With under two months until Election Day, Utah voters got a closer look at three of the candidates running for governor.
Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, Democratic Rep. Brian King and Libertarian Robert Latham took the stage at The Grand Theatre on the South Campus of Salt Lake Community College during a Sept. 11 televised debate organized by the Utah Debate Commission.
Cox wants a second term after taking office in January 2021. He previously served as lt. governor to Gov. Gary Herbert and in the Legislature before moving to the executive branch.
A 15-year veteran of the Legislature, King is a practicing attorney. He will not return to the Legislature in 2025.
Latham is also an attorney and ran as a Libertarian candidate for Congress in 2020.
Absent was Republican Rep. Phil Lyman, who did not meet the polling threshold set by the commission. Although Lyman was defeated in the June 25 GOP primary, he is mounting a write-in campaign and claims to be the rightful Republican nominee by virtue of his victory at the April 27 Utah GOP Nominating Convention.
Political Polarization
On the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the candidates were asked how they would work to promote a more constructive dialogue in politics — Cox’s particular bailiwick.
Latham decried the political rhetoric coming from both Democrats and Republicans and encouraged people who did not identify with either party to run for office as a way to lower the political temperature.
“It's historic that a third party candidate, an independent party candidate, a non-incumbent party candidate, has made this stage, and I support changing that to be less polarizing,” he said.
Although the debate lacked the rancor of the previous night’s presidential debate, King pulled no punches when calling out Cox’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Until the July 13 assassination attempt, Cox had resisted embracing Trump in the years since his political rise.
“[Cox] for years, went ahead and said openly, I thought commendably, that he was not going to support Donald Trump and then we see, two months ago, a flip,” he said. “We need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. And the governor right now is simply acting inconsistently with his statements that he wants to disagree better.”
Cox led a nationwide “Disagree Better” campaign during his time as the chair of the National Governors Association and told the audience that “unity is not believing the same thing.”
“I'm going to do everything I can to help [Trump], to help my party, to help Democrats, to help us come together, and I'm committed to that,” he said. “It's sad to me that my colleague would dismiss the vast majority of voters in our state who are going to support the former president, but I'm going to do everything I can to help him and everybody else come together and treat each other with respect.”
Energy
Stark differences in the candidates also arose during an exchange on the future of energy production in Utah.
King said he and other Democrats are “lecturing my Republican colleagues and the governor about the need to follow the free market” after legislative efforts aimed at supporting the coal industry were passed earlier this year.
“Renewable energy is not the future, it's the present knocking on our door saying, ‘Why are you late?’” King said. “That's what we're doing in Utah. We are not picking the ball up and running with this in a way that honors free market principles, and quite honestly, that is going to move more seamlessly and without difficulty and pain.”
The governor rebuffed that assertion and placed the blame for the lagging adoption of renewable technology at the feet of Democrats who have been slow to come around to the idea of permitting reform.
“Let me assure you that we are doing nothing in Utah to stop the free market when it comes to energy production. We want all of the above,” Cox said. “We can't even build the very types of things that [King] is arguing we should build, because, again, the radical environmental movement and the Democrats in Congress will not pass permitting reform to make that possible.”
Latham called himself a proponent of an “all of the above” approach to energy, but added Utah should be mindful of environmental impacts when it comes to any government subsidies for energy producers.
“I want to make sure that we're not granting any favors to someone who's not going to return that favor to us,” he said.
Housing
Unaffordability in the housing market led Cox to make new affordable housing construction a cornerstone of his legislative efforts this year. He pledged to build 35,000 “starter homes” in the coming years and doubled down on that number when asked about his future plans.
“I shudder to think what our country will be like if we have a generation of people who can't afford real property,” he said. “This is not just a Utah problem, but we are going to have Utah solutions.”
According to Zillow, the average Utah home price is now $521,222, up from just over $374,000 four years ago.
While King agreed more housing needs to be built, he added that protections also need to be in place to ensure Utah homebuyers are the ones purchasing those units and not out-of-state actors who are buying “speculative or investment properties.”
“Many times they just want to either flip them for speculation purposes or they want to rent them out at inflated rents, and that's not good for Utahns,” King said. “We need to make sure that Utah housing stock is purchased and available for Utahns.”
Latham said he would veto any legislation that subsidized the housing industry, calling it a “construction cartel” that artificially reduces supply to increase profits.
“I'm a free market Liberty-minded person who's not going to really put up with that kind of approach.”
Amendment D
With a proposed amendment to the Utah Constitution that could give the Legislature the power to significantly change or repeal citizen-approved ballot initiatives and referendums, the candidates were asked whether they should have that power.
A district judge is expected to rule on Sept. 12 whether the amendment will appear on the ballot after the language explaining the amendment was challenged by a group that claims it misleads voters.
King said Utah's answer to Amendment D, if it’s on the ballot, should be a “hard no.”
“This is nothing but a power grab that we're dealing with in Amendment D. This is deceptive. It's deceitful, and it is something that every Utahn should come out to the polls in November and vote against.”
King continued to say Cox is “complicit” with the Legislature’s efforts and a “lap dog for the most extreme and the most divisive voices in the Legislature.”
Latham also said he would vote no on Amendment D.
“I don't know where that's going to go, but Rep. King is right, the language that [Senate] President Stuart Adams and Speaker Mike Schultz put on there is deceitful.”
Cox largely danced around the question, saying governors cannot weigh in on constitutional amendments. That the process is “totally the purview of the legislature.”
“It's very important that we have the opportunity as people to propose initiatives and referenda as well, to overturn a decision by the legislature,” Cox said. “Initiatives should be rare, but they are important, and we have to keep that power available.
When pressed for an answer in a post-debate media scrum on how he would be voting, Cox said he understands both sides of the issue, but worries that any future ballot initiative would be litigated based on the Utah Supreme Court’s decision.
“If I could have written it, I would have done some things differently,” he said. “I'll just leave it there.”
Working with the Legislature
Utah’s Republican supermajority has flexed its muscles in recent years by overriding a Cox veto of the transgender sports bill and passing hot-button legislation like transgender bathroom access, school vouchers and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs. So what is the role of the governor when it comes to the Legislature?
Cox insisted that most of the back and forth with legislative leaders happens behind closed doors and is not seen by the public, something he wishes “everybody could see.”
“We work very closely with legislative leadership, and I'm grateful for the relationship that we have,” he said. “The best negotiation happens behind the scenes. There are dozens and dozens of bills that don't get passed every year because of the work that we're doing, and dozens and dozens of bills that get changed in a better way.”
For King, a “monopoly of power” for Republicans is an unhealthy way to run Utah.
“I believe that we are best served when we have competition from as many different ideas as we can. We simply don't have that in the legislature today, and we especially don't have it when we have a governor who is simply willing to sign anything that crosses his desk no matter how terrible, no matter how unnecessary, no matter how divisive.”
“Here's the promise you'll have with me as the governor, every bill I sign will be a bipartisan bill, and that's not something that the governor can say,” he said.
When Latham hears “bipartisanship,” he said that means exclusion for those who don’t fit traditional Republican or Democrat molds.
“My campaign is focusing on underthrowing the government, choosing your own path through intentional communities, mutual aid societies, even what are called FOCJs, functionally overlapping competing jurisdictions. These are competing governments, rather than monopoly governments,” he said. “That's about returning power back from these monopolizing political interests and back to the people.”
Utah has not elected a non-Republican governor since Scott M. Matheson won a second term in 1980. Cox won election in 2020 with 63% of the vote over Democrat Chris Peterson.
Mail-in ballots will be sent to registered voters starting Oct. 15. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5.
