2022 was a particularly poor cycle for the Utah Democratic Party. The U.S. Senate campaign was a cavalcade of failures — unable to get either former Rep. Becky Edwards or Evan McMullin to run as Democrats, then shunting aside candidate Kael Weston.
One of the reasons for backing McMullin in the Senate race was that the state party would then be freed to focus on winning state legislative seats. But, instead, the insulted volunteer base was decimated and the party lost two seats in the Utah House of Representatives.
The most bizarre decision was to spend so much publicity and money on a Utah House District 1 legal technicality fight without any electorally winnable reason to engage in it, or the inventiveness to link it to a larger culture of arrogance and corruption in the monopolized Utah Republican government.
The Tribune’s Editorial Board recently addressed the need for the Utah Democratic Party to be a viable political institution, and there are several reforms Utahns can participate in to make that a reality.
First, party leadership can only change — regardless of the people in charge — if those enraged by this year’s results will get off the sidelines this year and engage in 2023′s organization process. Delegates who quit and others interested in change need to return to the party, demanding at the conventions that party leadership candidates learn from their mistakes and then engage throughout the next cycle and beyond to make sure they do.
Second, there needs to be long-term planning to get moderates to vote for Democrats. As in 2018, ballot questions that a majority of voters support can be part of this process. With the loss of two Democratic seats in the Utah House, a constitutional amendment banning abortion is likely headed to Utah voters in 2024. As in other states, Democrats ride the coattails of a strong opposition campaign that counters with strong family-oriented proposals like investments in child care, eliminating the gender pay gap and age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education.
Furthermore, instead of more McMullin experiments, Democrats should get behind ballot initiatives that expand ranked-choice voting to party primaries and general elections, as Alaska and Maine have done.
Lastly, Utah Democrats should not give up nominating moderate candidates, but the McMullin campaign showed that abandoning the party is a failed strategy, as it has been for decades, and likely will be in the future for Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Sens. Mark Kelly or Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Michael Bennet of Colorado — all moderate Democrats — won around us in 2022. But they focused on local issues that connected them with the moderate voter base, instead of simply or constantly proclaiming themselves as moderates.
The biggest challenge Democrats will face in 2024 is from January 2-8, as the Republican Legislature moved the entire candidate filing period to the first week of the year. As Democrats choose party leadership this spring and summer, they need chairs ready to finish recruiting candidates during December 2023.
Those potential Democratic candidates should be able to depend on a party with an integrated strategy to win at all levels and throughout the whole state. There isn’t much left for the party to lose, but if the party doesn’t organize well in 2023, there may not be any party left after 2024.
Brett Garner
Brett Garner, West Valley City, is a stay-at-home father of three, ran for the Utah State Board of Education in 2020, received the 2013 Taylor-Mayne Award from the Utah State Democratic Party, and formerly served as Davis County Democratic Party Chair.