Robert Gehrke: How Celeste Maloy went from long shot to a front-runner for Congress

Celeste Maloy had a very, very good weekend.

Entering the Republican convention where delegates would choose their favorite to replace retiring 2nd Congressional District Rep. Chris Stewart, Maloy, running for office for her first time, was — according to everyone I talked to that week — expected to finish third or fourth.

The contest was shaping up to be between frontrunner Greg Hughes, the former Utah House Speaker, and potential challenger Jordan Hess, the former vice chairman of the Utah Republican Party.

But things went badly for Hughes from the start, underachieving in the first round of voting and was never able to recover, while Maloy and Hess kept adding votes in each subsequent round of balloting.

By the end of the day, it was Maloy, a staffer for Congressman Stewart, who pulled a stunning upset and emerged victorious at the convention and has set herself up to be the favorite to replace her boss.

Here’s a look at how she did it:

The power of endorsements

Generally speaking, I think endorsements can be overblown. But this race is an example where they actually mattered.

Maloy was largely unknown when she jumped into the crowded field. But the endorsement of her old boss helped elevate her from the ranks of also-ran to a top-tier candidate.

She was in striking distance after the first round of balloting — trailing Hughes by about 4% — and it stayed, with the pair running one-two in the second, third and fourth rounds.

But after the fourth round, Jordan Hess, the former vice chairman of the state party, was eliminated. When Maloy came back onstage before the final round of balloting, Hess was at her side, urging his supporters to back her.

It seems to have been enough to put Maloy over the top.

The China hit piece

Just a couple of days before the convention, The National Review dropped a piece mostly recycling earlier reporting from The Associated Press about Hughes’ travel to China while he was speaker and efforts by the Chinese government to influence state Legislatures.

There wasn’t anything new in the piece, but it was framed to focus exclusively on Hughes. While the story cast Stewart as “a staunch China hawk …. Hughes, by contrast, has a history of interactions with Chinese party and state entities.”

Not long after the story was published, delegates got a text message referencing the story.

It’s not clear if Maloy’s camp was behind it, but it doesn’t really matter. In the convention hall, I’m told, delegates were asking an unusual number of questions about China. Hughes used part of one of his short convention speeches to address it, suggesting he believed the tactic had drawn blood — which it seems to have done.

Regional allegiances

I’m told there was an incredibly strong sentiment from the delegates in Southern Utah that they wanted to see a nominee from their neck of the woods.

Hess had focused his campaign on being that guy, but Maloy was out in front of him after the first round of the balloting, and Hess was never able to catch up.

So that left the choice between Hughes, who is from Draper and doesn’t actually live in the district, and Maloy, who hails from Cedar City and has strong support among the delegates in rural counties.

And you may be thinking: Aren’t most of the delegates from the Wasatch Front? And the answer is no.

Over 30% of the delegates in the Second District are from Washington County. Tack on Iron, Beaver and a couple others and you have more than half coming from outside of Salt Lake and Davis counties (this is just another component of how the districts were gerrymandered by the Legislature).

And the makeup of the district is also important when we talk about where we go from here.

Primary front-runner

We know Maloy is the party’s — or at least the delegates’ — favored candidate and has locked up a spot on the primary ballot.

Right now, all eyes are on two other Republican candidates — former state Rep. Becky Edwards and former Republican National Committeeman Bruce Hough — to see if they can get the 7,000 signatures needed to qualify for the primary.

Edwards’ campaign says they’ve gathered about 5,000, and Hough told me Monday he already has more than 5,000 and voters should “expect to see me on the primary ballot.”

If either one gets on the ballot, they will still be facing district demographics that work against them because so much of the voting population is in the rural parts of the state. In Edwards’ case, when she ran against Sen. Mike Lee last year, she only managed to get 15% of the vote in the rural counties that make up most of the district, doing much better in the Salt Lake and Davis area.

To be fair, Maloy isn’t an established, well-funded incumbent like Lee is, so there’s room for Edwards to improve.

But if both Edwards and Hough make it to the primary, as it appears will likely be the case, there’s potential that they split the urban vote and make the task that much easier for Maloy.

A lot can still happen, but realistically, in the span of a couple of weeks, Maloy has gone from being a relatively unknown staffer to becoming the front-runner in the race to be the next member of Congress from the 2nd District.