'Vulnerable' in Utah: Mike Lee’s loyalty to Trump is becoming an issue as he seeks re-election
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is facing off against two Republican primary challengers who say he's been too loyal to Donald Trump.
The Utah Republican protested Trump's GOP nomination in 2016 and called on him to drop out of that race over the "Access Hollywood" tape, but he embraced the former president after he won -- and that has been the premise of primary challenges from former state legislator Becky Edwards and communications specialist Ally Isom, reported Politico.
“Trump’s criticized Mike, and Mike’s criticized Trump,” said Carson Jorgensen, chair of the state’s Republican Party. “But at the end of the day, Mike was one of his staunchest allies.”
The former president was never as popular in Utah as other Republican-leaning states, and Lee angered many of the state's Mormons by comparing Trump to a prophet in the Book of Mormon at an October 2020 rally, and he has watched his support among Latter-day Saints drop by eight percentage points since then.
“You don’t take him before the Senate Ethics Committee because he invoked Captain Moroni, right?” said one Utah political consultant. “It doesn’t rise to that level of inappropriate, but it just leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth.”
Lee's obstructionist stance against what he calls "bad legislation," which includes bills speeding up ALS insurance benefits and the creation of a national historic site at the location of a Japanese interment camp in Colorado, has also made him a target by opponents who say he's unwilling to govern.
“Utahns want a more productive, proactive and inclusive type of Republican, and a more productive, proactive, inclusive type of conservative,” said Edwards, a conservative who voted for Biden in 2020.
Isom, a former spokesperson for the Church of Latter-day Saints, left the Republican Party in 2016 but has since returned, and she's positioning herself as even more conservative than Lee, even if she hasn't embraced Trump.
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“It doesn’t appear that they’re taking votes away from Sen. Lee,” said Jason Perry, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics. “They’re mostly taking votes away from each other.”
Evan McMullin, a conservative former CIA officer who ran for president in 2016 as an anti-Trump independent, will also run for Lee's Senate seat as an independent, but Ben McAdams, probably the state's most prominent Democrat, decided against a run because he knows that a Republican is almost certain to win.
“Lee certainly is vulnerable,” said one political consultant. “We don’t know just exactly how vulnerable because he’s never been tested before. We don’t know how he’ll react to that pressure.”
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