Votes are still being tabulated, but at this point it seems safe to say that, once again, mainstream Republicans in Utah have mostly rejected the far-right candidates who dominate the party’s caucus and convention system.
Which again leads one to wonder why Utah tolerates such an anti-voter system of choosing candidates for public office.
Gov. Spencer Cox was nominated for re-election. Rep. John Curtis easily took the party’s nod for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by a retiring Mitt Romney. Rep. Blake Moore was re-nominated and, while the race is still too close to call, Rep. Celeste Maloy leads in her bid to stay in office.
Each of those primary election winners was rejected, sometimes overwhelmingly so, by the party’s nominating convention back in April, losing to far-right, MAGA-following candidates.
Cox, Curtis and Moore only made it to the primary ballot through the legal alternative of gathering signatures on petitions. Maloy risked a lot by not going the signature route, and survived the convention by a fraction of the delegates’ votes.
The only exception to this trend was in Utah’s 3rd Congressional District, where state Sen. Mike Kennedy, the winner at the party’s convention, also took a plurality of the votes in Tuesday’s primary election.
Utah Republicans should realize that their convention system is a waste of time and money that only drags their party further away from the Utah conservative mainstream, producing extremist candidates that even their own party’s typical voter can’t stomach.
They, and the rest of Utah, would be better off without it.