Take 2,500 politically active people, put them in an assembly hall and ask them to vote on whether they want to claim for themselves unreviewable power to defy the law and select their state’s top elected officials all by themselves.
It is a temptation that Utahns — Texans or Californians, Norwegians or Kenyans — might find difficult to resist.
But, to their credit, that many Utah Republicans voted on just such a question last week and decided to stand with the law.
Barely.
Technically, the question before the delegates at the Utah State Republican Convention May 17 in Orem was who should be the state party’s chairman for the next two years: incumbent Robert Axson or challenger Phil Lyman.
Axson won, 1,340 delegate votes to 1,215.
This matters to all Utahns because, while both candidates pledged fealty to the idea that only delegates selected through the party’s politburo-like caucus and convention system should be able to choose who gets to run for political office in the state, Axson argued in favor of obeying the law even as the party works to amend it.
Lyman advocates ignoring the law and expelling from the party all those who don’t agree with him.
This matters to all Utahns because whoever emerges from the Republican nominating process in this heavily GOP state is all but assured victory every other November. So every Utah governor, every U.S. senator or representative, every attorney general or state treasurer, nearly every legislator outside of Salt Lake County, will be the one chosen by Republicans.
In a state of 3.5 million people — 1.8 million registered voters — those decisions should not be made by a mere 2,500 activists.
State law, specifically SB54, requires that political parties offer candidates an alternative path to the primary election ballot. A path that involves getting enough signatures on a petition to appear beside the choice of the convention.
That means that the party won’t necessarily nominate (and thus elect) the favorite of a few true-believing, right-wing activists, but someone who appeals to the broader rank-and-file of registered Republicans.
Often, whoever wins at convention, even when they win big, is subsequently trounced in the primary by a more moderate candidate who took the petition route to the primary ballot.
That’s what happened to Lyman last year. He won an overwhelming victory in the party’s convention, but got thumped by incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox in the primary.
The overwhelmingly re-elected Cox is so unpopular among the party’s core delegates that he was booed at the 2024 convention and didn’t bother to attend this month’s gathering.
Lyman’s groundless whine that his victory at convention was the only thing that should have counted went all the way to the Utah Supreme Court, where it was justly and summarily trashed.
Lyman, a former state representative, then took that complaint to the state convention, where he argued for a plan to ignore the law and reserve for the party convention the sole power to choose Republican nominees.
The fact that he lost was not, unfortunately, only attributable to the candidates’ different stands on delegate power. Axson also carried important endorsements from President Donald Trump and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, on whose staff Axson once served.
But there is hope that there are enough big-R Republicans in Utah who believe in small-d democracy that SB54 and the petition route to the ballot will be preserved. As they should be.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
