How to sum up everything that is going wrong for Donald Trump? In a word: Utah.

The ruby red, conservative enclave hasn't voted Democrat for president since 1964, quadrennially rewarding Republican nominees with among their largest margins of victory of any state.

By every political measuring stick, this is a Republican state. The GOP controls the state house and executive offices, and dominates the congressional delegation.

Culturally, fiscally and otherwise, there is not an inkling of liberalism in Utah's DNA. And yet, even against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a candidate reviled on the right, Trump has run into turbulence.

In a late July-early August poll conducted by Dan Jones, a Republican pollster in Utah, Trump led Clinton 37 percent to 25 percent, with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson at 16 percent.

That means that despite Trump's 12-point lead over Clinton, a plurality of likely voters surveyed would prefer a candidate who is not the Republican. Yes, Trump's winning — and is expected to win. But he should be killing it.

Party insiders in Utah blamed the candidate.

They told the Washington Examiner in interviews Friday that Trump's historic weakness there could be directly traced to his personal style, policies, and the manner in which he is running his presidential campaign.

They could just as well have been talking about what has sunk the New York businessman in state and national polls since the conclusion of the Democratic and Republican conventions.

Attacks on Trump's temperament and fitness for office, and a sharper critique of his policies, has overwhelmed Clinton's several real and exploitable flaws and shifted the national race, at least for now, in her favor.

"In Utah, brutal honesty is not seen as a virtue; honesty is, but not brutal honesty. Decorum and temperament definitely matter," said Gregory H. Hughes, the speaker of the Utah House of Representatives who endorsed Trump after his first choice, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, was knocked out of the GOP primary.

Hughes, 46, is a real estate developer and hails from Pittsburgh. He moved to Utah to go to college and never left, and he concedes that his western Pennsylvania roots have made it easier to appreciate what Trump brings to the table.

Utah Republicans don't expect Trump to lose the state's six Electoral College votes to Clinton (or Johnson.) The state is simply too Republican, and conservative, to shift its support to a liberal Democrat like Clinton.

It's in Utah that Trump's pitch about voting for him to protect the Supreme Court's conservative majority, and his other traditional GOP positions, like across-the-board tax cuts, should resonate with Republicans and overcome whatever reticence they have toward him.

Utah's GOP establishment has been slow to come around. Hughes has been among the minority of high profile Republicans to do so early. Sen. Mike Lee still refuses to endorse Trump. Others, like Sen. Orrin Hatch, have offered only begrudging support.

But just last week, Gov. Gary Herbert, who endorsed Ted Cruz in the Utah primary, which was won by the Texas senator, offered his seal of approval, saying during a news conference that that he would be casting a ballot for Trump in November. Herbert cited Trump's vice presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, and the Supreme Court, as factors.

"There's not a lot of enthusiasm for Trump, but there's even less for Hillary Clinton," said LaVarr Webb, a Republican consultant in Salt Lake City whose publication, UtahPolicy.com, sponsored the Dan Jones poll.

Post-convention, Trump has continued his practice, honed during the primaries, of needlessly lashing out at the media, fellow Republicans and other myriad critics.

But unlike the primary season, the approach has distracted from his populist economic message and, while pleasing to his loyal base, has hampered his ability to grow his support with the voting blocs he'll need to defeat Clinton.

It's played right into Clinton's hands, whose strategy relies in large part on painting Trump as unmoored and temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief.

It's also helped obscure accusations that Clinton was involved in potential corruption with her family's charitable foundation while she was secretary of state, and that her use of a private, home-based email server during the same period exposed national secrets to U.S. adversaries.

The net result has been falling poll numbers and broader antipathy among mainstream Republican voters, nationally and in the swing states that are likely to decide the election. That loss of support has bled into Utah.

Boyd Matheson, a Republican operative in Utah and Lee's former chief of staff in the Senate, agrees that Trump is unlikely to lose the state.

But he said that the nominee's problems are bad enough that he is probably lucky that he's not running against a Democrat without Clinton's baggage.

Utah has never been friendly territory for the Clintons. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, came in third in Utah in 1992, behind President George H.W. Bush and independent billionaire businessman Ross Perot.

"I think if it was just Tim Kaine, he'd probably have shot. He's very likable; he's respectful. He has that positive outlook and it's not all about him," Matheson said, referring to the Virginia senator that Clinton picked as her running mate.

Tepid support for Trump's candidacy in Utah should set off alarm bells because of the reasons fueling the Republican's problems.

Utahans are conservative. But perhaps tempered by their strong Mormon faith, they also are mainstream Republicans who prefer a candidate who acts presidential and signals a willingness and capability of governing.

Trump isn't passing those basic threshold tests.

Utah Republicans remain uncomfortable both with the coarseness of Trump's behavior on the stump and with the nominee's signature proposals to ban Muslim immigration and crack down on illegal immigration.

Utah Mormons spend time abroad as missionaries trying to expand the reach of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a practice that informs their views on immigration and interaction with other races and cultures. It explains why Trump's particular approach to reducing illegal immigration might be discomfiting.

Lee has said recently that their experience as a member of a religious minority also has made Utah Republicans concerned about earlier Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the U.S. on religious grounds; the plan aims to reduce the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. He has since said he would temporarily ban immigration from nations where terrorism has taken root.

Meanwhile, Trump's combativeness and focus on himself as a national savior, symbolized by the line from his nomination acceptance speech, "I alone can fix it," has sown doubts about his ability to work with lawmakers in Washington to solve problems.

Webb described Republican politics in Utah as "collaborative conservatism," adding, "So I think that Trump's extreme behavior in a lot of ways bothers a lot of Utah Republicans."

Prior to the Dan Jones poll, which was conducted during the Democratic and Republican conventions, a couple of polls had signaled unexpected danger for Trump in Utah.

Just last week, Trump appeared to validate the concern, volunteering publicly that he was aware that he might be in trouble there.

That led Clinton to publish an op-ed on religious freedom in the Deseret News, a major newspaper in Salt Lake City. Bill Clinton was dispatched to Utah to raise money, another sign that the Democratic nominee might explore upping her play for the state's electoral votes.

Trump is scheduled to submit his own op-ed to the Deseret News to run Aug. 21, after previously ignoring the paper's invitation.

The Republican National Committee dismissed suggestions that Utah was drifting from the GOP orbit.

The RNC, which is handling most of the data analytics and voter turnout work for the Trump campaign, provided unprompted to the Examiner voter data from its analytics division, usually kept under wraps, showing that Trump's support there remained strong.

At least, that was the case as of July 17, the date of the voter sentiment readout that was made available. That was on the eve of the Republican convention in Cleveland.

Per numbers reflective of "modeled Mormon voters," Trump was performing as would be expected in Utah, with 68.7 percent support, compared to 31.3 percent for Clinton.

"These same voters have an extremely high net Obama change average (+55.7%), indicating that they are clearly looking for a president who will move our country away from the failed policies of President Obama," Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the RNC, said in an email.

The data are gleaned from extensive scoring of individual voters and their preferences, using registration, voting history, social media, consumer information and other indicators.