This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated.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.

Utah voters epitomize the definition of insanity attributed to Albert Einstein as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

According to a poll by The Salt Lake Tribune and Hinckley Institute of Politics, the Utah Legislature has only a 39 percent approval rating, with 43 percent of those polled disapproving of the Legislature's job and 18 percent unsure.

Yet election results over the years indicate that a vast majority of those who disapprove of the job the Legislature is doing will go into the polling booth and vote for their legislator, over and over again.

Utah is a conservative, Republican-dominated state, and elections involving statewide races show GOP candidates consistently winning over Democrats by a 60-40 margin, sometimes even as much as 65-35.

But the Democrats' mediocre showing at the polls still is markedly higher than their representation in the Legislature.

There are 63 Republicans in the Utah House of Representatives compared to 12 Democrats. Percentage-wise, that is an 84-16 advantage for Republicans, about 24 percent higher than the ratios reflected in the polls.

The Senate has 24 Republicans and five Democrats, a margin of about 83 percent to 17 percent.

And election results prove that Republican incumbents every election cycle have nearly a 100 percent chance of getting re-elected. There have been rare exceptions, but generally the only way a Republican incumbent will be defeated is if he or she loses to another Republican in the convention or the primary.

Yet, polls show Utahns are often unhappy with their legislators, even though they keep voting for them.

Utahns overwhelmingly support more funding for public education at a much higher rate than the Legislature has been willing to approve. Legislative priorities tend to shovel more and more money to software educational tools provided by private vendors and to charter schools while public polls show voters would like to see funding going to teacher salaries and development, smaller classrooms and in-school resources.

The majority of Utahns favor some form of Medicaid expansion and generally warmed to the plan put forth by Gov. Gary Herbert after much negotiating between the governor's office and the Obama administration.

Yet, the House blocked approval of any Medicaid expansion, even after the Senate voted to approve Herbert's plan, in a secret vote in closed caucus.

That triggered widespread angry responses from the public on social media and to the Legislature because voters felt the House had ignored the wishes of the public.

But what do you want to bet that every one of those Republican House members who choose to run for re-election will be successful again in November?

The Legislature's attempt a few years ago to gut the state's public records law, making it much more difficult for the public to see what their government officials are doing, received a huge slap from the public, particularly over the secretive way they pushed it through.

The public reaction was so vehement, the Legislature went back in special session and repealed the law.

Yet, just about all the Republicans who participated in that unpopular maneuver were re-elected.

There are several reasons for this particular type of insanity. Utahns, conservative by nature, are put off by the agendas of the national Democratic party and, by association, are distrustful of Utah Democrats. So a transgression committed by their Republican representative or senator can be overlooked if the alternative is a Democrat — any Democrat.

Then, of course, there is gerrymandering.

Because Republicans have controlled the state, both at the legislative level and the governor's office, for over 30 years, they have been able to redraw legislative and congressional district boundaries every 10 years that are most favorable to Republicans. There are many examples of Democratic leaning areas being swallowed up into larger Republican-dominated populations, even if by doing so the boundaries are elongated to combine territories quite remote from each other.

The result of that is that there are no Democrats in the Senate and just one Democrat in the House living outside Salt Lake County.

Because Democrats are blocked from all the important decision-making, Utah's most populated county has no voice in the Legislature.

And, because the Republicans have such a lock on the election process, the party's base wants to make sure that it can further impose its will on governing by keeping the candidate nominating system as closed as possible. Hence the fierce fight by Republican Party leaders to preserve the process whereby delegates are elected at small, easily manipulated neighborhood causes and then vote in convention for the party's nominees, which then almost always win the general.

So you have an extremist-leaning base determining who the candidates are who will then be elected because of their Republican label and then vote for laws and policies that not only ignore the wishes of the state's majority, but of the Republican Party's majority. And they know they will be re-elected anyway.

That's insanity. —