Utah Gov. Spencer Cox declared victory late Tuesday night after he said he received a call from Democratic challenger Brian King conceding the race.
Cox led in polling before Election Day and claimed a second and final term — he has said he will not run again — over King and write-in challenger Phil Lyman.
“We live in an amazing state, and we’ve been able to solve so many of our biggest problems together ... and we still have more to do,” Cox told reporters outside the governor’s mansion late Tuesday. “We were elected to represent everyone in the state of Utah and our promise, as it has always been, is that we will work harder than everyone else and that we will represent you. We will listen to you. We will learn from you.”
The first early returns were published nearly 2½ hours after polls closed. As of 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, Cox had 56% of the vote, according to unofficial tallies, to 31% for King and 8% that were write-in votes, presumably for Lyman.
After his phone call to Cox, King addressed about 100 supporters at Hotel Monaco, wishing his opponent success.
“From the very beginning, this campaign has been about a lot more than politics, about standing up for the values that define who we are as Utahns,” King said. ”We didn’t get the outcome that we wanted tonight, but I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished ... There are significant challenges facing our state, and we have to keep advocating for solutions to the problems that the people in the state of Utah face.”
It has been a gubernatorial race unlike any the Beehive State has seen.
In the fight for the GOP nomination, it was a contest between Cox’s “disagree better” mantra vs. Lyman’s approach of just disagreeing.
Lyman sought to replicate a Trumpian tone, appealing to red-meat party conservatives. It worked well enough to capture more than two-thirds of the delegate support at the nominating convention, where Cox — already assured a spot in the primary because he had gathered petition signatures — was booed loudly and fired back at the audience that “maybe you hate that I don’t hate enough.”
Cox went on to win the primary by nearly 38,000 votes — 54% to 45% — but Lyman refused to accept the results, accusing the governor of fraud, challenging the signature path the incumbent took as illegal, and asking the Utah Supreme Court and later the U.S. Supreme Court to disqualify Cox from the ballot.
“What a wild journey, through twists and turns,” said Damon Cann, a professor of political science at Utah State University. “[Lyman] lost by a substantial and clear margin in the primary election, so, at that point, I think just about anybody else would have stopped and been done with it, but that’s where things really went down the rabbit hole.”
Subsequent audits by the Utah state auditor and the legislative auditor general found that a small percentage of the signatures Cox gathered to get on the primary ballot should not have been counted, while others that should have been were not. Ultimately, auditors concluded, Cox complied with the law and met the legal requirements to be a candidate.
Lyman tried to persuade his legislative colleagues to convene an emergency special session to disqualify Cox but was rebuffed by House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper.
That didn’t stop Lyman and his backers from declaring the election fraudulent. And when Lyman asked what the punishment should be for election fraud, many responded with calls for hangings and executions — which the Utah Department of Public Safety and the FBI said they were monitoring.
King, meanwhile, who was outraised by Cox by more than $6 million, struggled to be heard among the cacophony.
The Democratic legislator took an extraordinary step of paying for a campaign ad in which he appeared with Lyman, the message being that, while the two disagree on policies, they agreed that Cox needed to go.
During his only debate with Cox, King sought to paint the incumbent governor as a chameleon, who talks like a moderate but governed like a right-wing conservative.
Cox bolstered King’s case in July, when the governor, who had been a consistent critic of Donald Trump, endorsed the former president’s election bid after an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. Cox explained that he believed Trump could unite the country and would temper his rhetoric — which, it turned out, the GOP presidential nominee did not do.
The Utah governor later drew criticism for sending a campaign email featuring a photo of Cox with Trump and the Utah family of a fallen Marine at Arlington National Cemetery, which explicitly prohibits political events at the reverential site.
After all of the dust settled, however, the election outcome was what was widely expected before it began. Cox continues an unbroken streak of Republican victories in gubernatorial races that dates to 1980, when Democrat Scott Matheson won his second and final term.
Cann said going up against two Republicans, King should have done better. “That should be the recipe,” the political scientist said, “for Democratic success.”
“You should have Cox and Lyman splitting the Republican vote, and King should really have the opportunity to push forward and seize on the situation,” Cann said. “It seems like a missed opportunity for the Democratic Party.”
