Mere months before they jumped into the contest to lead the Utah Republican Party, former gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman and current state GOP Chair Robert Axson were on the opposite ends of a lawsuit.
Lyman topped incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox by a 2-to-1 margin among delegates at the party’s 2024 nominating convention, but Cox, whose campaign gathered signatures to qualify for the Republican primary in June, flipped the outcome, winning by nearly 40,000 votes.
Amid a write-in campaign for governor and barrage of unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, Lyman asked the Utah Supreme Court to force Axson to ignore the primary results and certify Lyman as the party’s nominee.
The justices refused, but the clash is now the pivotal issue in the race for party chair.
Both chair prospects want to eliminate candidates’ option to gather signatures to earn a spot in a primary election, but they disagree on how to do it. Axson wants to continue to lobby the Legislature to intervene; Lyman believes the party can simply refuse to recognize the legitimacy of candidates who collect signatures.
But some in the party worry that the drive to eliminate the signature path could cause a backlash, resulting in the demise of the caucus-convention system.
The future of the Utah Republican Party, and to what extent party delegates will have a role in picking candidates, will be at the forefront of its annual gathering Saturday at Utah Valley University in Orem.
In a debate hosted by Washington County Republican Women earlier this month, Lyman said, “If the Republican Party wants to assert itself, it has to assert itself. It can’t just comply with everything.”
Countered Axson: “I do believe that it’s important to ask, what are the things that you are unwilling to do?”
“Am I willing to push back against the governor? Yes, I am,” Axson added. “Have I done it? Yes, I have. Am I willing to break the law? No, I’m not. If you want somebody who’s going to break the law, I’m not your guy.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Robert Axson speaks at the Utah Republican Nominating Convention in Salt Lake City on Saturday, April 27, 2024.
A delegate disconnect
Generally, Republican delegates tend to lean much further to the right than the rest of Utah’s GOP electorate — a possible advantage for Lyman.
A poll published this week by the Utah Foundation found that “all delegates, regardless of party, are more likely than voters to be men, actively religious, older, and white, and have more education and higher incomes.”
GOP delegates surveyed were more likely than Republican voters to be focused on tax cuts. They also were less worried about the affordability of groceries and their own housing.
The results of last year’s convention further illustrate the disconnect between delegates and rank-and-file Republican voters. In addition to Cox‘s victory over Lyman, Attorney General Derek Brown, Sen. John Curtis and Rep. Blake Moore all lost at convention but won decisive victories from GOP voters.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollock stands with Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson at the Utah Republican Convention in April 2024.
Caucus night last year — when the current slate of roughly 4,000 GOP delegates was chosen — was plagued by long lines and technical difficulties. It was conducted almost entirely in person on a Tuesday evening. Consequently, attendance was sparse, meaning more than 90% of Republicans had no role in choosing delegates to represent them at the nominating convention.
Those same delegates will pick the party chair Saturday.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gubernatorial candidate Rep. Phil Lyman, R-Blanding, greets supporters during a primary election party in Highland in June 2024.
Much of the blame for that night has been pinned on Axson, who said at the time that some precincts were “overwhelmed” by the number of people who came out to vote.
One indicator of just how close the battle for chair may be is President Donald Trump’s intervention last week as he stepped in to endorse Axson over Lyman, whom the president once pardoned after Lyman was convicted of leading an illegal all-terrain vehicle protest ride through federal land with cultural significance to Native Americans. Other prominent Republicans, including Axson’s former boss, Sen. Mike Lee, also back the incumbent.
The endorsement post from Lee — typically a far-right firebrand — prompted Lyman supporters to flood the replies to his social media remarks with comments like, “You sold out,” and, “It’s very clear now that we are not on the same team.”
Brad Bonham, one of the two Utah members of the Republican National Committee, isn’t endorsing anyone in the race but said he traveled with Axson to Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada to try to help the GOP clinch those swing states, and saw Axson take abuse during the toxic primary between Lyman and Cox.
“I’ve seen him put in time and effort,” Bonham said. “I‘ve seen him deal with all the death threats that have come his way in the Lyman-Cox — whatever you want to call that.”
High stakes for the GOP
The repercussions, if Lyman wins and decides to exclude signature candidates, could jeopardize the status of the state’s dominant political party.
Utah law provides for two types of political parties: a qualified political party and a registered political party. Qualified parties are able to put nominees on ballots through conventions, but only if they also allow signature-gathering candidates onto primary ballots. Candidates from a registered party can get on the ballot only by collecting signatures.
This arrangement came about over a decade ago after then-Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, fashioned a compromise — known as SB54 — to stave off a ballot initiative aiming to do away with nominating conventions in favor of direct primaries.
Bramble said in an interview that it is an “interesting strategy” for Lyman to assert that the GOP can retain its qualified party status but ignore the law passed by the Legislature.
“It’s the people’s ballot, not the party’s ballot. A political party has no constitutional right to be represented on the ballot,” Bramble said. “The only rights that the party has are delegated by statute.”
Lyman did not respond to interview requests.
In an interview, Axson highlighted his efforts to support delegate-chosen candidates postconvention but said he is unwilling to risk the GOP’s qualified party status.
“Gamesmanship that stands to potentially destroy the candidacy of all of our Republican candidates on the ballot — that type of gamesmanship is not worth taking lightly,” Axson argued. “And I think that there’s a role and a place for appropriate litigation, but bankrupting the party and putting at risk the qualified status of candidates to gain status or standing for a legal fight, that’s pretty heavy medicine.”
Efforts toward a bigger tent
In September, the Republican State Central Committee approved a resolution calling on the Legislature to do away with the signature path and “restore the party’s sole authority to determine its candidate-nomination process.”
This weekend, the party could go further. Delegates will consider an amendment to the party constitution to temporarily revoke Republican candidates’ party membership if they gather signatures and a platform change that would reinforce the party’s rejection of signature-gathering.
Axson declined to take a position on the proposals but said he doesn’t want the party to “chase people away if they are different in style or priority and preference to any one element of the party.”
Some Republicans believe the party has already done exactly that.
Among them is former state lawmaker and U.S. Senate candidate Becky Edwards, who formed the Governing Group Political Action Committee, in part, to help “solutions-oriented” Republican candidates pay the high price to collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
“Moves to invalidate [SB54] really take us in a wrong direction for what the Republican Party and the majority of Republicans around the state want to see,” Edwards said, “which is a bigger tent.”
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Then-Senate candidate Becky Edwards speaks with delegates at the Utah Republican Party Convention in 2022.
Caucuses in recent years have migrated away from open discussions among neighbors, she said. “More and more people are not feeling like this is a setting where their opinions or their perspectives are being valued.”
The delegates’ fervor for doing away with the signature path doesn’t resonate with rank-and-file Republicans, according to a poll commissioned earlier this year by Count My Vote. It found that 70% of Republicans either want candidates to have the dual-track option or to only get on the ballot via signature-gathering. Just 17% want a convention-only method.
Taylor Morgan, executive director of Count My Vote, said his group has no plans to try to change the current system, although other organizations have weighed launching voter initiatives to get rid of conventions.
Morgan said the convention system may die on its own — pointing to the chaos of last year’s caucus night and the primary losses convention candidates, like Lyman, suffered. “It’s simply going to go away because it’s not relevant anymore.”
Bramble has become disillusioned with how the caucus-convention path has operated and has come to regret brokering the SB54 compromise.
“In hindsight,” he said, “I’ll be the first to recognize that we would have done better by the public and by the party by not running Senate Bill 54, not trying to preserve the caucus-convention system and letting the initiative process … play out.”
