Author and community activist Darlene McDonald announced her campaign for Utah’s 4th Congressional District on Saturday, challenging Republican Rep. Burgess Owens.
McDonald recently founded the 1Utah Project, an organization that encourages civic engagement within underrepresented communities and fights disinformation. She is also a member of the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Commission on Racial Equity in Policing, and served as chairwoman for the Utah Black Roundtable in 2019.
McDonald previously ran for a seat on the Salt Lake County Council in 2019 and ran for the Democratic nomination for the 4th District seat in 2017, although both campaigns were unsuccessful. In December, McDonald criticized Owens for an opinion piece he wrote which compared vaccine mandates to segregation.
In a news release, McDonald said she’s running for Congress so she can address issues that are being ignored — like the country’s supply chain, its “crumbling infrastructure” and the national debt.
McDonald told The Tribune on Saturday that she wasn’t planning to run, since she didn’t want to be distracted from her work on educational equity after recent racist incidents in Utah schools. But she made the decision to enter the race for Utah’s 4th District “when no one else would do it.”
“Democratic values are Utah values, and we just have to learn on what those values are,” McDonald said. “And as long as we do that, people will see us. So we just have to hold on to that message — really making not only Utah a great place to live, but making this a great and better America for everyone.”
McDonald said she hopes to be a candidate for unity, since she hasn’t heard “anything positive at all” from Owens, and that even his social media is about “dividing us as a country.” She understands that residents of Utah’s 4th Congressional District might not agree with her on everything, but if elected, they will know that she has their backs.
“As a mom and grandma, I want to ensure our future generations have a path to education, employment, and home ownership,” McDonald said in the release. “We can’t afford to simply cross our fingers and hope everything works out. We need members of Congress who, instead of focusing on distractions, do real work, on real issues that affect real Americans from every walk of life.”
