Utah Politics: Principles, Theories and Rules of the Game

Utah is a peculiar place, and Utahns are a peculiar people. Men overwhelming dominate Utah business and politics. But it was also the first state in the nation where women cast a vote and is home to the nation’s first female state senator (who had to defeat her husband in order to get there). Utahns drink less alcohol than any other state in the nation, thanks in no small part to the state’s predominant faith which prohibits its use. And yet, Utah was the deciding state that repealed Prohibition against the public wishes of Heber J. Grant, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Settled by pioneers trying to escape the world and keep to themselves, Utah today has the highest level of foreign language fluency with international trade a key driver of the state’s economic development. Utahns overwhelmingly believe in limited government and reduced public spending. However, from its initial founding, Utah also has a proud history of supporting the arts, through both public and private efforts. For a short period of time, the state even had its own obscure language, thanks to a distinctive series of letters known as the Deseret Alphabet.Despite Utah’s unquestioned uniqueness, national experts frequently forget that the state’s politics are quite different from the national norm. Every few years, Utah has a competitive congressional race. And each time, one of the candidates will bring in out-of-state consultants who completely misjudge the Utah political landscape. They usually go too negative or punch too hard. Other times, they hit on the wrong issues altogether. They bring the same campaign flyers and stock ads that work in other Republican states, and almost without fail they flop here in Utah. Even the legendary comedian Bob Hope was greeted by complete silence at the 1987 Stadium of Fire celebration for jokes that brought crowds to tears across America but couldn’t quite land with the locals in Provo. It turns out that, in Utah, we’re different. When Utah was first established by Latter-day Saint pioneers, its settlers chose a place where they could be completely isolated from the rest of the nation. Within that isolation, it makes sense that the political culture could turn out to be, well, a little bit quirky.