This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Hillary Clinton's campaign dispatched Delaware Gov. Jack Markell this week to Utah, where he met with supporters and held a roundtable on economic development in downtown Salt Lake City.
Markell previously made a campaign stop in Ohio and will soon hit New Hampshire, two traditional swing states, which made his visit to Utah, one of the most conservative states in the union, an outlier.
"I was intrigued when they called me and asked me to go to Utah," he told The Salt Lake Tribune. "It says to me they think there is a good chance here."
Still, he called it an uphill battle. The most recent poll, conducted by Dan Jones & Associates for UtahPolicy.com, had Clinton 15 percentage points behind Republican Donald Trump.
Markell called Trump "incredibly divisive" and said Trump's plan for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country and comments about Mexican immigrants as rapists were "a real betrayal of American values."
"If any state gets it, it is Utah, because there is so many people from Utah who have spent time overseas visiting other cultures," Markell said in reference to missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
While there's no current plan for Trump or Clinton to visit Utah in the last two months of the race, other surrogates are likely to stop by, including Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr.