On the bright side if Utah gains a 5th district after 2030 there will be at least one fair, Democrat district out of them all...
Doubt it. They'll just keep cracking SLC in as many pieces as it takes.
That'll make it all the more hilarious when metro SLC gets big enough and liberal enough that it ends up flipping every district to the Democrats as a result.
That would imply Utah as a whole being a Democratic state, which. No lol. It didn't happen in 2016 and it won't happen in 2036 either.
Muh trends won't save you here. The only solution is a Congress-imposed independent commission, or a SCOTUS decision outlawing partisan gerrymander (which, yeah, unlikely too).
The only way that happens is for Mormons to flip D, which tbh is not the most outlandish idea if the Democrats had not gone in the direction they did post 2018. Mormons have higher rates of college, tend to be pro-establishment, while socially conservative on key issues they are less stringent on it than modern ideological evengelicals(education - they are not creationist/dominionist, LGBT rights though ex-Mormons ensure those advocacy groups have an anti-Mormon vendetta, abortion). Ie. it is a center-right group you could see moving as an extension of an outer-suburban exurban swing.
It won't happen because Ds are not only too far left, but because D leftwingers have a near personal vendetta against Mormonism.
Current trends may get Ds to something like a 55-41 statewide loss in 2028, and maybe the GOP would go 4-1 rather than have 2 53-44 seats, but they could probably outlast that. Democrats need Mormons to vote like non-Mormons with the same income/educational backgrounds.
A few years back, I ran the numbers and found that McMullin’s performance by county in Utah and Idaho was heavily informed by the % of Mormons and the % of people with a college degree (r^2 of something like 0.82). My point in calculating that was to make a county map of a McMullin wins Utah by 1%, but it showed to me that McMullin wasn’t a Mormon candidate, he was very much a college-educated Mormon candidate. Biden did do pretty well there against Trump in 2020. Hard to say how things would look without Trump though. All that is to say that there could be some fracturing of Mormon support along college/non-college lines.
