By MICHAEL STEWART
OCT. 9, 2016
As Republicans across the country contend with the fallout from a newly released recording in which Donald J. Trump made vulgar and sexually degrading comments about women, perhaps nowhere was reaction more swift and decisive than in Utah, home to a sizable Mormon population already deeply unsettled by a sense of the candidate’s moral shortcomings.
Within hours of the video’s release on Friday, a number of top Republican officials in the state yanked their endorsements, including Gov. Gary Herbert, a Mormon, who declared Mr. Trump’s statements “beyond offensive and despicable.” Representative Jason Chaffetz, who is also Mormon, said that if he voted for Mr. Trump he would no longer be able to look his 15-year-old daughter in the eye.
On Saturday, the Deseret News, a media outlet owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, broke with an 80-year tradition of refraining from presidential endorsements to publish an editorial calling on Mr. Trump to step aside.
“We prefer to stand for something rather than against someone,” Deseret’s editorial board wrote. “But this is one of those rare moments where it is necessary to take a clear stand against the hucksterism, misogyny, narcissism and latent despotism that infect the Trump campaign.”
It is too early to say how the lewd video will affect Mr. Trump’s standing in Utah, which has not backed a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Polls taken before the video was released showed Mr. Trump with a comfortable lead, and many Republicans outraged by his remarks have vowed never to support his rival, Hillary Clinton.
Still, the scale of the rebellion by Utah Republicans against their party’s presidential candidate is practically unheard-of, said Chris Karpowitz, a director of Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy. Almost the entire congressional delegation has vowed not to vote for Mr. Trump in November.
“The Republican establishment in the state of Utah is in all-out revolt against the Trump candidacy,” Mr. Karpowitz said. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before.”
For many years, Mr. Karpowitz said, Republican Mormons, who dominate Utah’s political culture, have felt little conflict between their religious values and party affiliation. Mitt Romney, who was the first Mormon presidential nominee of a major party, embodied the comfortable union of religion and politics in the state. A ranking official in the Church of Latter Day Saints, Mr. Romney won Utah handily in 2012.
By contrast, for Utah Republicans and especially Mormons, Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been a source of anguish. Many find his boasts of philandering and adultery deeply disturbing. In an uncharacteristically pointed speech in March, Mr. Romney, who has been one of Mr. Trump’s most strident Republican critics, called the New York businessman a “phony” and a “con man” and criticized his disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants and Muslims. In the Utah Republican primary, Mr. Trump won just 14 percent of the vote.
Even so, much of the Republican establishment was grudgingly resigned to his candidacy.
Until Friday.
“I’m out,” Mr. Chaffetz, who had previously said he would vote for Mr. Trump, told CNN. “I’m not going to put my good name and reputation and my family behind Donald Trump for president when he acts like this. I just can’t do it.”
At the headquarters of the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, the initial impulse was to cover the video, which was first published by the Washington Post, as straight breaking news. Editors huddled late into the night, wresting over how to portray Mr. Trump’s tawdry descriptions of unsolicited sexual groping in the three-minute recording, while upholding the outlet’s conservative editorial standards, said Paul Edwards, the editor and publisher of the 166-year-old publication.
“We tried to keep it to the issue,” Mr. Edwards said, but as the night wore on, “it got to where we felt we that we had to take a stand.”
“We did not see this as a political issue,” he said. “We really saw it as a moral issue.”
The outrage among Utah conservatives over the recording has allowed Democrats to begin to contemplate what was once unthinkable: taking the state for Mrs. Clinton in November. The hope is that disaffected Republicans will abandon Mr. Trump and split their votes between two third-party candidates: Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. official who is a Mormon.
Mrs. Clinton has opened a campaign office in Utah, something that no Democratic candidate has done in decades, said Peter Corroon, the state’s Democratic Party chairman.
“Trump will be losing votes,” Mr. Corroon said. “Where those votes go is yet to be determined.”
By Saturday, few of the state’s political leaders appeared ready to immediately throw their support behind an alternative. Most, like Senator Mike Lee, seemed more focused on getting Mr. Trump to go away.
In a video recorded at Mr. Lee’s home and posted on Facebook, the senator addressed the Republican candidate directly: “With all due respect sir, you sir are the distraction,” he said. “Your conduct, sir, is the distraction, is the distraction from the very principles that will help us win in November.”
“I respectfully ask you, with all due respect, to step aside, step down.”
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