One of the more puzzling, albeit obscure, subplots in the final weeks of this campaign season has been Donald Trump’s thunderingly incompetent effort to court Mormon voters.

Earlier this month, the former president’s campaign launched Latter-day Saints for Trump, one of several “coalition” groups designed to coordinate outreach to specific subsections of the electorate. (See also: Catholics for Trump, Jewish Voices for Trump, and Latino Americans for Trump.) The campaign’s special attention to the LDS vote makes sense. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once the most reliably Republican religious group in the country, have been considerably less loyal to the party in the Trump era. And enough of them live in the closely divided battleground states of Arizona and Nevada to make a difference.

But almost immediately, Latter-day Saints for Trump devolved into a Veep-like comedy of errors. The official website went live on October 7 with a photo of Russell M. Nelson, the president of the Church and a man considered by its members to be a prophet of God. When a reporter for the Church-owned Deseret News asked if the campaign had gotten permission to feature the image, given the Church’s neutrality in partisan politics, the campaign quickly scrubbed the photo from its homepage.

A few days later, users on X discovered a page on the Trump-campaign website selling Mormon-branded merch—including Latter-day Saints for Trump coffee mugs ($25) and koozies (two for $15). When people pointed out that Mormons somewhat famously don’t drink coffee or alcohol, the campaign hastily rebranded the merch, and a social-media pile-on ensued. (“Next: Jews for Trump pork chops.”)

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

Meanwhile, Mormon-targeted campaign events have been scheduled with an odd indifference to Latter-day Saint religious practice. A canvassing event in Nevada, for example, was held the same weekend as General Conference, a semiannual series of Church broadcasts in which senior leaders deliver sermons and spiritual counsel. (The timing was a “challenge,” admitted the Utah GOP chair, who helped organize the event.) And when Trump held a rally in Prescott, Arizona, with an array of MAGA-Mormon luminaries—including Senator Mike Lee of Utah and the right-wing media personality Glenn Beck—it took place on a Sunday, which Latter-day Saints traditionally set apart for worship, service, and rest, not political events. (Perhaps to address this dissonance, the post-rally Latter-day Saints for Trump Zoom call was advertised as a “virtual fireside,” a reference to evening religious meetings held by Mormons.)

The latest hitch in Trump’s Mormon outreach came yesterday, when the Deseret News reported that Doug Quezada, a founding co-chair of Latter-day Saints for Trump, is being sued for fraud over an alleged scheme involving a cannabis company. (Quezada told the paper the lawsuit was a “shakedown” and denied wrongdoing; in July, a judge denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.) Such allegations may be somewhat commonplace in the Republican nominee’s orbit, but the words cannabis company and fraud will not reassure Trump-skeptical Mormons.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to my request for an interview about the rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump. But Rob Taber, the national director of Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group that works closely with the Democratic campaign, was happy to talk. Taber told me he’s been surprised by the “sheer incompetence” of Trump’s efforts, and chalked up the missteps to a lack of practice. “They’re used to being able to count on the LDS vote to be the door-knockers and the foot soldiers of the Republican Party,” Taber told me. “Actually having to engage in persuasion is a little bit new to them.”  

For most Mormon voters, these political faux pas won’t be deal-breakers on their own. But the Trump campaign’s clumsiness is revealing. Taber has a point: There’s a reason professional Republicans are so bad at pandering to Latter-day Saints—before Trump came along, they never had to. In the modern political era, a typical GOP presidential nominee would receive the support of 70 to 80 percent of LDS voters in the United States. In 2016, Trump—with his “locker-room talk” and fondness for adultery, his rank xenophobia and religious illiteracy—barely managed to pull half of the national Mormon vote, and won deep-red Utah with a meager plurality. (Evan McMullin, a Mormon independent candidate, drew more than 20 percent of the vote.)

For most of 2016, Trump’s campaign seemed to take the Mormon vote for granted—even as Democrats saw an opening. That August, Hillary Clinton wrote an op-ed for the Deseret News touting her record of support for religious minorities around the world as secretary of state, and contrasting it with Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, which the Church had condemned. Intent on showing that she’d done her homework, Clinton even cited several historical LDS leaders by name. When Trump responded with his own Deseret News op-ed a few days later, it comprised a hodgepodge of generic GOP talking points, plus a tin-eared pledge to protect pastors who endorse political candidates from the pulpit (a practice that, though common in evangelicalism, is forbidden in LDS services).

Four years later, Trump and his allies seemed more attuned to their Mormon problem. The campaign repeatedly dispatched Donald Trump Jr. to Utah, and enlisted the help of Mormon surrogates. But they still struggled to connect. The most famous blunder came late in the 2020 campaign, when Lee gave a speech in Arizona ham-fistedly comparing Trump to a character from the Book of Mormon.

[Read: Why mormons don’t like Trump]

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee said, pointing to Trump. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”

Many Mormons, including some Trump supporters, found the comparison blasphemous. Captain Moroni is a beloved scriptural figure, the personification of bravery and selflessness, and seeing him invoked at a MAGA rally was jarring. Lee quickly walked back the comments, but the incident illustrated just how uncomfortable many Mormons are with their newfound status as a voter bloc to be fought over. To court them effectively in a presidential campaign requires both a strong grasp of LDS culture and a certain amount of delicacy.

Rob Taber told me that this is where Mormon Democrats like him have an edge. People with left-of-center views in the Church spend their lives learning how to lay out their view gently and persuasively, he said: “You just get used to explaining things.”

There’s little doubt that most LDS voters will support Trump this year. Conservative attitudes on abortion and other cultural issues guarantee a certain degree of partisan loyalty. But younger Latter-day Saints, who came of age in the Trump era, are significantly less conservative than previous generations. And in the past eight years, some anti-Trump Mormons have gotten more comfortable voting for Democrats instead of third-party protest candidates.

The margins could matter. In a survey conducted shortly before the 2020 election, Quin Monson, a pollster and political-science professor at Brigham Young University, found that Joe Biden doubled Clinton’s share of the Mormon vote in Arizona—a state with a large Mormon population that Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes. For the Harris campaign, holding on to those voters this year could be the difference between losing Arizona and cracking open a celebratory beverage on Election Night. I know a website where they might be able to get some koozies on sale.

There may be, quite simply, no place in America less Jewish than Brigham Young University’s football stadium on Yom Kippur. In a typical year, few of the roughly 63,000 fans who streamed into LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo, Utah, for the annual homecoming game would even be aware that Saturday was the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. But this is no typical year: The star quarterback for BYU, Jake Retzlaff, is Jewish. And he has led the team for the flagship Mormon university to an undefeated start that’s confounded prognosticators and propelled the Cougars to a top-15 national ranking.

It is one of those wonderfully strange college-sports stories that serves as a magnet for camera crews. In recent weeks, ESPN and CBS have both turned up on campus to profile Retzlaff, and Fox Sports dispatched a team of 140 to broadcast its game-day studio show from Provo. The stakes for Saturday’s game were high—a win against the University of Arizona Wildcats would not only make the Cougars bowl-eligible, but keep the team’s chances at a Big 12 championship and national-playoff berth alive.

The stakes were also high for me personally. As a dad gradually surrendering to stereotype in my approach to middle age, I had recently embarked on a mission to indoctrinate my young kids in the college-sports fandom of my alma mater. I bought them overpriced royal-blue hats and sweatshirts, and showed them viral videos of the beloved Cougar mascot, Cosmo, doing TikTok dances and jumping through hoops of fire. After deciding I would bring them to Provo last week for their first BYU football game, I spent days teaching them the fight song. By the time we took our seats on Saturday afternoon, the propaganda had done its work—they couldn’t wait to belt out “Rise and shout, the Cougars are out” after each BYU touchdown.

I assured them they’d have many opportunities to sing, but I secretly had my doubts. Arizona’s defense was good; BYU’s first five wins of the season had been weird and a bit fluky. Most important, like any BYU fan, I harbored a vaguely superstitious notion that this was the point of the season—with national hype peaking and people finally taking notice—that our team usually melts down. Chatting with fans before the game, I discovered I wasn’t alone in this anxiety. One fan even wondered aloud if Retzlaff’s decision to play on Yom Kippur, which many religious Jews spend in prayer and fasting, would curse his performance. He was joking, I thought. But then the Cougars’ opening drive ended with Retzlaff missing an open receiver in the end zone on fourth down, and the Wildcats marched down the field to score, and suddenly the specter of divine punishment didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. I found myself wondering if any other nervous BYU fans were Googling How bad is it to play football on the day of atonement?

When I met Retzlaff on campus a couple of days later, I told him about the earnest Mormon’s concern over his compliance with Jewish law, and he laughed. “That’s fandom,” he told me. Retzlaff, who wore sweats and a Star of David necklace, said he never seriously considered skipping the game. He knew some Jews would disagree—Sandy Koufax famously sat out the first game of the World Series in 1965 to observe Yom Kippur. But to Retzlaff, playing on Saturday was a chance to represent his faith on a stage that is not exactly teeming with people like him. Utah has one of the smallest Jewish populations in America, and at BYU, there are only two other Jewish students. That puts Retzlaff in a strange position: He represents one of the university’s smallest minorities and is also one of its most famous students.

Retzlaff, a California native who spent two years as a top junior-college quarterback, told me that his first thought when BYU recruiters showed up was about football, not faith. The school has a comparatively high-profile program with a powerhouse pedigree—the Cougars won the national championship in 1984 and have churned out a string of famous quarterbacks over the years, including Steve Young and Jim McMahon. But he admits that contemplating what his non-football life would look like on a 99 percent Mormon campus gave him pause.

BYU, which strictly prohibits drinking, premarital sex, and a host of other traditional college pastimes, is not an obvious draw for most non-Mormon students. But every year, the school attracts a combination of college athletes who want to play their sport without distraction and students from other orthodox-religious backgrounds who don’t mind spending time on America’s most “stone-cold sober” campus. (Last year, a Muslim basketball player for BYU named Aly Khalifa made headlines for fasting during a March Madness game that fell during Ramadan.)

Retzlaff told me his arrival in Provo was a culture shock. Sundays were brutal: Local businesses closed, the campus shut down, and, with most of his teammates at church, Retzlaff found himself sitting alone in his room, struggling to ward off boredom. The mandatory religious classes, which frequently began with all the students singing a Mormon hymn, could also be disorienting. “Every single person around me has got this thing memorized,” he recalled, “and I have no idea what’s going on.”

Another player in his position might have chosen to downplay his religious differences; Retzlaff decided to lean in. On Instagram, he started referring to himself as the “BYJew,” and encouraged skittish friends and teammates to use the term as well. (Eventually, the Utah County Chabad began selling “BYJew” T-shirts.) To celebrate Sukkot last year, he arranged for a kosher food truck from Salt Lake City to visit campus so he could treat his teammates to shawarma and falafel. He relished the opportunity to educate. “Members of the LDS faith do have a funny fascination with Judaism,” he told me. Some of the questions he got—“Do you guys believe in Jesus?” for example—were rudimentary. (“To me, that’s like, you’ve never met a Jew in your life,” he told me.) But others were more sophisticated, prompting conversations about the overlapping theologies and shared cultural experiences of two religious minorities, one very old, the other relatively new.

The Latter-day Saint rituals weren’t his own, but Retzlaff learned to find comfort and even a kind of divine beauty in them. During the pregame team prayers, when all the other players bow their heads, he looks up and around the locker room at his friends and teammates—trying “to be present in the moment” as he reflects on his own gratitude.

Retzlaff’s experience took on a new dimension after the October 7 attacks on Israel last year. As campuses across America erupted in protests over the war in Gaza, and as many of those protests curdled into virulent anti-Semitism, Retzlaff was struck by how different his classmates seemed from the people in viral video clips hurling epithets at Jewish students. He suspected that the secularism that dominated those other campuses played a part. “I’d love to ask them about their faith,” Retzlaff told me of the protesters. “What are the odds that they’re faithful at all? I’d bet you they’re not.” For all the inconvenience and occasional awkwardness that BYU’s deep religious culture might cause him, Retzlaff believes it’s allowed his fellow students to see his Judaism not as a marker of political identity but as a faith that warrants respect, even reverence.

In fact, Retzlaff told me, as BYU’s quarterback he’s encountered more anti-Mormonism than anti-Semitism. The year before he joined the team, some fans at the University of Oregon greeted the Cougars with chants of “Fuck the Mormons.” The school eventually apologized, but Retzlaff told me he and his teammates have continued to face religious taunts in opposing stadiums. He’s less scandalized by the heckling than by the lack of outrage it seems to engender. “The blatant disrespect for their faith—it’s something to think about. What if there was a Jewish university that had a Jewish football team, and they were saying that in the stands?” Retzlaff asked me. “Like, imagine if that hit the papers. That would be a big deal.” The casual bigotry, and muted response to it, unnerves him. “There’s a lot of people who just don’t like Mormon people, for no reason,” he told me. “That’s what happened to the Jews all throughout history.”

In the arena on Saturday, Retzlaff and his team found their rhythm in the second quarter. After a perfect 20-yard touchdown pass tied the game, the Cougars never looked back. They scored 24 unanswered points, and forced four turnovers. We sang the fight song until our voices went hoarse, and by the time the game ended in a 41–19 blowout, my kids were converted. I had a Jewish quarterback to thank for helping me pass my fandom down to the next generation.

But BYU’s win wasn’t meaningful only to the Latter-day Saints who were watching that day. After the game ended, Retzlaff made his way to the locker room to shower and change, and then took questions at a press conference. Playing like that on Yom Kippur was, he would later tell me, a “spiritual experience.” He was exhausted and emotional. But before he could leave, he got word that someone was waiting for him in the stadium, now mostly empty. A Jewish fan had waited more than an hour to take a picture with the quarterback. After shaking Retzlaff’s hand and thanking him, the man said he was going home to break his fast.