Like voters in the rest of the nation, Utahns of the 1870s had a choice between two political parties. Yet unlike elsewhere, the two parties were not the Democrats and the Republicans. Instead, they were the People’s Party and the Liberal Party, both indigenous only to the Beehive state. While in the rest of the United States, Democrats and Republicans debated the merits of Reconstruction and the state of the post-Civil War union, the Utah parties were divided by religion. The People’s Party was the Mormon party, organized under the auspices of the LDS Church; the Liberal Party was the non-Mormon, or “gentile,” party.

This was not the first time that Mormons banded together at the polls. In the infant days of the Church, Mormons in Missouri voted as a bloc, causing friction with their non-Mormon neighbors. Likewise, when they fled Missouri at gunpoint and settled in Illinois, church founder Joseph Smith was regularly courted by prominent politicians seeking the sizeable Mormon vote in the thriving city of Nauvoo. By the 1840s, Mormons had become “swing voters,” alternating between the Whigs and Democrats (Bowman 2012a). And in 1844, Joseph Smith ran for president as an independent candidate (see Chapter 8 for details).