Utah Republicans – Utah courts forced the state to use non-gerrymandered congressional districts for the first time this century—opening a potential path for a Democrat. Republicans have responded with a relentless push to block the change, not just by drawing new maps, but by a
On a political calendar already dark with midterm dread, Utah is offering Republicans something they didn’t expect: the chance that voters could finally send a Democrat to Congress from one of the state’s four seats.
That possibility doesn’t just threaten party control in November. It has turned into a fight over who gets to define reality in Utah’s elections—courts or the legislature—and how far Republicans are willing to go to ensure the answer never moves.
Utah is set to hold its first non-gerrymandered congressional election of the 21st century this cycle. Donald Trump won Utah in 2024 with nearly 60 percent of the vote. but after years of litigation and court orders. Utah is now being required to use fair districts created by an independent redistricting commission. Utah’s Democratic Party—long a political afterthought—has started to look alive again. with four candidates on the primary ballot for the new 1st congressional district and a televised debate among them last month that hadn’t happened since 2010.
The legal fight traces back to Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative Utah voters approved in 2018. Republicans in the state legislature, with support from the governor, moved quickly and repeatedly to stop it from taking effect. After eight years of bitter legal battles. Utah courts forced the state to follow the law and adopt fair voting districts that will be in effect for the first time this year.
The impact is concrete: a Democrat now has a real shot at winning one of Utah’s four congressional seats. And even in a state with a reputation for hard-core conservatism. the history shows the stakes have never been purely theoretical. In 1992. Utah elected a Democratic woman. Karen Shepherd. who served a single term before she was ousted two years later by the scandal-plagued Enid Waldholtz.
Back when Utah had only three congressional districts. one seat was mostly limited to Salt Lake City and its suburbs. the state’s largest population center. In 2000. that district elected Jim Matheson. a Blue Dog Democrat whose father. Scott Matheson. was the last Utah Democrat elected to serve as governor in 1980.
When the national GOP grew more radical. Utah Republicans who couldn’t beat Matheson at the ballot box tried redistricting him out. In 2002. they changed his district boundaries to break up Salt Lake City and staple it to rural areas like Vernal or the fast-growing conservative area in Southern Utah. eight hours away. Matheson kept winning anyway, even after the legislature split Salt Lake County into four different districts in 2010. In 2014. he retired after 14 years. and his former district remained somewhat competitive: the late Republican Mia Love won that year. then lost it in 2018 to former Salt Lake County mayor Ben McAdams. who served one term before losing in 2020 to former NFL player and Fox News commentator Burgess Owens.
The pattern that followed is the one Utah now wants to break. In 2020, the state legislature redrew the maps again to ensure that no Democrat could ever be elected to Congress.
Republicans have been able to keep doing this because they control the legislature with a veto-proof supermajority. even as Utah’s demographics have shifted dramatically. The legislature is more than 80 percent male, nearly 90 percent Mormon, and 98 percent white. Yet Utah is now about 16 percent Latino, only about 60 percent LDS, and increasingly liberal. Brigham Young University professor Jacob Rugh has calculated that since 2004. Utah has swung left more than any other state in the country by about 24 points. Even Provo. home of BYU and Mitt Romney’s stronghold in 2012—Romney won about 85 percent of the vote—gave Trump only 56 percent of its vote in 2024.
Salt Lake City itself has moved so far left that democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won the Democratic presidential primaries there in 2016 and again in 2020. Kamala Harris beat Trump in Salt Lake by 23 points even as she lost the rest of the state by more than 20.
Those changes haven’t translated into Utah’s congressional delegation, which remains entirely white Republican men. For Republicans, the frustration has now collided with a court-enforced reality—one that threatens to let voters decide districts without legislative manipulation.
Emma Petty Addams, co-executive director of nonpartisan faith-based Mormon Women for Ethical Government, put it bluntly: “There was, and continues to be, a sense among our leadership in particular that an un-gerrymandered outcome was not favorable to their political future.”
After Prop. 4 passed in 2018, the legislature moved to repeal it. In 2021, it cracked Salt Lake into four GOP-dominant districts. The next year. eight groups—including the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government—sued the legislature. arguing that repealing Prop. 4 violated the state constitution.
In 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled in their favor and sent the case back to the trial court for more litigation over the maps. The legislature tried unsuccessfully to amend the state constitution to ban citizen-initiated ballot initiatives.
Then came the order that changed the election outlook for this cycle. In August last year. Judge Diana Gibson ruled the legislature had violated the state constitution and gave it a month to come up with new maps that complied with the law in time for the 2026 election. The decision ignited a national firestorm on the right.
Trump—who said Utah was “a wonderful Republican State” and that he won “in every Election”—posted on Truth Social that “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary,” adding that the courts allegedly want to “take away our Congressional advantage.”
Instead of following Gibson’s order, the legislature drew partisan district maps again. Gibson threw them out again. She ruled that the 2026 election would be governed by nonpartisan maps created by the independent redistricting commission.
But refusing to accept a map order is one thing. What Utah Republicans have pursued since then is something else: pushing to cripple the institutions that could keep enforcing the rules.
Members of the state legislature immediately moved to impeach Gibson. She received death threats, along with many court employees. Republicans also appealed the decision, with support from Republican Gov. Spencer Cox.
Cox wrote on social media that “The Utah Constitution clearly states that it is the responsibility of the Legislature to divide the state into congressional districts.” He said he respected “the Court’s role” but argued that “no judge. and certainly no advocacy group. can usurp that constitutional authority. ” adding that he supported the legislature’s appeal.
The fight widened beyond the courtroom. The Washington County commission. in southern Utah. voted in January to ignore Gibson’s order entirely. even though its own lawyer advised it would be out of compliance with state law. Commissioner Victor Iverson fumed that Gibson was “that lady who shouldn’t even be on the bench. ” and said he believed she was guilty of “criminal conspiracy for conspiring with democratic socialists. and with outside money to try to flip a district in a state and basically control Congress.”.
In February, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously rejected the legislature’s appeal, but the conflict didn’t cool. In December, the head of the state GOP and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) started a group called Utahns for Representative Government to repeal Prop. 4 through a ballot initiative.
The enterprise drew accusations and complaints. According to the Salt Lake Tribune. a dark money group aligned with Trump funneled more than $4 million into the campaign and helped bring in out-of-state workers to gather petitions needed to get the measure on the ballot. The initiative generated complaints from people who alleged they were tricked into signing it, thinking they were actually opposing gerrymandering. Good-government groups then launched a grassroots effort encouraging people to withdraw their signatures if they felt they had signed in error.
The measure failed to get on the ballot, and the election proceeded under the court-required maps. For the moment, that has left Utah Democrats energized.
Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the bipartisan organization that spearheaded Prop. 4, said, “It’s definitely a win for the people of Utah to finally have something they voted for working.”
Former Rep. Ben McAdams looks poised to return to Congress. But Republicans appear committed to ensuring that even if he is elected, he won’t serve another term.
As state judges have repeatedly blocked Republicans’ campaign to undo Prop. 4, GOP officials have focused on undermining the independence of Utah courts.
Teneille Brown. a University of Utah law professor who helped found Co-Equal Utah. a nonprofit focused on protecting the state courts from political pressure. described what she sees in stark terms: “The legislature is really losing its stranglehold on Utah. and they do not want to be politically accountable.”.
Brown said Utah’s judges have historically been considered some of the best in the nation because they were selected on merit. She said a bipartisan judicial nominating commission was charged with identifying candidates for the governor to select from.
But she pointed to a shift in 2023. when the legislature removed requirements for the commission to include Democrats and members recommended by the state bar. Under the new system, the panel selecting appellate judges is entirely Republican. It includes members like Sen. Mike Lee’s nephew. who graduated from BYU law school in 2020. and the board chairman of the right-wing Sutherland Institute. a Utah think tank.
Then Republicans went after the judges directly. Utah holds retention elections for judges, and the GOP has urged voters to reject the Supreme Court judges who upheld the maps. It has also instigated a particularly nasty smear campaign against Justice Diana Hagan.
Last year, Hagan had been involved in an ugly divorce. Her ex-husband alleged to a friend that she had been having an affair with one of the lawyers who worked on anti-gerrymandering litigation. Hagan was friends with the lawyer, but she had recused herself from any case in which he was involved.
Still. Hagan’s ex-husband’s friend—who has worked in the Trump administration—filed a complaint against Hagan with the Judicial Conduct Commission. Hagan vehemently denied the affair allegations. After investigating, the commission found “very little credibility to this complaint” and dismissed it. The commission’s investigative report was supposed to be confidential, but the legislature leaked it to a local news outlet. Cox and the state legislature then demanded an “independent” investigation.
The publicity, along with death threats, made Hagan’s life so miserable that in early May she decided to resign. In her resignation letter to Cox. she wrote that “[M]y family and friends did not choose public life. ” and that “They do not deserve to have intensely personal details surrounding the painful dissolution of my thirty-year marriage subjected to public scrutiny.”.
In January, the legislature voted to expand the state Supreme Court by two additional judges, even though the existing court said it didn’t need more help. This month, Cox appointed two men with no judicial experience to fill the seats, including a senior counsel for the LDS church.
Once the new judges are in place, Co-Equal Utah’s Brown said the next step seems likely: the state legislature will go back to court to challenge the district maps and try to ensure that the 2026 midterm election will be the last time Utah Democrats have a shot at sending someone to Congress.
The sequence of actions is difficult to miss: voters approved Prop. 4 to stop gerrymandering, courts enforced it, and now the political system that lost the map fight is trying to change the rules of the decision-makers themselves.
Utah redistricting gerrymandering Proposition 4 Diana Gibson Spencer Cox Mike Lee Utah Supreme Court Diana Hagan Ben McAdams independent redistricting commission 2026 midterm elections congressional maps