes. President Trump summed up the political environment aptly the next day at a press conference. He suggested that Love and other Republicans had lost because they did not sufficiently “embrace” him.
“Mia Love gave me no love, and she lost,” Trump said. “Too bad. Sorry about that, Mia.”27
***
In the summer of 2018, tiny microbes reacting to changing levels of salinity in Great Salt Lake turned the water half-red and half-blue. It created a stunning visual image—and an apt metaphor for the political changes that are starting to happen in Utah.28
If you’ve never been to Salt Lake City, you might assume that it’s a rather conservative, buttoned-up place. It was founded in 1847 by pioneers of the LDS Church, the most heavily Republican-leaning religious group in America. But Salt Lake City is racially diverse and politically progressive. Nearly one in four city residents is Hispanic.29 In some neighborhoods, two-thirds of school children speak Spanish at home. In recent years Salt Lake City has been ranked as the third most hipster city in the world,30 one of the queerest cities in America,31 and the fourth best city for Millennials to live in.32 Millennials make up nearly half of the city’s mortgages, compared to the national average of 9 percent.33
Traveling throughout the city during several visits, I met as many non-Mormons—evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, and even a couple of scientologists—as I did Mormons. I also met a whole lot of ex-Mormons. Utah as a whole remains predominantly Mormon, but Salt Lake County, home of the state’s capital and largest city, is now majority non-Mormon.34
To appreciate how defiantly progressive Salt Lake City is, take the TRAX light rail to Temple Square, the city center and heart of the LDS Church. Church members are forbidden from consuming alcohol. But I counted at least a dozen bars within walking distance of the Temple, including some that mock the Mormon culture with names like the Beer Hive Pub, the Tavernacle, and Ex-Wifes Place. Or drive a few blocks south to Harvey Milk Boulevard and check out the Coffee Garden, Centered City Yoga, or Club Try-angles, which advertises itself as a “high-energy gay bar offering the coldest, cheapest and biggest drinks in town.”
“Salt Lake City is extremely progressive,” Jennifer Dailey-Provost, who represents Utah’s House District 24, told me when we met at Nostalgia Café, a boutique coffee shop and vegan brunch restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City. Every legislative seat in the city is represented by a Democrat. And every mayor since 1976 has been a Democrat, including Jackie Biskupski, the city’s first openly gay mayor, who served until January 2020.
Dailey-Provost has a friend who refers to the city as “Berkeley East.” Dailey-Provost prefers to call it “a progressive oasis in a vast sea of red. I think most Republicans see it that way, and it drives them nuts that the capitol and (Salt Lake) Temple are both in my district.”
One evening in 2019, I attended a house-warming party at the Salt Lake City home of a Democratic activist couple I’d become friendly with. I spoke with nearly two-dozen people that night. Many were former Mormons, and everyone seemed to be a Bernie Sanders-supporting progressive. That shouldn’t have surprised me. In 2016, Sanders drew a crowd of 17,000 at a rally in Salt Lake City a few days before winning Utah’s Democratic caucuses with 77 percent of the vote.35 In the general election, Hillary Clinton won Salt Lake County by 10 points just four years after Mitt Romney had won it by 20.36 On Super Tuesday in 2020, Sanders would easily win Utah with 35 percent of the vote.37
Utah State Rep. Jennifer Dailey-Provost in 2017. (Daniel Allott)
It has been nearly twenty years since a Democrat won any statewide office in Utah, and more than fifty years since a Democratic presidential candidate won the state. But that sea of red is beginning to recede as young professionals from other states move in to take advantage of Utah’s job market, which routinely ranks as the best in the nation. Utah is the country’s fastest-growing state. Some of that growth is due to the high birth rate among Mormon families. But much of it comes from young people moving in from out of state, attracted by great jobs, a relatively low cost of living, and Utah’s natural beauty.
Salt Lake County’s population is projected to rise 50 percent by 2065, according to a University of Utah study. That’s an addition of nearly 600,000 people.38 Many newcomers settle in the metropolitan area that stretches from Ogden to Provo, dubbed Silicon Slopes, where 80 percent of the state’s population lives. Home to numerous start-ups and established software companies, medical device manufacturers, and aerospace businesses, it’s been ranked as the fourth best metro area in the country for tech jobs. Goldman Sachs, Adobe, and Twitter all have offices there.39
Utah Democratic strategist Jim Gonzales sees the influx of people from high-tax, high-cost-of-living states, such as California, as helping Democrats. “They tend to be a little more socially progressive and well educated,” he said of the newcomers, adding that these migration patterns help to explain the parts of Salt Lake County where “the red wall may be falling down a little.” In 2016, more than 23,000 people moved to Utah from California alone. Few of them were Mormon.40
In 2018 Democrats picked up one new state senate seat and five state house seats. But their biggest prize was the fourth Congressional District seat that Ben McAdams narrowly won over Mia Love. McAdams is the first Utah Democrat to win an election for federal office since 2012. Voters also approved two progressive ballot initiatives—one to expand Medicaid, another to legalize medical marijuana.
Gonzales believes Democrats have also benefited from the chaos within the state Republican Party. “The Utah Republican Party is trying to decide whether it’s the Trump party or the Romney party,” he said. “They haven’t come close to deciding that yet.” In 2016 Donald Trump became the first Republican in more than half a century not to win a majority of Utah voters. He won less than a third of Salt Lake County voters. Utah Republicans have also been fighting over the structure of their party. A 2014 law known as SB 54 has divided the party. It allows candidates to appear on the ballot by gathering signatures rather than solely through the traditional caucus/convention route.
In 2018, Romney’s effort to collect signatures while seeking the Republican nomination for US Senate caused such a backlash among caucus goers that a majority voted for State Senator Mike Kennedy, forcing Romney into a primary.41 The Utah Republican Party Central Committee fought the law all the way to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case, effectively ending the debate.42 The fight reportedly bankrupted the state party. The ensuing turmoil caused the state chairman to resign in 2019.
The controversy wasn’t received well by rank-and-file Republicans. A survey by Dan Jones & Associates found that nearly two-thirds of Utah Republicans said the infighting had made them less supportive of the Utah Republican Party.43 When I spoke with Salt Lake County Republican Party Chairman Scott Miller in the spring of 2019, he insisted he wasn’t worried about the SB54 controversy. Instead, he was focused on rebuilding the county party, which he says was “apathetic” when he took it over in the summer of 2018. “We’d gotten so used to winning races with minimal effort,” he said. “But now that the dynamics of Salt Lake County have changed, we need to change.”
Miller was dismissive of local Democrats’ recent successes. “I don’t think the Democrats are doing anything different than they’ve ever done. I just think they’re getting lucky with the types of people that are moving into the area.” Lucky or not, Republicans are slowly losing ground beyond Salt Lake City. Republicans’ share of the vote decreased between 2016 and 2018 in twenty-two of the twenty-three Salt Lake County state house races in which both parties fielded candidates. The same thing happened in eight of ten state senate races. Besides lucky demographic changes, Miller blamed the 2018 losses on those two ballot initiatives, which spurred record high turnout. Scott said young voters “came out in droves” to help pass the measures.
But Democratic gains predate 2018. In the state house, for instance, Republican candidates in Salt Lake County lost vote share in more than two-thirds (14 of 20) of eligible races between 2014 and 2016. A couple of years ago, statistician Nate Silver predicted that Utah might be winnable for Democrats as early as 2024. In some ways, Utah “increasingly has the markers of a blue state, meaning high education levels, big tech sector, young population,” he said.44 Silver’s prediction seems premature. Most of Utah is still deeply conservative. Then again, if tiny microbes can suddenly change the color of Utah’s largest lake to a mix of red and blue, perhaps Democrats can do something similar to the state’s political map.
***
As Trump’s presidency proceeded, MWEG weighed in with op-eds and official statements. They rebuked the administration for the “unconscionable practice of separating children from their parents at the border”; demanded further investigation into thirty-five-year-old sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings; and pressed for more witness testimony during President Trump’s impeachment trial.45 When Mitt Romney voted to hear witnesses in the trial, MWEG members hand-delivered a thank-you note, milk, and brownies to the Utah senator’s office. They later wrote a letter to Romney thanking him for voting to convict and remove President Trump from office.
Whenever I met with members, they would continue to insist that MWEG was nonpartisan and that, at least in private, their members were having “robust debates” and “tough conversations” on a range of issues and from a variety of perspectives. But while every press statement and op-ed included lofty rhetoric about transcending partisanship, they always directed their ire at Trump and Trump’s Republican Party, never at Democrats. And whenever they complimented a Republican, such as with Romney’s impeachment vote, it was only when he had broken with his party to side with Democrats.
When I asked members why they hadn’t ever criticized a Democrat for unethical or tribal behavior, some of them seemed stumped, as if the possibility had never occurred to them. Others said they expected to do so once a Democrat becomes president. Emma Petty Addams, who became MWEG’s executive director in 2019, said their lack of criticism of Democrats was “more of a bandwidth issue,” suggesting that the sheer volume of unethical behavior by the Trump administration monopolized their time and resources. To be fair, whenever I asked members to tell me something they felt Trump had gotten right, most had an answer. They would mention the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill that Trump had signed into law in 2018, or the taskforce the Trump administration launched to investigate missing and murdered indigenous peoples.
One woman said she appreciated that Trump had overruled his education secretary to restore an annual budget request of $18 million in federal funding for the Special Olympics. “It took all I could do,” she said in describing how it felt to write the administration a letter of thanks. “It took courage to do it. I still shudder to think about it now.”
In February 2020, a Utah Political Trends poll found that for the first time, a majority of Utah voters approved of President Trump’s job performance.46 The poll also found that 60 percent of active Mormons approved of Trump’s job performance. That was consistent with the 61 percent of Mormon voters Trump had won on election day and the 61 percent approval rating he had on the anniversary of his inauguration. But the Utah Political Trends poll showed a sizeable gender gap of 18 points. Just 38 percent of Mormon women approved of the president’s job performance. Another poll found 55 percent Mormon approval overall but a gender gap of 11 points.47 Interestingly, while women were more likely than men to identify as Republicans (68 percent to 63 percent), they were less likely than men to approve of Trump (51 percent to 62 percent).
As the 2020 election approaches, the question for many Mormon women will be tricky. Without a conservative alternative like Evan McMullin on the ballot, for whom will they vote? Will they overlook Trump’s character flaws to vote for him? Or will they consider voting for the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden? On my final visit to Utah in February 2020, I spoke separately with more than half a dozen MWEG members. It didn’t surprise me that none of them were considering voting for Trump.
Dalene Rowley said she was fond of Elizabeth Warren and that her primary vote for the Massachusetts senator a few days later would be the “first time in a long time that I voted for, and not against, a candidate.” Rowley added that she would vote for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders if he became the Democratic nominee, though the prospect of voting for an avowed socialist was painful for her to imagine. “Ultimately, I would trade the robustness of my 401k for us to be a kinder, gentler nation,” she explained.
Melarie Wheat mused about her political transformation since becoming a member of MWEG. She sheepishly told me that she had voted for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 primaries. “What was I thinking?!” she said as she thought back to her earlier vote. Before I had the chance to ask her about President Trump, she revealed that she had cried tears of gratitude when Mitt Romney cast his vote for impeachment. A few days before my visit, Wheat had received a Republican primary ballot in the mail. But she tore it up before mailing it back and requesting a Democratic ballot instead. She said she was open to voting for any of the Democrats except Sanders or former Vice President Joe Biden.
“Old, white men—I’m really done with,” she said.
Overall among the women, I found little to no enthusiasm for Sanders or Biden. The names I heard again and again were those of two women who would soon drop out of the race: Warren and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
I also talked to a woman named Shelly Cluff, one of MWEG’s most conservative members. Cluff said she was grateful that her involvement with MWEG had challenged her own political biases and allowed her to step out of the conservative echo chamber of her family and friend group in Riverton, a conservative suburb of Salt Lake City. But Cluff also complained that she didn’t always feel listened to by other members of MWEG’s Facebook discussion groups whenever she voiced a dissenting opinion. Cluff was uncertain how she’d vote in the election, but was certain it wouldn’t be for either Trump or Sanders.
Later, she would email to say she didn’t think she could vote for Biden either because of his willingness to align with extreme factions of his party. “Religious freedom protections are a big issue to me,” she wrote. “And I do not see any part of him standing up for Christians because that’s not popular right now.”
Sharlee Mullins Glenn at her home in Pleasant Grove, Utah. (Daniel Allott)
Most of the women were convinced that Trump would be reelected, and that he would perform better among Mormons than he did in 2016. “He has kept his promises,” a couple of the women said to explain why many Mormons were turning more decisively toward Trump. Several said they knew friends and family members who in 2016 had reluctantly voted for Trump but now supported him more enthusiastically. “It seems like the attitude in Utah has been, acknowledge the good and ignore the bad,” one member said, resignedly.
My last stop in Utah was the home of MWEG’s founder, Sharlee Mullins Glenn. Mullins Glenn said that she too was fond of Klobuchar and Warren, but was open to other candidates. “I would vote for anyone that I felt like was reasonable and could listen and could work across the aisle and be respectful and lead,” she said.
Then she told me a story that perfectly captures the challenge facing MWEG and anyone else attempting to transcend the partisanship and tribalism that define modern politics.
The New York Times had recently published an op-ed Mullins Glenn had written in which she recounted how Trump’s election had prompted her to become politically active.48 In the op-ed, she criticized President Trump for declaring himself to be above the law and instilling fear in the public. She ended the piece by calling the choice between love and the fear represented by Trump “the defining question of our time.” The op-ed’s original headline, written by a Times editor, was, “Why I became an activist against fear.” Mullins Glenn felt that headline was “a little lackluster” but that it at least conveyed the main thrust of the piece. But a few hours after the piece had been published, a Times editor changed the headline to something quite different: “I am Mormon, and I am fighting against Trump.”
As an opinion editor, I understand why the headline was changed. The second headline is much more compelling and certainly more click-worthy. Would the average New York Times reader rather read an op-ed by an activist against fear or one written by a Mormon woman who’s “fighting against Trump”? That’s an easy question: The Times’s liberal readership would love an op-ed by a member of the most conservative religious denomination in America bashing Trump.
But MWEG has always maintained that it isn’t “fighting against Trump.” It’s fighting against the lawlessness, incivility, and fear they believe are at the heart of his presidency. That nuance may have been lost on the Times’s editors; it was certainly hard to detect in the op-ed. But it was a crucial distinction for Mullins Glenn and the group she founded.
Mullins Glenn contacted the Times’s editor and demanded that the headline be changed back. “We are very, very careful to position ourselves as an organization that is for something and not against something,” she explained to the editor. “We see ourselves as peacemakers.” The editor changed the headline, but by then, the “fighting against Trump” headline had been on Times’s homepage for a couple of hours, likely seen by thousands of readers. One of those readers was a close family member of Mullins Glenn’s, who sent her an angry email, chiding her for adding to the discord.
When Mullins Glenn and I talked about the op-ed and the wrangling over the headline, she still seemed a little frustrated. She had spent a year-and-a-half trying to get a piece published in America’s most prestigious newspaper, and was grateful for the opportunity and the overwhelmingly positive response it had generated. But Mullins Glenn felt that the new headline sent exactly the opposite message to the one she wanted to convey. “It violated all of our guiding principles in one headline,” she said.
I admired the women of MWEG for aspiring to transcend political tribalism. But I also wondered whether it was a realistic aspiration in a political environment in which almost every institutional force demands that we remain in our tribes and which punishes those like Mia Love who venture outside of them.
