Jennifer Funk was excited to take her 18-year-old daughter to her first Weber County Republican caucus on Super Tuesday. Funk expected the local school where their caucus was hosted to be packed. She anticipated long lines and the need to practice a good amount of patience.
That’s not what happened.
“No one was there, and that was surprising to me,” Funk said. “It was a little bit disheartening.”
Funk added about 30 people showed up for her precinct, and her daughter pointed out that most of the attendees were older Utahns. The turnout stood in stark contrast to caucuses in Salt Lake County and elsewhere that were chaotic.
By early morning the next day, The Associated Press called the preference poll for Donald Trump. Results from the Utah GOP available on March 10 showed him with 56% of the vote to Nikki Haley’s 43%. There are still outstanding votes to be counted. But the former president isn’t formally Utah’s Republican nominee – yet.
GOP caucusgoers selected state delegates on Super Tuesday. Those delegates will attend the Utah Republican Convention in April where they will decide on national delegates. Those Utah delegates will officially tap Trump as the state’s nominee at the July Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“The snapshot that we were able to capture on Tuesday night [March 5] tells our national delegates … how to vote. And we express that through that presidential preference poll,” Utah GOP Party Chair Rob Axson explained.
Since the party didn’t host a primary, which would have solidified the presidential pick, Axson said the preference poll conducted at the caucus is “definitely a snapshot” of who the party wants the nominee to be. Axson stressed that it “was not a binding election.” Rather, the poll was to “inform national delegates the will of the membership of our party in Utah.”
State numbers show 890,637 active Republican voters in Utah. Only 84,942 votes had been tallied in the presidential preference poll — 9.5% of active voters.
Once all the counting is completed, Axson estimates turnout “will be right around 100,000” Republicans who participated in caucus night. Even with that small percentage of registered voters, he said it’s “certainly a statistical representation of the party.”
Matthew Burbank, a University of Utah political science professor, disagreed. To him “that’s not a sample” because the caucusgoers weren’t chosen randomly to engage in the system. Instead, voters who “care enough to turn out and vote in a presidential preference and sit through likely two hours of political discussion and participate in that whole process” are prioritized.
Burbank added the choice of the poll and the caucus system itself makes it harder to gauge where the big tent party is actually at.
“It is by design excluding people who perhaps don't really have a strong view on the presidential nomination or excluding people who just don't care enough, even though they're going to turn out and vote in the presidential election.”
The Utah Republican Party wanted to “emphasize the party building part of the caucus system,” Burbank said, so they opted for the poll even though a state-run primary “would give them a better sense of where Republican voters in the state [are] at.”
After seeing the thin turnout in her Weber County precinct, Funk also disagreed with the claim that the caucus gave a good glimpse into who the party would like to see as president. She didn’t feel like caucusgoers were representative of Utah's Republican population in the slightest, and called the process “a little disenfranchising.”
“Something as important as a presidential primary, we need more voices, not less,” she said. “I don't want one demographic of people choosing every elected leader for me.”
