AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool, File
- Sen. Mike Lee’s top GOP primary opponents have called for a shift away from former President Trump.
- Unlike most states, Lee’s Republican challengers in Utah aren’t competing over fealty to Trump.
- The senator’s reelection bid is also complicated by his earlier push for term limits for lawmakers.
On paper, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah should have one of the easiest reelection bids in the country.
The two-term lawmaker represents an overwhelmingly conservative state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964 and last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1970.
However, Democrats aren’t the biggest barriers to Lee’s 2022 reelection campaign.
Two of Lee’s top Republican challengers — former state Rep. Becky Edwards and Ally Isom, a former spokesperson for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — both believe that Utah voters want fresh leadership in Washington, DC.
And to be untethered from the former Republican president.
Edwards, who voted for Biden in the 2020 presidential election, believes that former President Donald Trump should have been impeached for “incitement of insurrection” for his role in the January 6, 2021 riot and has lauded Republican Sen. Mitt Romney — a top foil of the former president — for standing on principle in the upper chamber.
“Utahns are tired of divisiveness, ineffectiveness and the extreme rhetoric Lee is so often known to deploy,” Edwards wrote in Deseret News last month, adding that “politics should not be about sowing division, a cult of personality or staunch obstructionism.”
Isom told The Salt Lake Tribune last July that if elected, her voting record would likely align with Lee’s “97% of the time,” but still believes that it is time to eliminate the “rancor and division” in government.
“Our nation is at a crossroads. I think the Republican Party is at a crossroads as well,” Isom told the newspaper.
As he fights for a third term, Lee is now facing the most pushback from fellow Republicans over his staunch support of Trump, which is complicating his reelection bid, according to Politico.
Unlike the rest of the country, where most Republican primaries have become a litmus test to gauge the level of loyalty to Trump, the Utah contest has become a referendum on whether Lee’s support of the former president has been too excessive.
Utah’s uniqueness – given its large Mormon population and ties to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) — has revealed the limitations of Trump’s combative style of politics among conservatives in the Western state.
While Trump won Utah in 2016 and 2020, he underperformed compared to recent Republican presidential nominees, defeating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a 45%-27% margin and President Joe Biden by a 58%-38% edge.
Carson Jorgensen, the chairman of the Utah Republican Party, told Politico that the faith-based character of the state plays a huge role in the nature of its politics.
“The culture is very much influenced by their friends and neighbors and faith, and we are very tight-knit communities,” Jorgensen told the outlet.
AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
A bumpy road to MAGA
In 2020, Lee was a co-chair of Trump’s campaign in Utah, but his bond with the former president didn’t always exist.
During the 2016 election, the senator wasn’t on board with Trump’s candidacy, even calling for the then-presidential candidate to exit the race after crude comments about women were revealed on the now-infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.
After Trump was sworn into office, Lee — a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and a onetime Assistant US Attorney in Utah — steadily emerged to become one of the then-president Trump’s closest allies in the Senate.
A Trump rally in October 2020 shifted the dynamics of Lee’s relationship with many Republicans, where he compared the then-president to a prophet in the Book of Mormon, Politico reported.
“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee said.
The senator then used scripture to boast 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,” Lee continued.
Many LDS members were not pleased with the comparison to the revered figure, with one political consultant telling Politico it “leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth.”
Lee later said in a Facebook post that the language he used was “perhaps awkward.”
“Some people found that comparison upsetting, blasphemous, and otherwise wrong,” he wrote on Facebook at the time. “I respect their right to feel that way, and realize that my impromptu comments may not have been the best forum for drawing a novel analogy from scripture.”
The senator’s numbers among LDS members dropped between January 2021 and January 2022, per Deseret News/Hinckley Institute polls, resulting in a middling 42% approval rating in a survey released last month, with 38% disapproving.
Another complication in the race: Lee has pushed for a two-term limit for senators, but is now seeking a third term for himself.
“Unfortunately, for a lot of people in elected office, it’s circumstantial ethics,” former Utah governor Gary Herbert told Politico. “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 has not yet endorsed a candidate in the race.
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