Hard pivot toward Trump proves costly for red-state ally

Like many GOP primaries this year, the challenge to Sen. Mike Lee in Utah turns on the question of fealty to Donald Trump. Unlike in most of those primaries, however, the issue isn’t whether he’s loyal enough. It’s whether he’s gone too far.

In most red states, that wouldn’t be a problem. But in Utah, where many Republicans continue to harbor reservations about Trump’s character, the appearance that Lee has bent over backwards to curry favor with the former president is complicating his bid for a third term.

Lee’s predicament is a reflection of Utah’s singular politics. But it’s also a test of the limits of Trump’s appeal in one of the most conservative states in the nation.

“Utah has a very different political culture here. Navigating that can be difficult,” Carson Jorgensen, chair of the state’s Republican Party, said. “The culture is very much influenced by their friends and neighbors and faith, and we are very tight knit communities.”

The two leading Republican challengers to Lee — former state legislator Becky Edwards and business and community leader Ally Isom — both campaign on the premise that Utahns are collectively disgruntled with Lee and ready for fresh leadership.

But it’s his relationship with Trump that’s at the heart of their critiques. Lee started out as a skeptic who protested Trump’s nomination at the 2016 National Republican Convention. A month before Election Day, Lee called on Trump to drop out of the race, citing the Access Hollywood tape as the tipping point.

Then Lee took a full MAGA turn after Trump was elected. By the subsequent midterms, Lee was one of Trump’s staunchest allies in the Senate.

Trump even interviewed Lee in 2018 as a candidate to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat — and the senator said he “wouldn’t say no” should an invitation come . The following spring, Lee pledged his allegiance to Trump’s reelection bid.

“Trump’s criticized Mike, and Mike’s criticized Trump,” Jorgensen, the state’s GOP chair, said. “But at the end of the day, Mike was one of his staunchest allies.”

When Lee pivoted to Trump’s corner, many Utah Republicans held their noses at what seemed to be a purely political shift. In the predominantly Latter-day Saint state, Trump had never been as popular as in other conservative-minded states. Trump’s brashness, promiscuity and rhetoric on immigration tarnished him in the eyes of many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — in 2016, Trump fared worse in Utah than any other red state.

While Utahns warmed up considerably toward Trump after his election, it was not enough to overcome one of Lee’s Trump-related transgressions — his seeming use of his Latter-day Saint faith as a justification for his support.

It occurred at an October 2020 Trump rally in Arizona, where Lee was in attendance, but didn’t expect to speak. When Trump invited him onstage, Lee offered an impromptu pitch to two of Trump’s most unconvinced voting blocs, Hispanics and Latter-day Saints.

He first addressed his comments to his “hermanos hispanohablantes,” dusting off his rusty Spanish from a two-year Latter-day Saint mission in Texas. “Viva Donald Trump!” he continued. He then turned his attention to his co-congregants.

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee yelled, comparing Trump to a prophet in the Book of Mormon. He continued by paraphrasing the religion’s scripture, but in reference to Trump: “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”

To many Latter-day Saints, it was an unforgivable blunder. Previously, Lee had undertaken a weekslong slugfest against a church-owned news organization and quoted a Latter-day Saint hymn to justify his opposition to a Covid-19 relief bill.

But comparing Trump — the same man who privately mocked Latter-day Saint underwear — to a holy prophet was a step too far. Between January 2021 and January 2022, Lee’s support among Latter-day Saints dropped by eight percentage points, according to Deseret News/Hinckley Institute polls.

“You don’t take him before the Senate Ethics Committee because he invoked Captain Moroni, right?” one Utah political consultant explained. “It doesn’t rise to that level of inappropriate. But it just leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth.”

Lee’s relationship with Trump isn’t the sole issue in the primary. Many Utahns remain averse to the MAGA wing of the Republican Party in general. Lee’s challengers have also targeted his so-called obstructionism. Those in Lee’s inner circle praise his willingness to be a human barricade against “bad legislation,” but his opponents frame it as an unwillingness to govern.

Lee was the only senator to vote against bills speeding up ALS insurance benefits and creating museums for Latinos and women. Most recently, Lee was the lone senator to oppose the formation of a national historic site at the location of a Japanese internment camp in Colorado . Lee’s communications director told the Associated Press that the senator’s objection was not of the site itself, but of “any increase" of federally owned lands.

“Utahns want a more productive, proactive and inclusive type of Republican, and a more productive, proactive, inclusive type of conservative,” said Edwards, a conservative who voted for Biden in 2020, when he won over a higher share of Utah voters than any Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Isom, too, has a fraught relationship with her party. A former spokesperson for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she left the GOP in 2016, though she says she’s always identified as a “classic conservative” and has since returned to the party. Political observers in Utah note that Isom is positioning herself as equally conservative, if not more so, than Lee — only without the MAGA support.

Both candidates have used their own distance from the establishment GOP to hammer what they see as Lee’s blind allegiance to party and to the former president.

When the Republican National Convention convened in Salt Lake City this month and deemed the Jan. 6 insurrection as “legitimate political discourse,” Edwards joined Utah Sen. Mitt Romney in quickly denouncing the party’s statement. No such comment came from Lee.

“Senator Lee’s silence is deafening, isn’t it?” Isom said.

Earlier this month, Isom called on Lee to drop out of the race and “honor his commitment” to serve only two terms . Twelve years ago, Lee won incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett’s seat in part by campaigning on Bennett’s broken promise to serve only two terms. Lee has supported Senate legislation that would limit officeholders to 12 years of service, promising he would comply should the legislation pass.

"Unfortunately, for a lot of people in elected office, it’s circumstantial ethics," former Utah governor Gary Herbert said. "That's a legitimate criticism of Lee. Men shouldn’t be commanded in all things. You should do things that are right and proper, regardless of if it’s a rule or not."

Herbert — who has a close relationship with all three GOP candidates, including Isom, his former deputy chief of staff — has yet to make an endorsement.

Knocking off Lee won’t be easy. Early polls show the senator with a massive lead over both GOP challengers, though his approval rating among Utah voters dropped to 42 percent this month.

Lee’s relationship with the former president is somewhat complicated — Lee cosponsored the First Step Act , perhaps the Trump administration’s chief legislative achievement , but refused to challenge the results of the 2020 election, drawing Trump’s ire. Trump and Lee did not speak for over a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection, add Lee called it " a very, very bad thing that happened ." Weeks later, Lee participated in a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago .

Trump has yet to endorse a candidate in the Utah Senate race.

The Lee campaign declined an interview for this story.

The longer both Republican challengers stay in the race, though, the greater risk they run of slashing whatever hope they have to defeat Lee. In interviews, both Isom and Edwards downplayed their concern of splitting the anti-Lee vote, but multiple sources close to the campaigns confirmed that “feelers” have been put out to “foster a conversation” about one of the candidates dropping out.

Similar conversations were had prior to either candidate entering the race. Sharlee Mullins Glenn, founder of the nonprofit group Mormon Women for Ethical Government, spoke to both Isom and Edwards about pursuing other races before the two launched their respective Senate campaigns, sources say. (Glenn was not speaking for the nonpartisan organization.)

“It doesn’t appear that they’re taking votes away from Sen. Lee,” said Jason Perry, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics, which has surveyed Lee’s approval rating. “They’re mostly taking votes away from each other.”

The Utah GOP employs a dual-path nominating system, in which prospective candidates can earn their spot on the primary ballot by either the traditional convention route or by gathering signatures. Lee rode the tea party wave in 2010 to oust the incumbent Bennett in the convention — Bennett finished in third place among delegates, and the top two candidates, Lee included, moved onto the primary.

For the general election, a host of unlikely operators is working to give him a tougher fight than in his two previous reelection campaigns, where he won easily. Ben McAdams, a former Salt Lake County-based Democratic congressman who was defeated in 2020, has spent the last several months rallying voters behind a candidate outside of his party.

Evan McMullin , the 2016 independent presidential candidate, announced last year that he’s entering the Senate race as an independent, and McAdams has been outspoken in his support for the challenger. Lee ironically voted for McMullin in 2016, in protest of Trump.

McAdams, perhaps the state’s most prominent Democrat, considered running, but said it became clear that no Democrat would win a statewide race in Utah.

“I have good favorability ratings in the state of Utah,” McAdams said. “I have high name ID. And I looked closely at the race and I can tell you, it is not a race that a Democrat is going to win.”

For the past several weeks, McAdams has invited delegates for the state’s upcoming Democratic nominating convention into his home, in 20-person cohorts, to give them the McMullin sales pitch. So far, he’s spoken to over 100, and the “vast majority” — about 95 percent, he says — are convinced to not put forward a Democratic candidate in this race and instead support McMullin.

It’s an approach that has incensed Kael Weston, the lead Democrat running, who told the Deseret News it is “ fundamentally disenfranchising .”

“Lee certainly is vulnerable,” one political consultant said. “We don’t know just exactly how vulnerable because he’s never been tested before. We don’t know how he’ll react to that pressure.”