House Race in Deep Red Utah Turns Tossup on Anti-Trump Sentiment

MILLCREEK, Utah — Ben McAdams, a candidate for Congress, was speed-walking along the highway shoulder in his business suit, safety and common sense be damned.

“We’ll make it,” he said, as the trucks whistled by, blowing dust into the Utah sun.

In his bid to unseat Rep. Mia Love, a Republican, McAdams has been trying to do just that — make it, in this case to the U.S. House as a Democrat from a state that runs about as red as the desert is dry. The district he seeks to represent, Utah’s 4th, is a boot-shaped expanse extending south from Salt Lake City where fewer than 15 percent of the voters are registered Democrats.

In any other year, a McAdams win would seem improbable.

Love, the only black Republican woman in Congress, won her last election by nearly 13 points, and many voters see her as an outgoing leader in a place where women — especially conservative women — are rarities in the halls of power. She is the sole Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus, making her an uncommon symbol of bipartisanship in an era of deep division.

But this is Utah, where Mormon values dominate political choices and voters largely rejected Donald Trump, whose crass commentary and hard line on immigration clash with church doctrine, garnering him just 45 percent of the vote in 2016.

Democrats see the district as one of their best chances to move into red territory. And if McAdams plays it just right, there is bipartisan acknowledgment that he could win, particularly because he is the twice-elected mayor of Salt Lake County, home to 85 percent of the district.

The Cook Political Report is now declaring the race a Republican tossup.

“She and other congressional Republicans have failed us in their moral duty,” said Jordan Roberts, 33, a doctor and former Republican who rushed through a crowd to speak with McAdams at the opening of a new health clinic. “I feel like she’s been a yes-man for the current administration.”

Now, McAdams, 43, is crisscrossing the region like a Mormon missionary (he was one, in Brazil), wearing a tidy haircut and a grin and trying to convince voters he’s the centrist alternative to the president, the swamp and anyone tied to them, including Love.

He’s focused on bipartisan issues — passing an infrastructure bill, expanding access to health care. And in a gimmicky ad he appears to have copied almost shot for shot from Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, he’s shown showering in his business suit, promising to clean up Washington.

“Mia Love,” he said on a recent day at his campaign office, where his cardboard cutout smiles from a corner, “has essentially taken her vote and handed it over to somebody who doesn’t have the best interest of Utah at heart.”

But this is a challenging argument for McAdams to make, given that his opponent is no obvious symbol of the party establishment. Love, 42, is the daughter of Haitian immigrants, a convert to the Mormon church who began her political career fighting a mosquito problem in her hometown, Saratoga Springs, Utah. After a stint as mayor, she became the first black Republican woman elected to Congress, in 2014.

She frequently criticizes Trump’s rhetoric on immigration. And for many Mormons — who see themselves as a once-persecuted group — she is an important voice to have in Congress.

“He’s completely out of touch with what people want,” Love said of McAdams. She has at times mocked her opponent’s attempts to cast himself as a centrist, pointing to his past votes against abortion restrictions and his support of the Clintons as evidence that he would push through a liberal agenda. “It’s incredibly important that we keep the seat.”

To win, McAdams would have to sway a sizable number of voters outside of his party. Forty-two percent of the district’s voters are Republican, and another 40 percent are unaffiliated, according to data from the political firm L2. Polls show him trailing Love by mid-to-high single digits.

While McAdams’ supporters see him riding the blue wave into Washington, Love and her staff members are convinced she will return to the capital along with one of her biggest supporters, Mitt Romney, who is running for Senate.

“When Romney is on the ticket, people turn out,” said Abby Evans, Love’s data director. “This isn’t really a blue wave district.” Utah’s 4th district is its newest, and it includes a sliver of the relatively progressive Salt Lake City, as well as fast-expanding suburbs like West Jordan, where freshly built subdivisions sit amid temples steepled by golden statues of the angel Moroni, all of it backed by the towering Wasatch Range.

Residents have elected a Democrat before. In 2013, Jim Matheson became the 4th’s first congressman, after serving six terms in another district. But Matheson was the scion of a Western political family, and it’s unclear if his success can be repeated.

Still, liberal forces have gained a small hold in this area, and conversations about the future now include religious leaders, right-leaning politicians, a Democratic minority, immigrant groups and gay activists, as well as developers and technology companies interested in the state’s booming economy.

Over the last decade, McAdams, a lawyer and a seventh-generation Utahn, has tried to position himself as a bridge between these disparate camps, and he is well known for negotiating a deal among church members, Republicans and the gay community on a nondiscrimination ordinance. More recently, he led an effort with Greg Hughes, the Republican speaker of the state House, and others, to tackle the region’s homelessness problem.

Part of his research involved secretly living as a homeless man.

For all of Love’s criticism of the president, she has voted with Trump’s position 96 percent of the time, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, a fact her opponent is trying to use against her.

But it’s unclear if this will be enough. In the Saratoga Springs neighborhood of Legacy Farms, where the homes and yards are as tidy and bright as a movie set, Katelyn Green, 33, was pushing a stroller with one hand and helping her son Caleb, 6, ride his bicycle with the other.

She is a Mormon who tends to vote Republican — she opposes abortion in most cases and prefers less spending on social services, she said — and was likely to vote for Love.

She had no problem with the congresswoman’s proximity to the president, she said.

“I didn’t vote for Trump, honestly,” she said. “But I feel like once we have elected a president, as long as they’re not making our country terrible and trying to purposely run it into the ground — I feel like: ‘OK, I accept that my candidate lost, let’s get behind the person that’s there.'”

At Love’s campaign office, a volunteer named Lisa Bagley, 54, called Love an “incredibly important” figure for Republican women at a time when many felt left out of the political conversation.

“There’s all this support: ‘Women! Women! Women!'” Bagley said, explaining that she feels like a pariah at the ostensibly nonpartisan women’s leadership events she has attended. “I feel it’s, ‘If you’re a Republican, need not apply.'”

On a recent day, McAdams stood in a soup kitchen where he’d once gone undercover, explaining his approach to a group of visiting Western lawmakers.

Outside, state Rep. Jefferson Moss, a Republican, said that McAdams was probably the only Democrat in the state who could win the race.

But that wasn’t going to change his vote. “He’s got some really good ideas,” said Moss. “That said, if anybody asks, I’m supporting Mia.”