Gov. Spencer Cox said Wednesday — the day after Utah counties finished certify their primary election results — that he wasn’t going to vote for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in this year’s election. And he’s not going to vote for President Joe Biden either.
“I’m not going to vote for either presidential candidate this year,” Cox said on CNN’s The Source on Wednesday.
Instead, Cox, who is up for reelection this year, said he plans to write-in his presidential candidate — like he said he’s done for every election since 2012, when current-Utah Sen. Mitt Romney faced off against incumbent President Barack Obama.
“I haven’t voted for the top of the ticket since 2012. I’ve certainly had my concerns [with Trump] — of those is what happened on January 6th,” Cox added, referencing the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol after Trump lost the 2020 election.
While Cox said he wouldn’t vote for Trump, he said he still hoped his party and Trump would succeed, and that he was anxiously awaiting Trump to announce his pick for vice president. He appeared to endorse North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for the job, calling him an “incredible leader” who could “actually help to unite the party and lead us into November.”
When Cox was asked multiple times ahead of Utah’s 2024 gubernatorial primary, where Cox faced multiple candidates from his political right, he refused to say plainly that he would not support Trump.
“I have a very low tolerance for fake and dishonest people,” Carson Jorgensen, the former Utah GOP chair and a gubernatorial challenger in this year’s primary, wrote on X Thursday morning. “[During] the primary campaign at multiple campaign stops, Cox would say, ‘I will support whoever becomes the party nominee.’ You know what support doesn’t look like? Showing up on CNN and saying I will not be voting for the Republican Nominee.”
Emma Williams, a governor’s office spokesperson, said Cox’s stance wasn’t new.
“He’s been saying it for several, several months now,” she said.
However, his statement on Wednesday is more firm compared to how he answered the same question in February and May, before the primary election, during his monthly PBS news conferences.
In February, the governor said he “always does a write-in” to vote in presidential elections, but stopped short of endorsing Trump. He said he believed both parties were making a mistake in choosing their nominees, but added, “I do believe that President Trump is going to win.”
While Cox again expressed dissatisfaction with the Republican candidate in May — saying, “I’d hoped that we would find new candidates on both the Republican and the Democratic side” — he didn’t answer when a Salt Lake Tribune reported asked if he was going to vote for Trump.
“I answered this last time, Bryan,” he said, “You can go back and look at the tape.”