Utah—Yes, Utah—Sends a Democrat to Congress

For the first time in eight years, deep red Utah elected a Democrat to the House. Former congressman and Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams trounced Republican Riley Owen with more than 70 percent of the vote. McAdams’ victory has been a long time in the making, and not necessarily because of the especially strategic brilliance of his campaign or even the national blue wave. Instead, his election is the result of nearly a decade of unglamorous work by good-government groups to force Utah to give up partisan gerrymandering.

For more than two decades, Republicans have used their legislative supermajority to draw congressional maps that disenfranchised many Democrats who live in Salt Lake City and the surrounding metro area. The state, which claimed one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in the country, hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress in eight years, despite many liberal strongholds where Democratic presidential candidates have for years won by wide margins.

But in 2018, voters narrowly passed a ballot initiative that required the state to create an independent redistricting commission that would draw fair voting maps. Republicans, including the current governor Spencer Cox, have fought the initiative tooth and nail, through legislation and litigation, all of which failed. Over the past year, state GOP lawmakers blew up the state’s nonpartisan judicial selection process to undermine the courts that upheld the fair maps. They also personally attacked two women on the state supreme court who were part of the unanimous decision upholding fair maps, one of whom resigned because of the attacks.

“We’re coming for you,” Utah GOP Chair Rob Axson warned the judges during the party’s state nominating convention in April. “Go find a job in the private sector. We don’t want you anymore.”

As I explained in June:

The mere possibility of Utah voters sending a single Democrat to Congress has sparked a fierce and desperately devious backlash from state Republicans hell-bent on making sure such an outcome never happens again. Emma Petty Addams, co-executive director of nonpartisan faith-based Mormon Women for Ethical Government, says, “There was, and continues to be, a sense among our [Republican] leadership in particular that an un-gerrymandered outcome was not favorable to their political future.”

McAdams’ victory may be short-lived, as Republicans will no doubt try to undo the current maps in the newly stacked courts. But in the meantime, Utah’s first non-gerrymandered election this century is showing why fair redistricting and competitive elections are so important for state residents and democracy writ large.  

In 2020, McAdams narrowly lost his congressional reelection race to Republican Rep. Burgess Owens, a Fox News commentator and former NFL defensive back who’d played for the Oakland Raiders when they won the Superbowl in 1981. Despite his endorsement by President Donald Trump, his credentials for Congress were slim: He’d suffered a series of bankruptcies. He’d published a heavily plagiarized book called Why I Stand: From Freedom to the Killing Fields of Socialism. And his ties to Utah were tenuous at best.

When he announced his run for Congress in 2019, Owens hadn’t lived in the state for long and hadn’t registered to vote there until 2014. His only real tie to Utah was his adult daughter, who actually did live there. He put her on his campaign payroll as a consultant. He lived in a house owned by one of his donors. Shortly before he announced his run for Congress in 2019, with funding from a local real estate developer, he attempted to prove his local bona fides by starting a youth charity. It folded less than three years later.

During his 2020 campaign, Owens endorsed President Donald Trump’s plan to restart nuclear testing in the state—an issue that any local would know is anathema to Utah residents, who were poisoned by radioactive fallout during the open-air nuclear tests in the 1950s. In later campaigns, he dodged debates even as he worked the conservative media circuit and blasted President Joe Biden for running a “dictatorship.”

Owens was such a bad candidate that his tenure might have been restricted to one term—except that in 2020, the legislature redrew his once-competitive district to give it a 30-point Republican advantage. The former Fox host never suffered a significant challenge again, and he governed like someone who didn’t have to worry about getting reelected.

Since taking office, Owens’ most notable achievement has been introducing a bill to force DC’s overtaxed National Airport to allow more direct flights to Salt Lake City, so, as he told the Deseret News, his children and grandchildren could visit him in DC more often. Despite FAA warnings that it would be unsafe, Congress added 10 additional flights to the busy airport. The move came under fire after the January 2025 crash of an American Airlines fight coming in to land at DCA that killed 64 people.

Owens spent a fair amount of time in office focused on important Utah concerns such as attacking what he saw as the leftward drift of the NFL, as evidenced by Bad Bunny performing at the Superbowl. Last year, Owens, who is Black, made headlines by suggesting that Beyonce’s Grammy award for best country album was “the closest thing to DEI we’re going to see right now.” He also compared the “fairness” of her win to the basic unfairness of transgender women playing in women’s sports.

Owens spent a lot of time getting people to try on his Superbowl ring. He co-founded the “Freedom from Big Tech” caucus with Republican luminaries such as disgraced Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC). Owens, a man who went through bankruptcy multiple times to avoid paying off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, fought Biden-era attempts to help student loan borrowers. Last year, he suggested that students drowning in school debt who are barred from discharging it in bankruptcy court should simply work harder and “go out and get a second job.”

Nonetheless, he was reelected twice and might have made it a third time this year except that the Utah supreme court upheld the nonpartisan congressional maps that would redraw his district for the 2026 election. That was enough to inspire Owens, 75, to announce his retirement. The move prevented an internecine primary fight among GOP incumbents in the newly drawn districts.

A fifth-generation Utahan who served in the state legislature before winning two terms as Salt Lake County mayor, McAdams will be an improvement for Utah residents in Congress if only because he is, well, normal—something that is sadly quite rare in extremely gerrymandered districts. Unlike Owens, who declared his unflinching loyalty to Trump and spent years frothing about Democratic “Marxists” and cranking out unreadable books suggesting that liberalism turned “good men” into “whiners, weenies and wimps,” McAdams is as middle-of-the-road a politician as you can find these days. Salt Lake Tribune political columnist Robert Gehrke once wrote that his inoffensiveness was “equaled only by white rice.”

Salt Lake Tribune political columnist Robert Gehrke once wrote that his inoffensiveness was “equaled only by white rice.”

During his brief two years in Congress, from 2018 to 2020, McAdams focused on issues people in Utah actually care about—and he knew how to legislate. While Owens supported Trump’s plans to restart nuclear testing, McAdams successfully inserted language into a defense appropriation bill to block new testing. He helped pass the Great American Outdoors Act, which allocated billions to repair national parks, of which Utah has five that generate a significant amount of economic activity in the state. But then he lost to Owens.

This year, though, McAdams is back, after going through an unusually robust Democratic primary in the spring that was also the product of fairer district maps. And not only that, the other Republican-leaning districts have become more competitive thanks to the nonpartisan redistricting. This week, Rep. Blake Moore won Utah’s new 2nd district by only eight points, and Rep. Mike Kennedy won the 4th District by seven. Both had won in their solidly Republican old districts by at least 30 points in 2024. Utah voters who have supported the independent redistricting may have just made their incumbents a lot more responsive to their concerns by forcing them to have to work for reelection in the future.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, McAdams credited the work done by Utah activists to make Utah elections fairer. Instead of letting candidates pick their voters, as they had in gerrymandered districts, he said, “in the district you fought to create, the people of Salt Lake County picked their own representative.”