In politics, you’re either on message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… UNDER THE RADAR.
Statewide races always seem to grab all the headlines, even in a mid-term election. While everyone (myself included) has spent far more time looking at the U.S. Senate race, there are four House races going on, too.
One that has managed to go largely unnoticed is the race for Utah’s First District, where one-term incumbent, Blake Moore faces two Republican challengers in Tina Cannon and Andrew Badger.
Badger won at convention, for whatever that’s worth (spoiler alert: not much) and Cannon has the endorsement of Rob Bishop, who represented the district for nearly two decades.
Those are maybe the only things that make the race interesting. It’s commonly accepted that a House member is most vulnerable in his first run for re-election. Survive that and Moore can likely hold the seat until he’s ready to give it up.
He certainly has the highest name ID of anyone in the race and the most money to spend over the next three weeks until ballots are in voters’ hands. Any real anti-incumbent sentiment should be split between the two challengers.
Cannon made a very small Fox News ad buy and Moore is the only candidate who is running ads consistently.
That ad show you what’s driving the race. The first third of the thirty-second supports all the wrong-track issues and includes images of the GOP’s unholy trinity of Pelosi, Biden and Putin.
The remaining 20 seconds highlight Moore’s work fighting inflation for Utah families, supporting domestic energy production and the military – a consistent winner in the district that’s home to Hill Air Force Base.
In short, Moore is saying all the right things to the broad spectrum of primary GOP voters. Outside of the delegates, who rated him seven points behind Badger, I don’t sense there’s any swell among Republican Primary voters to replace Moore.
His messaging is on target. He’s not had any major mishaps in his first term. And almost 238-thousand of them have cast a ballot for him before. All signs point toward him claiming the GOP nomination next month.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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