SALT LAKE CITY – Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has said he will seek a second term in 2024. Other Republican hopefuls are beginning to test the waters with the intent of challenging either Cox or Sen. Mitt Romney for their influential jobs.
This “way too early” look at the political landscape examines what might materialize in Utah’s gubernatorial race as 2023 approaches its end.
WHAT WE KNOW
While a few names have made it into the mix of potential candidates for Utah’s 2024 contest for governor, the field remains fluid with some of those individuals also interested in challenging Mitt Romney for his U.S. Senate seat.
Former Congressman Jason Chaffetz – who works for Fox News as a political pundit – has mentioned interest in running for both of those races, and Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson also is exploring the possibility of a U.S. Senate run in 2024.
In mid-March, Cox told KSL News that he would definitely seek re-election, but the 47-year-old pledged that a second term would also be his last leading the state.
At the same time, Carson Jorgensen, 33, is finishing his two-year term heading up the State Republican Party at the end of April. Reached by phone recently, Jorgensen told the Underground that he’s seriously contemplating running for governor in 2024.
“I’m pretty well committed at this point. I just have to make sure I can do what it requires to get it done,” Jorgensen said.
A COX-JORGENSEN CONTEST?
Both Cox and Jorgensen are Republicans who hail from Sanpete County – a rural land mass populated by just over 29,000 people. Their family homes sit just six miles apart.
But the ideological distance between them seems to stretch much further, illustrating the two wings of Utah’s Republican party – ranging from far right to moderate centrist.
In 2022, Gov. Cox and Sen. Romney were oddly absent from the party’s state convention, basically persona non grata who knew they’d be booed off the stage as RINOs or Republican in Name Only for some of their stances.
But Cox’s national reputation indicated his star was on the rise. In May 2022, a Morning Consult poll ranked Cox as the nation’s 6th most popular governor, according to Fox13 News.
In August 2022, Molly Ball of Time Magazine wrote about Cox as “The Red-State Governor Who’s Not Afraid to Be ‘Woke’.” While endearing to many across the nation, the hardcore element of Cox’s own party villainized him for publicly daring to define his pronouns and allowing others to do the same.
By that time Cox had labeled Fox News Celebrity Tucker Carlson as “cowardly” for being manipulative and unkind. Cox had also recently vetoed a bill that banned transgender girls from youth sports teams.
That particular veto proved to be largely symbolic because the Legislature’s GOP supermajority swooped in to override it.
Near the end of 2022, a Dan Jones & Associates poll showed Cox enjoyed a 63 percent approval rating, thanks to Utah’s large swath of moderate voters.
But in late January 2023 – early in this year’s 45-day session – Cox signed the fast-moving Senate Bill 16 that banned hormone treatments and surgical procedures for minors seeking to transition from one gender to the other.
That measure had passed along partisan lines with an overwhelming veto-proof Republican majority. While it could have become law without Cox’s signature, his speedy stamp of approval might help curry favor among the party’s base in 2024.
Before serving two terms as former Gov. Gary Herbert’s Lt. Governor, Cox practiced law and also served as a city councilman, mayor, county commissioner and state legislator.
For Jorgensen – a sixth generation Utah rancher, farmer, small business owner and recent social media sensation – the gubernatorial race represents his first run for public office. His website, carsonjorgensen.com, stated that views for Carson’s social media had reached nearly 20 million.
Jorgensen acknowledged that he intends both to campaign and govern well to the right of center.
“Socially I think we’re getting out into the weeds. A perfect example of this is what happened with Anheuser Busch this past week,” Jorgensen said recently by phone. He wasn’t thrilled that the iconic beer maker featured a transgender woman touting Bud Light during the NCAA’s March Madness broadcasts.
“They decided that their new spokesman would be a transgender woman – a man acting like a 13-year-old girl,” Jorgensen said, noting the company’s stock suffered as a result.
A big motivation for Jorgensen to enter the state’s top race has been how candidates say one thing to woo delegates and voters, and then shift positions in the general election and to govern after they take office.
“That has been my biggest thing. I’m just tired of the same old same old, where people run and then change,” Jorgensen said. “We can’t keep doing that. It’s not sustainable and it’s not fair.”
Jorgensen also realizes that his strongest support would come from Utah’s rural counties. So he’s beginning to gauge how much human and financial support he’ll be able to gather as he moves forward. And he’s also determining if it personally makes sense to aim so high.
“You either have to be crazy or a narcissist, one of the two, and I have yet to decide which I am,” Jorgensen said in a flash of self-deprecation. “(Being governor) has never been something I’ve sought for. It’s just something I feel is the right thing to do.”
If he does decide to toss his trademark cowboy hat into the ring, Jorgensen said he’ll continue to be “who I am.”
“Don’t pretend to be anything different, because there’s so many people who get disappointed,” he said.
During his time as GOP party chair, Jorgensen believes he made a difference by bucking the Utah Debate Commission in favor of hosting GOP-controlled debates where questions would be more in line with the party’s platform.
“I would do it again in a heartbeat because it was the right thing to do,” Jorgensen said. “If they’d like to partner with the party on it, I’m more than happy to do that, but never from here on out do I foresee the party deviating from having control over those.”
The field of candidates to replace Jorgensen as GOP chair recently narrowed to one: Robert Axson – director of Sen. Mike Lee’s state office – will take the party’s helm after its April 22 organizing convention.
WHY CANDIDATES CHANGE
Running for statewide office can involve courting votes at three separate stages of the same race: the party convention, a possible primary and finally the general election.
“Within the Republican party, strong conservatives tend to dominate among delegates (at convention) – but not so much among broader Republican voters when you’re facing a direct primary,” University of Utah Political Science Professor Matthew Burbank said by phone. “And If you’re running in a general election, politicians moderate those positions a bit because they’re trying to appeal to a broader range of voters.”
“The kinds of things that may motivate people in a Democratic or Republican primary are not the same kinds of things that may motivate people to come out and support you in a general election,” Burbank said. “Most politicians are well aware of that and try to calibrate.”
And in the case of a governor, part of the job involves serving as a check on the legislative branch.
“We typically see the governor trying to moderate what the Legislature does so they don’t get too far out there,” Burbank said, noting that some behavior depends on who lawmakers represent. “A governor has to represent the whole state or at least a broad swath, whereas Legislators have smaller districts.”
Burbank also acknowledged that rural districts tend to be more conservative than their urban counterparts.
“But the bulk of people are represented in urban areas,” Burbank said. “Utah is a highly urbanized state, which is to say that most of the people live in an urban area and the rural population isn’t that large.”
MONTHS TO DECIDE
No doubt 2024 will be a huge political year with several important races and volatile issues on the line. But no one can officially file as a gubernatorial candidate in Utah until the first week of January.
Utah’s last Democratic governor left office four decades ago when Cal Rampton served two terms from 1977 to 1984.
In an April 17 phone interview, Utah Democratic Spokesman Ben Anderson said his party has yet to name a gubernatorial candidate, noting that those determinations will come later this fall.
“Right now we’re focusing on municipal elections,” Anderson said.
The United Utah Party, a third party that formed in 2017, might also field a candidate. That remains to be seen.
In 2020, Cox won 63 percent of the vote after contending with challenges from Democrat Chris Peterson (he won 30 percent), Libertarian Daniel Cottam, Independent American Party of Utah’s Gregory Duerden, and four independent write-ins.
