Another poll shows Donald Trump keeping lead in Utah

A new poll released late Tuesday night showed voters in Utah, which has gone to a Republican in the last 10 elections, are split among Trump, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and third-party candidate Evan McMullin.

The Deseret News/Y2 Analytics poll this week found that Trump and Clinton each registered 26 percent support, while Independent conservative McMullin was almost a statistical tie at 22 percent support. An increasing number of the state’s mostly Mormon voters are considering casting ballots instead for third-party candidates Evan McMullin and Gary Johnson.

Utah was the most Republican state in the country in 2012, voting for Mormon candidate Mitt Romney by a 48-point margin. McMullin is a former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer who later became chief policy director for the House Republican Conference.

“And the other thing is Governor Huntsman called my office asking for a meeting and I didn’t call him back, which I could have and should have”, Trump said to Fox News in early December 2011. A few extra votes could make the difference.

McMullin holds some conservative positions that Trump has repeatedly touted. “It’s awful that, here in the state of Utah, he’s backed by hundreds of millions of dollars and the RNC, the Republican Party in general, and he can’t even beat Hillary Clinton decisively”. “And they’re not liking, especially here in Utah, what they’re seeing in Donald Trump”, he said. While he failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for the presidential ballot in Wyoming, campaign volunteer Debbie Neuenschwander said voters can still write him in on their ballots.

Utah, however, isn’t the only state that could potentially be won by a non-major-party candidate.

The survey underscored the level of disaffection some conservatives have shown for Trump, who has found himself at odds with much of the Republican Party establishment. Seven percent of likely voters remain undecided.

Prior to the poll, Trump was averaging 45 percent and Clinton 27 percent in the largely Mormon state, according to the HuffPost Pollster aggregate of publicly released polls. “I saw someone who admired dictators overseas and who I didn’t think would protect or respect our civil rights”. Yet, because the fight for Utah’s electoral votes is fought entirely within Utah’s borders, an unusual quirk about this one state could potentially award Utah’s electoral votes to one of the least popular politicians in Utah. About 1.6% of the U.S. population is Mormon, according to the Pew Research Center, but in Utah, that figure jumps to 55%.

Julie Moncur, who drove down from Pocatello, Idaho, to see McMullin, said she understands that her vote for McMullin may be more symbolic than anything. Y2 Analytics surveyed 500 likely Utah voters over landlines and cellphones October 10-11 The poll has a plus or minus 4.4 percent margin of error…

Despite about half the state not knowing who he is, McMullin has a profile that reassures voters as a Utah-born, straight-arrow Mormon Republican. It’s one thing to blow a vote on the fourth-party candidate when you’re anxious that the national election will be close and a McMullin upset in Utah would hand the presidency to Clinton.