Politics

Utah’s Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, spoke with High School students from around the U.S. Thursday, to help raise awareness of child sex trafficking. The students are in Salt Lake City for one week to learn how to create awareness campaigns when they return to their hometown schools.

It’s official, Mark Crockett is the Republican Nominee for Salt Lake County Mayor. The Salt Lake County Clerk’s office announced Tuesday that Crockett defeated West Valley City Mayor Mike Winder in the June Primary election according to official results.

“Mark Crockett 38, 387 votes, Mike Winder, 37,368 votes for a difference of 1,119 votes.”

Republican leaders in Utah were uniformly critical of Thursday's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, saying it threatens the nation's economic recovery and could sharpen the partisan divide.  

In his monthly news conference on KUED, Utah Governor Gary Herbert said, "This has divided the country terribly and taken our eye off the ball on economic recovery.  I do believe, if you want to repeal Obamacare, you need to repeal Obama."

Senator Orrin Hatch won the Utah Republican primary, and spent 10 million dollars in the process.  Now, Democratic challenger Scott Howell aims to turn that money against the incumbent Senator.   Howell says Hatch’s significant campaign war chest is not a problem for him.  It’s a problem for the people of Utah. 

“When you see that big money, that drives the behavior that we’ve seen in Washington DC, that gives loopholes to businesses and industries that have access that you and I don’t,” said Howell, “We’re going to end that in this campaign.”

The KUER News team spent last night covering the biggest races in the GOP Primary Elections. We sent reporters and interns to election night events across the Salt Lake Valley and they used our new twitter account, @KUERnews, to keep you updated throughout the night of the latest results and to help give you a broader view of each candidates thoughts.

John Swallow defeated Sean Reyes in the Republican primary for Utah Attorney General last night. Swallow is the current Chief Deputy Attorney General and will face Weber County Attorney Dee Smith in the general election.

The race took an ugly turn when ads attacking Reyes’ background aired in the weeks leading up to the primary. Reyes’ campaign in turn issued a rarely successful cease and desist order to remove the ads from television. Despite the negative campaigning and lost election, Reyes explained how he felt about the last two weeks.

The Tea Party revolution swept through Utah in 2010, when conservative favorite Mike Lee ousted three-term Republican Sen. Bob Bennett at the state party convention.

Perhaps the person watching the upset closest that day was Utah's longest-serving senator, Orrin Hatch. Now 78, Hatch is trying to keep his job in an anti-incumbent atmosphere that led to the defeat last month of his colleague Richard Lugar of Indiana.

KUER News has a new twitter account (@KUERnews) and yesterday's special session of the Utah Legislature proved to be a great way to break it in. We sent three reporters to the capitol and throughout the day they took advantage of twitter to keep you updated.