A new political-action committee formed by a Republican is endorsing candidates who emphasize problem solving over partisanship. A former Republican governor is trying to root out political trash talk. And a push to redraw a congressional map that could bring back a Democratic House district has been buoyed by a Republican-dominated state Supreme Court.
As President Trump pursues his right-wing agenda at breakneck speed, with Democrats in retreat and “Never Trump” conservatives making themselves scarce, one of the 50 states has remained a redoubt of a kinder, gentler and more civil kind of Republicanism.
Utah.
Traditionally deep red, Utah moved just one percentage point to the right in the 2024 election, the second-smallest statewide shift in the country after Washington. One big reason is that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who make up a vast — and once reliably conservative — segment of the Utah population, have been drifting away from the G.O.P.
The church, headquartered in Utah, counts 2.2 million people there as members — about three in five residents — though other estimates suggest only about 42 percent of Utahns are practicing Mormons.
Repelled by Mr. Trump’s language mocking immigrants and demeaning women, Latter-day Saint voters, who also have a sizable presence in Arizona, played a key role in flipping that swing state blue in 2020. Last year, 31 percent of L.D.S. voters nationwide backed former Vice President Kamala Harris, up from the 23 percent who voted Democratic in 2020, according to a Fox News analysis of Associated Press VoteCast data.
While Utah still backed Mr. Trump by 21 points, center-right Republicans who are uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s confrontational brand of politics — and are more in sync with former Senator Mitt Romney, a fellow Latter-day Saint who defied Mr. Trump — have gained new momentum and are pushing to wrest voters in the state away from the party’s MAGA wing.
Though they are often reluctant to openly criticize the president, their efforts to nudge the state toward a courtlier kind of political engagement can be seen at every level of Utah politics.
Perhaps the most assertive is the Governing Group, a PAC founded in 2023 by Becky Edwards, a former Republican state legislator who challenged Senator Mike Lee, a close Trump ally, in 2022. She won 30 percent of the vote, finishing second in a three-way primary. But her organization has endorsed candidates not over their policies but over their willingness to commit to civil discourse and problem-solving.
“We’ve seen this polarization and a magnetic pull to the type of dialogue that I don’t think moves any of us closer to policies that support the American people,” Ms. Edwards said. “Overwhelmingly, what we’re hearing is that people are really quite exhausted with those kinds of conversations.”
The Governing Group, which also helped run its candidates’ campaigns, spent only about $350,000 last year, but it has gained some sway at the state and local level: Of the 28 general-election candidates it backed in school board or legislative contests last year, 25 won, including about a dozen in competitive races. And Ms. Edwards said her team continued to be a sounding board to its winners.
Another promising sign for those pushing to rein in partisan combat came in a gerrymandering fight last year, when the state Supreme Court found that the Legislature had violated the state constitution when it overrode a voter-backed ballot initiative creating an independent redistricting commission. The Legislature’s congressional map, which took effect in 2021, split the heavily Democratic Salt Lake City area across four districts. Groups including the nonpartisan Mormon Women for Ethical Government sued, and the issue is now being litigated in a district court. A victory for the plaintiffs could lead to a redrawn map with at least one competitive House district.
A number of Utah leaders are also trying to promote civility in the next generation of political practitioners.
At the State Capitol, former Gov. Gary Herbert, a member of the church, lectured a group of college interns recently about the importance of moral character.
“We have some politicians who are good at calling people names, showing a lack of respect with a difference of opinion,” he said. Harsh language might help get candidates elected, he added, “but it doesn’t solve any problems.”
Mr. Herbert is also an adviser to a Utah-based initiative called the Dignity Index, which grades politicians’ speech on an eight-point scale. The lowest score is reserved for expressions of contempt and calls for violence against one’s opponents; the highest is awarded to those treating others with dignity. (In their presidential debate last fall, Ms. Harris earned a few threes, but Mr. Trump was twice tagged with a two.)
The index’s backers have worked with college campuses and are asking politicians to sign a pledge to improve the tenor of their rhetoric, said Tami Pyfer, the index’s co-creator.
“You have to build a constituency that demands dignity, and then you have to give that constituency someone to vote for,” she said.
The daylight between Mr. Trump and many Utah Republicans isn’t just over his smash-mouth, domineering style of politics.
Latter-day Saints say they are more likely to be sympathetic to immigrants and refugees because many have served on missions overseas and because early Mormon pioneers were refugees themselves. And Mormon women have been at the forefront of the shift away from Mr. Trump; some have said they reconsidered lifelong opposition to abortion after seeing the consequences of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Mormons also received a nudge from church leaders, who urged members in a 2023 letter not to reflexively vote for one party down the ballot without careful consideration — interpreted by some as a warning against blindly voting for Mr. Trump and the politicians he endorses.
Still, it’s easy to make too much of the anti-MAGA mood among Latter-day Saints.
Senator John Curtis, an L.D.S. member, has said he is unafraid to break with Mr. Trump, prompting some Utahns to hope he would take after Mr. Romney, whom he replaced in the Senate. But Mr. Curtis has opposed none of Mr. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominations.
And even Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah — a church member and longtime Trump critic who started an initiative called Disagree Better in 2023, urging Americans to work through political disputes in a positive way — endorsed Mr. Trump last summer.
For that matter, Mr. Trump’s most outspoken admirers in Utah scoff at the center-right’s high-mindedness.
Phil Lyman, a former state representative and Trump supporter who challenged Mr. Cox for governor last year, said politicians like Mr. Cox were hypocritical.
Taking issue with signature-gathering procedures in last year’s Republican primary, Mr. Lyman sued unsuccessfully to get Mr. Cox both removed as the Republican nominee and ousted from office. He also argued, unsuccessfully, that Mr. Cox’s supporters had tried to confuse voters by getting another man named Lyman to also run for governor.
“They say, ‘I want to create a “Dignity Index” so I can monitor everything that you say, and then I’ll decide if you’re being nice. And if you’re not, then things are not going to go very well for you,’” he said. “They do not practice ‘Disagree Better,’ being nice — in fact, they’re some of the most vicious people that are in the movement right now.”
On the campus of Brigham Young University, at least, there are subtle signs that the church is promoting a distinctly un-Trumpian style of politics.
Each Tuesday morning, students file into an arena for a spiritual-minded “devotional” address by a religious leader or academic, underscoring the importance of dignity and respect. The remarks rarely veer into overtly political territory. But some students say they see the messages being delivered each week as incompatible with Mr. Trump’s worldview.
Speakers “push the student body to be willing to engage with the world around them and have hope,” said Scott Sawaya, 23, a senior. “I believe that contrasts sharply with the current fear-mongering and scapegoating seen in the MAGA movement.”
On a frigid recent morning, Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, implored students to defend the Constitution, saying that James Madison had worried about the “excesses of mob democracy” overtaking reason. Citing social media, he said Americans were “not listening to other points of view, are not respectfully deliberating, and in those ways, are living in a version of Madison’s nightmare.”
Henry Demke, a 21-year-old junior who attended Mr. Rosen’s talk, said she was a Republican but had voted for Ms. Harris last year.
“We were taught in church that the spirit of fear is of the devil,” she said, “and I feel like there’s a lot of fear-based politics in the Trump movement.”
