‘Blue tsunami’ hits Utah: House Republicans on pace to lose 17 seats, breaking supermajority

By the time Utah’s election night results were posted at 9 p.m. Tuesday, it was already clear that Democrats were sweeping the nation in a scathing rebuke to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. 

Though margins indicated Democrats here were performing far better than they usually do, Utah’s congressional races largely came down as expected. Rep. Ben McAdams overwhelmingly won the state’s new Democratic-leaning congressional district that turned blue after an anti-gerrymandering lawsuit resulted in new, court-ordered boundaries. And Utah’s other three red districts were unsurprisingly won by GOP incumbents, Reps. Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy and Mike Kennedy. 

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But what wasn’t expected in mostly Republican-controlled Utah came down the ballot. 

Eric Biggart — a longtime Democratic strategist in Salt Lake County who is a member of the Utah Democratic Party’s executive committee and chair of LDS Democrats — said disbelief initially washed over him as he scrolled down, down, down through the state legislative race results. 

There weren’t just a handful of Democratic candidates beating Republican incumbents and in the lead to flip open seats previously held by the GOP supermajority, as Utah Democrats had hoped for in a best-case scenario. They were leading in far more. 

“There was never a world where we were looking at double-digit (wins) being on the table this year,” Biggart told Utah News Dispatch Wednesday. He said they had hoped for maybe four to seven seats — but in the teens? That was unthinkable. 

Yet as of Wednesday morning, unofficial election results show Democrats are in the lead to pick up 15 seats in the Utah House, and unaffiliated candidates are slated to take two. Republicans are on track to lose 17 seats. In the Senate, Republicans are poised to lose two seats to Democrats.

Election results are preliminary, with thousands more still needing to be tallied. But to political pundits, aside from a couple of races with razor-thin margins, the results are likely to hold. 

That puts Republicans on pace to lose their two-thirds, veto-proof supermajority in the House. They’re projected to still have a simple majority, 44 of the House’s 75 seats. And the Senate will still be controlled by a GOP supermajority, with 20 seats to Democrats’ eight. 

 

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But for a state that hasn’t seen a House chamber without a GOP supermajority since 1993 — and no recent memory of Democrats sweeping that many seats in a single election year — it’s extraordinary. 

Biggart said he and other Utah Democratic strategists have spent years trying to carve a path toward breaking the supermajority, but they expected it to take eight or 10 years — not all in one election.

The “blue tsunami” washing over the nation made landfall in Utah, Utah Democratic Party Chair Brian King said Tuesday night. Political pundit Taylor Morgan agreed, but he said he hadn’t expected the way it seeped down into local legislative races. 

“I was absolutely shocked. I was flabbergasted, blown away,” Morgan, a political consultant with the lobbying and public affairs firm Morgan & May, told Utah News Dispatch on Wednesday. 

He said he expected Democrats to do well in Salt Lake County — but what he didn’t expect was that phenomenon to be so widespread in counties up and down the Wasatch Front, the Wasatch Back and beyond. 

“Goodness gracious,” he said. “Look at Davis County. Look at Weber County. They’re both blue. Utah County results are blue in so many ways.” 

And Morgan said he didn’t expect so many voters who weren’t Democrats “to turn out to vote and intentionally vote for the Democratic candidates down ballot to punish the Republican party.”

“This is the first time in my lifetime that a national election wave has also taken over the Utah ballot like this,” Morgan said. “It is frankly unprecedented.” 

Morgan’s firm built a website to track the results and their impact on the balance of power in the Utah Legislature. He told Utah News Dispatch he expects most Democrats to keep their leads as vote tallies are finalized in coming weeks. 

What happened? To both Biggart (a Democrat) and Morgan (a Republican), it wasn’t just Utahns fed up with Trump and an energized Democratic base. It was also Utahns of other political stripes — even some Republicans — having yearslong, mounting frustration with how the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature has handled redistricting, ballot initiatives, unions and other issues, along with an ongoing wave of outcry over data centers and development. 

“That combined with a general repudiation of the Republican Party, because of Donald Trump, I think that caught up with Utah legislative Republicans,” Morgan said. 

To Biggart, the blue wave was fueled “50-50” by Trump and a frustration with Utah Republican legislators. 

“Data centers and gerrymandering and Amendment B and Amendment D before that, all these tricks and power grabs, have weighed on people,” Biggart said. “We’ve reached a point where Democrats are organized. And we’ve knocked literally hundreds of thousands of doors and sent hundreds of thousands of texts to a degree we’ve never done before.” 

Democrats, Biggart said, “ran a professional, world-class campaign for these candidates in these targeted races. And it worked.” And he said the results show Utah independents and even some Republicans “have just had it.” 

“The Trump effect,” he said, was “a nice kicker at the end.”

Another powerful Senate Republican on track to lose his seat

When one of Utah’s most powerful Republicans, Senate President Stuart Adams, lost his primary election to GOP challenger Stephanie Hollist, apparently that was just the beginning. 

Now Adams’ No. 2, Senate Majority Leader Kirk Cullimore, was trailing his Democratic challenger, Shana Anderson, by nearly 14 percentage points as of Wednesday. 

It was an upset in Sandy, Draper, Alta, Highland and Alpine areas making up Senate District 19 that perhaps only Anderson herself saw coming. 

“I keep hearing people say how surprised they are, but I actually was not surprised at all,” Anderson, a U.S. Army veteran and stay-at-home mom who lives in Sandy, told Utah News Dispatch Wednesday. “I’ve been out there talking to voters, and I knew where everybody was at.” 

She’s not claiming victory yet, noting there are still votes to be tallied. But she said she was happy to see “voters coming out and letting their voices be heard.” 

Cullimore did not return a request for comment Wednesday. Anderson said she hasn’t heard from him, and he hadn’t called her to concede. 

Anderson’s experience on the campaign trail reflected Biggart and Morgan’s takeaways. She said she heard from a lot of people “upset with the Trump administration,” but also many who were directly frustrated with Cullimore’s track record, especially when it came to supporting school voucher programs or anti-public union legislation. 

“I had volunteers coming out of the woodwork from all different angles because of what he’s been doing,” Anderson said. “And I honestly think he had no idea that people were paying attention. And people would try to reach out to him, but he would not listen or respond to them.” 

Largely, Anderson said the perception she heard from her district’s voters was that Cullimore “has not been doing the job” representing their interests. 

“He’s been working for people in power, people with money, and special interests. And he’s not been working for the people in his district,” she said. “It wasn’t even a heavy lift, to be honest.” 

How will this shake up the Legislature? 

To Morgan, Cullimore’s likely loss and Democrats’ gains in the House will send reverberations through the halls of the Utah Capitol. 

Before the election, Cullimore and Sen. Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City, were in a tight race to replace Adams as the next Senate president. Now that race — which will be decided in a closed caucus meeting Friday night — has a new, giant question mark over it. Will Vickers take it? Or will a different candidate swoop in to run in Cullimore’s place? 

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“That election has been shaken up completely,” Morgan said. 

And because the House is slated to lose so many Republicans and get so many new Democratic faces, Morgan expects even House Speaker Mike Schultz might be in for a shakeup. 

“Speaker Mike Schultz has lost 15 members of his caucus, some of whom will be really devoted to Speaker Schultz,” Morgan said. “Will now Speaker Schultz face a challenger within his caucus for the speakership because of what happened?” 

Additionally, Morgan wondered if House Democratic leadership might see some changes due to all the new members. 

Committee assignments, chair positions and policy priorities are all influenced by who is in House and Senate leadership, so the implications run deep, Morgan said. 

To Biggart, the political aftershock of this year’s elections will energize Democrats in Utah like never before — and he expects more candidates willing to run now that they’ve seen what’s possible in traditionally red Utah. Now that it appears the House supermajority has been cracked, Biggart said that will open the floodgates. 

“It’s at that point where people really start to believe, where people start to donate, start to knock on doors, start to make those text messages to their friends and family,” Biggart said. “Because when it’s on the margins and it feels real, all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier to do.”