VoteHub just came out with what is probably the best political data visualization dashboard I’ve seen. It allows you to dive into the precinct level results, and shades it by margins and not just who won, so we can literally see the geographic gradients as we shift from more Democrat areas to more Republican areas. It also allows you to see the volume of vote count in 3D.

So while Mormonism is famously red, where are our “Austins,” islands of blue in a sea of red?

First of all, the Tree Streets right next to BYU and central Provo. That makes sense to me; the Tree Streets are essentially a college town, and when I drive in downtown Provo there are a lot of rainbow flags and I definitely get a cool hipster Austin independent rocker kind of vibe with events like the rooftop concerts.

Other Mormon Austins include downtown Ogden, downtown Logan, and, unsurprisingly, Salt Lake City (although I don’t know how “Mormon” some of those places are anymore). However, less expected is downtown Pocatello, Idaho, which voted blue in the last election. Finally, North Las Vegas is both blue and kind of a mini-Utah (at least we kind of rule it even if we’re not numerically predominant. When I was serving there as a visa-waiting missionary almost all the councilmen were members, and the slumlords would let us know where the new move-ins were, which I thought was odd until I realized they were members).

What about “swing precincts.” If those places are the Austins, where are the Ohios? The politically diverse places in Mormondom where you would live if you want about half of your neighbors to be democrats and half republicans? The main candidate is the transition zone between Utah and Salt Lake counties (everywhere else the blue-to-red transition happens quite abruptly).

Specifically, it looks like there’s a “blue wall” that runs diagonal from the Point of the Mountain up to the airport, so Sandy, West Jordan, and Taylorsville probably win for most politically diverse areas of Mormondom.

P.S. A fun aside that is totally unrelated to the OP, but it’s not worth its own post so I thought I’d append it here. I recently got access to the new AI video generator Sora 2. I don’t think it’s as good as Gemini’s, but I asked it to make “the most Mormon scene ever” and this is what it generated (apologies that I can’t figure out how to shrink the movie).