SALT LAKE CITY – Echoing their rosy appraisal of Vice President Kamala Harris’ debate performance on Tuesday, the Utah Democratic Party was quick to declare victory on Sept. 11 for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brian King in his face-off with Gov. Spencer Cox.
“Unlike Cox, Brian King supports real solutions, not political division,” according to UDP executive director Thom DeSirant, in a prepared statement released while the debate featuring Cox, King and libertarian candidate J. Robert Latham was still underway.
“Brian King’s victory at tonight’s debate proved that he is the only candidate who will put Utah on the right track,” DeSirant insisted.
To some extent, DeSirant’s appraisal of the debate at Salt Lake Community College was strikingly similar to that of his boss, Democratic Chair Diane Lewis, who fired off a cheer-leading message after the presidential debate 24 hours earlier.
While giving King a pass on a string of policy pronouncements – like more bipartisan legislation — that realistically stand little chance of surviving a single session of the Republican-dominated Legislature, DeSirant accused Cox of ignoring issues that Utahns really care about, flip-flopping “more than a pair of sandals” and wasting Utah taxpayers’ time and money on pointless culture wars, like litigation against social media giants.
Cox defended his tenure as governor, claiming credit for ushering in Utah’s ranking as the top state in the nation for two consecutive years.
Despite that success, the governor couldn’t shake the recent optics of his office that left Cox associated what King called the “most extreme elements” within the Republican Party.
Legislative leaders Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Shultz recently saddled Cox with defending two controversial constitution amendments on the November ballot that would give the Utah Legislature the authority to change or ignore voter-sponsored ballot initiatives.
Of late, Cox has also found himself trying to explain away a recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia with Donald Trump and his sudden endorsement of the former president after years of distancing himself from Trump’s frequent claims of a stolen 2020 election.
DeSirant’s statement of Sept. 11 condemned what he called Cox’s “weird obsession” with Trump and his Make American Great Again (MAGA) policies while offering “no explanations for his failure to make housing more affordable, his inability to fully fund public education or his support for taking away Utah voters’ ability to pass ballot initiatives.”
“Maybe (Cox) is too busy fundraising with Donald Trump to address issues that really matter,” DeSirant added.
Regardless of the strengths or weaknesses he displayed in the first and only scheduled debate in the race of governor, however, the last thing King needs now is an honest evaluation of his chances in that contest.
The Republican Party has nearly a million registered voters in Utah, while the Democrats can barely muster a third of that number.
Despite some defections within his party over the failed candidacy of conservative Phil Lyman, recent polling for The Deseret News by the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah found Cox leading King by a margin of 40 percentage points.
The only bright spot for the Democrats in the gubernatorial election picture is that fact that recent polling by the Utah Foundation found that 62 percent of Utahns believe that the state is on the wrong track and that quality of life is worse now than it was five years ago.
DeSirant says that those negative opinions are Cox’s fault, but the foundation’s analysts acknowledge that those views could partially be the result of the Biden’s administration’s dismal handling of the economy and inflation since 2021.