When former Utah House Minority Leader Brian King filed to run for governor, he hoped to break a losing streak that has lasted nearly three decades — Democrats haven’t won a statewide race since 1996.
But after he lost by 25 percentage points to Republican Gov. Spencer Cox in November, the Salt Lake City attorney has a new goal: Revamp the Utah Democratic Party to gain ground in the crimson state. First, though, he has to beat three other candidates for chair.
Among King’s challengers is up-and-coming politico Ben Peck, who, if elected, would be one of the youngest ever to lead a state political party. The 25-year-old hasn’t spent years in elected office, like King, but he ran campaigns for Democrats who won two of Utah’s most competitive 2024 races: Salt Lake County Council member Natalie Pinkney, who captured the one countywide seat up for grabs, and state Rep. Rosalba Dominguez of Murray.
Jonathan Lopez, a third chair candidate, did not respond to requests for an interview, and Archie Williams III did not provide the party with contact information to post on its website. The four will face off at the party’s organizing convention Saturday at Ogden High School.
King, who was a reliably outspoken liberal voice during his decade-and-a-half in the Legislature, is considered by many to be the favorite in the chase for chair. He has the backing of most Democratic state lawmakers, the last person the party sent to Congress and the most powerful Democrats in Utah — including Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson.
But an upset by a young, progressive organizer is hardly unprecedented. In 2023, the North Carolina Democratic Party ousted its incumbent chair — also a former state lawmaker — to pick a 25-year-old boss.
Peck, who has already served as executive director of the Salt Lake County Democratic Party, argues it is time for a new generation to lead the state party, whose loyalists even complain about stagnation and disappointment.
Several issue and identity caucuses in the party have picked Peck as their preferred candidate, including the Progressive Caucus, Young Democrats, Women’s Caucus, the Stonewall Caucus (representing the LGBTQ+ community), the Disability Caucus and the Asian/Pacific Islander Caucus. Pinkney, who endorsed Peck, described him as a “campaign wizard” who she said can “lead the party into a winning era.”
“The party has unfortunately turned into a bit more of a social club that focuses on wine-and-cheese fundraisers,” Peck said, “rather than an organization that’s actually supposed to be winning elections.” None of the party’s executive committee, he noted, is under age 30.
Saturday’s results will reveal if his message has resonated with delegates. According to a recent report by the Utah Foundation, delegates trend much older than other registered Democrats. Roughly 58% of Democratic delegates were born in the ’60s or earlier. By contrast, 61% of Utah’s larger Democratic electorate was born after 1980.
King agrees that the party needs more young people involved and plans to add more structure to the party’s operations toward that end. He foresees more outreach and visibility fending off a defeatist attitude among some beleaguered Democrats.
“The loss of Vice President [Kamala] Harris in the election last year, and seeing some of the things that Donald Trump has done, and seeing how badly our supermajority state Legislature has acted in terms of just abusing its power,” King said, “has caused some Democrats, who would otherwise be energized, to be a little discouraged.”
Yet a record-breaking referendum effort against an anti-union bill and Utah protests attended by thousands gives him hope. “I’m optimistic that we can overcome that relatively easily if we work hard,” King said, “because the extreme behavior of both Trump and the supermajority Legislature are so great that it has roused people into action.”
How to make Utah a little less red
Whoever wins will have a steep climb to put up a fight in midterm congressional and legislative elections. Despite a statewide coordinated campaign last year, the party merely held its ground in the Legislature and did not come close to winning any statewide or federal contests.
All of the candidates for chair have said during their campaigns that they believe the party can — and should — do better, and outgoing Chair Diane Lewis agreed.
“I think we can win more races, I really do,” Lewis said, noting that she sees more people becoming politically active as they become frustrated with policies pursued by Republican trifectas at both the state and the national level.
At county conventions leading up to the statewide event, Lewis estimated that attendance doubled — including in rural counties where only a few typically participate. She is not endorsing anyone in the race but said her successor will have to find a way to “continue the excitement.”
Short-form videos posted on social media by Elevate Strategies, the Utah political consulting group that ran King’s gubernatorial campaign and has taken on his bid for chair, have drawn and harnessed some of that enthusiasm.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan at Elevate Strategies in Salt Lake City on Thursday, April 24, 2025.
With multicolored sticky notes and a whiteboard, Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan began explaining Utah’s hottest political issues and policy debates through a left-leaning lens in Generation Z terms, and occasional profanity, after last year’s elections wrapped up.
Their TikTok page has almost 60,000 followers, and an Instagram account has almost 18,000. Videos have amassed as many as half a million views.
“If you’re a Democrat and you’ve ever thought to yourself, ‘Wow, the party really needs to get its sh-- together,’ now is the time,” Finlayson told viewers earlier this month, “because we are in the middle of an election for the next chair of the Utah Democratic Party, and making sure that our party actually gets back on track and we actually start doing something starts with electing Brian King as chair.”
People piled into the comments asking how to become Democratic delegates.
Going on the offensive and meeting voters where they are, which is typically online, is a tactic the team put into practice during King’s gubernatorial campaign, and one the chair candidate said he wants to carry over into party leadership.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Notes at Elevate Strategies in Salt Lake City on Thursday, April 24, 2025.
One way King said he would do that is by joining the trend of high-profile Democrats making guest appearances on adversarial media, like President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary and former presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, who has become a regular fixture on Fox News.
King did something similar last year when he joined Phil Lyman, Republican-turned-independent candidate for governor, in an ad urging voters not to pick incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox. King wants to get the word out that, from his perspective, Democratic policies are more closely aligned with the needs of “regular working Utahns” than those of Republicans.
Peck, too, has ideas for growing the base, largely focused on recruiting the people involved with issue-focused grassroots efforts to rally behind Democrats, and vice versa.
When Utahns attended a town hall for Republican congressional Reps. Celeste Maloy and Mike Kennedy — where the two were greeted with shouts of “shame” and “do your job” — Peck stood outside gathering signatures for the referendum to reject the law stripping public unions of collective bargaining rights. He has traveled to dozens of rallies organized since Trump’s inauguration to network and invite protesters to sign up to become delegates.
“A lot of times [people at protests are] written off by the party as, ‘Oh, those are the activists, they’re leftists who hate the party. They’ll never join us,’” Peck said. “But through talking with them, they just didn’t even know that the party would take them. … We should, as a party, be begging people who show up to these protests and rallies, these young people, to be part of the party instead of gatekeeping.”
Pulling Dems out of disarray
For any of those efforts to be worthwhile, both candidates said that Democrats, as King put it, need to “put in place a structure within the party that grows credibility and grows a feeling that … the party can be trusted.”
Finlayson and Morgan said King’s experience in elected office gives him the background needed to bring organization and stability to the party.
“In Utah especially, we see so much turnover in staff at the state party level,” Finlayson said. “It does tend to have a little bit more of a chaotic feel when things are having to be reset all the time.”
Per its website, the party currently employs two people. It does not have an executive director, nor a communications director. Multiple sources confirmed that both positions have been vacant since last year.
On top of a hiring spree, the next chair will also face the task of mending a persistent rift in the party triggered by delegates splitting in 2022 over whether to nominate a Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Mike Lee or back big-name independent candidate Evan McMullin.
They ultimately chose the latter, to no avail, at the same convention where Lewis officially took the helm after serving several months as interim chair. She subsequently spent much of her tenure trying to hold fighting factions together.
In 2024, there were again races in which prominent Democrats endorsed unaffiliated and third-party candidates for statewide and legislative offices, rejecting candidates running under the party banner who had either spent little time campaigning or publicly disavowed the party’s platform. In every such instance, the candidates with “DEM” printed next to their name outperformed their non-Republican opponents without matching their effort.
One of those defeated unaffiliated and third-party candidates — attorney general candidate Michelle Quist, who now leads the Utah Forward Party — was a client of Elevate Strategies, and Finlayson and Morgan conceded that “it didn’t necessarily pan out in the way that some people thought it would over two election cycles.” They said any coalitions formed would be better served by “building the Democratic brand.”
King shares that opinion. He said it is the chair’s responsibility to recruit high-quality candidates and “do everything in my power as chair to give them every reason to run as Democrats, rather than Republicans or rather than independent or unaffiliated candidates.”
Pointing to Senate District 8, which includes parts of Salt Lake and Davis counties, Peck asserted that because the party did not prevent a Democrat and unaffiliated candidate from splitting votes, “we blew our best shot of increasing our representation in the Senate … and we won’t get another chance at flipping that seat for another four years.”
Republican Sen. Todd Weiler of Woods Cross received 47.1% of the votes in the district, while the Democrat and independent candidates, combined, netted 49.5% of votes.
“We need to stop pretending that people are so afraid of the word ‘Democrat’ that just getting rid of that on the ballot is going to make us win,” Peck said. “If we’re ashamed of being Democrats, we can’t be surprised that people don’t want to join our party and vote for our candidates.”
Correction, 4 p.m. • This story was updated to clarify that Elevate Strategies worked on the 2024 campaign of one candidate who was not a member of the Democratic Party.