Jackson Lewis, Utah’s youngest elected official as a 21-year-old member of the Canyons School Board, was walking into a meeting of young Utah Democrats last week when he was stopped by 1st Congressional District candidate Nate Blouin.

The 36-year-old Democrat and member of the Utah Senate was set to receive an endorsement from the Utah Young Democrats that evening, but he had some news for Lewis ahead of time: A dump of opposition research was about to be published about the congressional candidate and would expose years of offensive social media posts Blouin made between 2009 and 2015.

The posts, which were initially reported Wednesday morning by Punchbowl News, mocked people with disabilities and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, made light of sexual assault and domestic violence and joked about child sexual exploitation.

Blouin, in a statement, apologized for the posts, saying there was “no excuse” and that he had evolved past the early twenties version of himself that the posts reflect. Lewis said Blouin made similar comments to him Tuesday evening, taking accountability for the posts and apologizing for their content.

“My reaction was obviously disgust, and I was disturbed,” Lewis said in a recent interview. “It was an inappropriate thing to say and I did tell him that the comments are disturbing.”

But Lewis, who noted that he is speaking for himself and not the Canyons School Board, is not retracting his endorsement of Blouin. In the wake of the news, he is one of many Democratic voters in the district wrestling with how to handle the revelations of Blouin’s online history — and how to approach the issue of candidates’ digital footprints more broadly as a generation that grew up online begins to run for office.

“He shouldn’t have said it to begin with, but there was a different culture around posting on the internet from 2009 to 2015 than there is now,” Lewis said. “And we need to have the space and ability for people to have changed since then, or unless we can find a candidate who is Jesus Christ, we will not be able to find a person perfect enough to run.”

The posts don’t reflect the lawmaker Lewis said he has come to know in recent years, and a progressive party, he argued, needs to allow space not just for society to progress, but for people to progress, too.

And Lewis thinks not allowing for that could impact young people running for office everywhere.

“How are we supposed to recruit people to do that, to shift policy in favor of young people, if we constantly are nitpicking through every single piece of their internet history from ten, 15 years ago?” he asked.

But other young progressives have argued that the comments reveal Blouin to be unfit for office.

Youth is ‘not an excuse’

Blouin has not denied making the posts, which were found on Reddit and online skiing and running forums.

The posts include calling members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “a bunch of bigoted a-------” and said church members are the worst part of living in Utah.

Blouin also frequently used derogatory slurs for people with disabilities and a term referencing committing violent sexual acts.

And when a Brigham Young University student was charged with sexual battery, Blouin posted on a running forum, “good ol’ mormon kid. had to let out the pent up sexual frustration somehow” and that people are “too damn sensitive” and that “slapping girl’s a----- as you run by … shouldn’t land you in jail or anything by any means.”

Trey Walton, a 23-year-old who works in political communications, noted that he is around the age Blouin was when he made the recently unearthed comments.

“It has never, ever come across my mind to comment on a public forum [something like the] vile and vigorous and gruesome nature of these comments,” Walton said in an interview. “So the excuse for being young and just reckless is not an excuse. It’s a similar excuse to ‘boys will be boys.’”

Walton said he, too, has grown up on the internet, and that he understands many young people have pieces of their digital history they might not want unearthed.

“People post, like, Tinder screenshots, and that’s cringy and that’s embarrassing,” he said. But there’s a line, he added, between embarrassing and offensive.

In Blouin’s case, Walton said the posts are central to how he is judging the candidate.

“When we can’t judge a politician by his track record because he doesn’t have one,” he said, referring to the fact that Blouin has not passed a bill into law while in the Legislature, “we have to judge based on a character analysis.”

It is particularly important, Walton argued, given the stakes of the seat for which Blouin is running, as it has a chance to be the first Democratic representative from Utah in years.

“As the sole federal Utah legislator that will be … representing all Democrats in the state, not just the district, the stakes are too high to push politics to be performance art,” Walton said.

Walton said he is not currently working for any candidate, but thinks former U.S. Rep. Ben McAdams, who is running against Blouin in the primary, is a better fit for the role.

“Ben is stable,” he said. “He is very, very soft spoken, but he is stable, and he puts his foot down when it matters. So when he talks, people look.”

Blouin said last week he believes “there are much bigger forces working against [my] campaign.” And when asked directly if he thought McAdams or his allies were behind the posts becoming public, Blouin replied: “Something like that.” A spokesperson for McAdams declined to comment on Blouin’s suggestion that the campaign had a hand in digging up the posts.

But the McAdams campaign acknowledged Thursday that “people can grow and people can learn,” but said Blouin has not changed the way he interacts with people.

Meanwhile, Lewis argued that McAdams’ voting record as a member of Congress from 2019 to 2021 was more offensive to him than anything Blouin posted.

“A comment made by 21-year-old Nate Blouin is … much less impactful on people’s actual lives than the 43-year-old Ben McAdams’ voting record and his cosponsored legislation to strip low-income and minority women from the access to abortion and reproductive care that they need,” referring to votes McAdams took on abortion bills while a member of the House.

And the dredging up of old posts, Lewis said, is at least partly a play by an older generation to keep a younger generation from unseating them in elections.

“I’m going to just be honest here, there is definitely a sense of, ‘I want to hold on to my political position as long as I want and as long as I can’ from these older folks, and they will take whatever advantage they have over young people in order to hold on to their positions of power,” Lewis said.

But Walton said he doesn’t think an embarrassing or offensive internet history is necessarily going to be the center of every young person’s campaign.

“Gen Z,” he said, “is going to be smart enough that when you’re running for office, they’re going to hire a firm to wipe it clean.”