Utah's Future

[RedSLC]

It will likely trend Democratic due to demographic changes, but it will probably still be a few decades before it's competitive.  It has a lot of trending to do.

That's assuming the parties stay as there are today, which they won't. But Utah will probably always be more conservative than most other states because the mormons there have a way of rubbing off on the people who move there.

Actually, I think that most of the people that move to Utah were already conservative before moving there. The conservative climate generally attracts conservative voters. There some exceptions to this. People who move to Salt Lake City, such as me, as well as a few other select parts of the state can be fairly liberal, but in most parts of the state (especially the suburbs) the people that move there are quite conservative.

[RedSLC]

2012 was a special case for obvious reasons, but even without that Utah is a conservative place and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

This.

Ignoring 2012, Salt Lake County is fairly elastic, and appears to be trending D, but the rest of the urban counties are uber-R, and will keep the state in the R column for a long time.