A new poll shows how Trump and Biden fare against a third-party candidate in Utah

Samuel Benson
·2 min read
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A woman cheers as former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event on Jan. 27, 2024, in Las Vegas. Trump continues to be the solid front-runner in the GOP primary polls, setting up a possible rematch with President Joe Biden.
A woman cheers as former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event on Jan. 27, 2024, in Las Vegas. Trump continues to be the solid front-runner in the GOP primary polls, setting up a possible rematch with President Joe Biden. | John Locher, Associated Press
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Former President Donald Trump leads President Joe Biden in Utah, according to a new poll of a hypothetical 2020 rematch in this year’s presidential election.

According to the Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll, 43% of registered Utah voters say they would support Trump if a Trump-Biden general election were held today. Thirty-three percent said they would vote for Biden and 24% said they would support another candidate.

The poll was conducted from Jan. 16 to 21, with a sample size of 801 registered Utah voters. The margin of error is +/- 3.02 percentage points.

The large portion of voters saying they will vote for a third-party or independent candidate — nearly 1 in 4 — may be a result of many voters still being undecided, with nine months until Election Day. But Utahns have shown significant interest in third-party candidates, reflecting a trend nationwide of disappointment in a possible Biden-Trump rematch.

In a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll conducted in August 2023, a majority of Utah voters said they would “definitely” or “maybe” consider voting for a third-party candidate in 2024.

In 2016, independent candidate Evan McMullin, a Utah resident, secured nearly 20% of the state’s vote.

Several independent and third-party candidates are running for president this year. Two of them — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West — have visited Utah in recent months, organizing signature-gathering operations to meet the state’s threshold for ballot access. Kennedy met the state’s requirements in early January.

A nonprofit group, No Labels, is pushing for ballot access across the country, too, though it has yet to declare who will be its candidate. The group plans on creating a ticket with a Republican and a Democrat.

“We have never seen these numbers that we have seen repeatedly in extensive research and modeling — that 60% don’t want these two choices. It is unprecedented. And everybody knows it,” Nancy Jacobson, founder and CEO of No Labels, told the Deseret News in August.