A record number of women are running for office this year, prompting some to call 2018 the ‘Year of the Woman.’ But maybe that’s just for Democrats. The resistance energy in the midterms seems to be working against female Republicans, who have long resisted identity politics and are reluctant or unable to claim any advantage to being a woman among voters. “We’ve told a lot of women, ‘Don’t run this year,’” said the co-founder of Republican Women for Progress. “We’ve told them, ‘You’re a great candidate, if it were any other year you would win.’" [NYTimes]
Happy Tuesday.
Topping the news: Utah’s biggest individual political donor for this election cycle is ultraconservative Republican Dave Bateman, the co-founder of the software company Entrata. He has contributed $777,454 to various right-wing causes. [Trib]
-> Rep. Mia Love and Sen. Orrin Hatch have both independently broken with President Donald Trump’s policy on tariffs against U.S. allies and rivals. “More trade, not less, benefits Utahns and the American people,” Hatch said. [Trib]
-> Robert Gehrke looks at some of the lives that have been changed one year after the launch of Operation Rio Grande, the coordinated effort to reduce drug use and violence around the downtown homeless shelter and Pioneer Park. [Trib]
Tweets of the day: From @RobertGehrke: “I appreciate Chris, Fabian and Emily being willing to share their intensely personal stories of life since Operation Rio Grande began. Hopefully it helps capture that the solutions to homelessness are as complex as the situations that got them there.”
-> From @Olivianuzzi: “Today, like so many other days of the Donald Trump presidency, I’m having trouble deciding which confirmed compulsive liar to believe!”
-> From @cushbomb: “'John McCain' is never trending for the right reason."
Happy Birthday: To Salt Lake County Councilman Michael Jensen, former 4th Congressional District candidate Doug Owens and to Helen Langan, who served as a senior adviser to former Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker.
In other news: Love called for the repeal of a medical devices tax designed to generate billions of dollars for the Affordable Care Act, though Republicans have already suspended the measure for two years. [Trib] [Fox13] [DNews] [ABC4]
-> Gov. Gary Herbert and other governors in the West say a directive from the Trump administration that severely limits a type of land swap involving federal property could hurt populations of the greater sage grouse, a beleaguered bird found in the region. [APviaTrib]
-> Rep. Rob Bishop will hold town hall meetings this week in Vernal, North Logan, Morgan and South Weber. [APviaTrib]
-> A federal judge tossed most of a lawsuit filed by a woman who says she was sexually assaulted by Missionary Training Center President Joseph L. Bishop in 1984, but a fraud assertion against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints survives. [Trib] [Fox13] [KUER] [ABC4]
Nationally: Peter Strzok, an F.B.I. senior counterintelligence agent who helped oversee the Hillary Clinton email and Russia investigations and criticized Trump in a number of text messages has been fired for violating bureau policies. [NYTimes] [WaPost] [CNN]
-> The president appeared to acknowledge on Twitter that White House aides are made to sign nondisclosure agreements — something that has long been suspected but that West Wing officials have refused to confirm. It is highly unusual for White House officials to be asked to sign such agreements for matters beyond classified information. [NYTimes] [WaPost] [USAToday]
-> In a scathing op-ed published in Politico, White House senior advisor Stephen Miller’s uncle called his nephew an “immigration hypocrite" for his role in crafting Trump administration policies. “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out,” his uncle wrote. [Politico] [WaPost]
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-- Taylor Stevens and Connor Richards
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