It was a tough election for Democrats.
Nationally, the party lost the presidency, Senate and likely the House. And in Utah, Democrats weren’t able to flip as many legislative seats as they hoped for. They still, however, see an opportunity to put some cracks in the state’s GOP supermajority.
At least six state legislative seats were considered competitive. But on Nov. 8, only one Democrat had a lead in a Salt Lake County race. West Valley City councilor Jake Fitisemanu had a 469 vote advantage over Republican state lawmaker Fred Cox.
Democrats are at risk of losing one seat in Weber County where Rosemary Lesser is trailing Republican Jill Koford by 205 votes. If Lesser doesn’t win, Democrats will have added no seats to their already slim minority.
Salt Lake County
Gabi Finlayson, a co-founder of Elevate Strategies, a left-leaning political consulting firm in Utah, said they still view this election cycle as a win. She said Democrats have been working to flip Fitisemanu’s likely seat blue for the last decade. They’re also holding out hope that the at-large Salt Lake County Council seat will be held by Democrat Natalie Pinkney.
“Campaigns are not won in months, they're won in years. Every single person that ran this year did the work and told their story and spread the message of why we need to break up this political monopoly in Utah,” she said.
Elevate believes they can crack the code to break up the supermajority before the next redistricting cycle.
Finlayson is also bolstered by Utah being one of the only states that didn’t shift more to the right. In fact, it leaned a little bit more to the left. She thinks President-elect Donald Trump’s margins in Utah didn’t shift much at all because of the “divisions internally within the Republican Party.” Something she plans to capitalize on.
“All politics really is selfish – not in a bad way – but people want to know what politicians are really going to do for them,” she said. “And if we're not talking to those issues and those real problems that people actually need solved, we're never going to make real progress.”
Weber County
Stacy Bernal’s campaign for State Senate District 3 was one the national Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and Elevate Strategies thought they could flip.
Unofficial results show incumbent Sen. John Johnson easily defeated Bernal.
Jeremy Thompson, treasurer of the Weber County Democratic Party, said Democrats thought that seat was attainable because the area has “a very working-class feel” and Bernal had previously been elected to the Ogden School Board.
During the campaign, Thompson said the county party focused on recruiting volunteers and spreading the message that Democrats are here, fit with the culture and aren’t “big hippie liberals from California.” Thompson wanted voters to know he loves “shooting guns. We've got ranchers that are out here. I was in the military.”
Democrats also lost races for county commission and House District 9, and while Bernal lost, Finlayson said she “did perform better than any Democrat we've seen in a long, long time in that district.”
Thompson said it’ll take time to learn from this election and figure out where the party will go next, but they plan to debrief with candidates and determine their strategy going forward.
The strategy moving forward
University of Utah political scientist Jim Curry said Utah Democrats did alright given that the state did not see an “overall shift toward the Republican Party.” Instead, he said, it remained about the same as four years ago with some areas shifting blue“ever so slightly.”
“Normally having no change when you're the party out of power who's trying to make up ground would be demoralizing,” Curry said. “But I think if you put that in the broader context of a big national shift towards the Republicans, being able to hold firm is progress.”
In order to move the needle, Curry said a lot of it comes down to messaging. To a certain extent, he said Utah Democrats need to be able to “carve out a separate brand from the national Democratic Party.” However, they have to acknowledge that Kamala Harris was the best-performing statewide Democrat on the ballot. Harris also gathered the most Utah votes out of any Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.
“I think the state party needs to consider what that signal means where Harris is going to get a certain percentage of the vote in Salt Lake County, but most of the other Democrats running in Salt Lake County are going to be a little bit underneath that.”
Curry thinks if the Democrats have any chance of winning a statewide seat, they will need to “very slowly and very laboriously try to win at lower levels a little bit at a time.”
As Finlayson heads back to the drawing board to figure out how to win more seats, she said the firm will “take a hard look” to determine which candidates are the best for each district they’re after.
“We're certainly not giving up on any of these districts that we know will be competitive in the next couple cycles, but it means that we have to continue doing the hard work.”
