The race is on for Utah’s redrawn 1st Congressional District, and former congressman Ben McAdams is running to return to Washington, D.C.
He made the announcement early Nov. 13, less than three days after Utah got a new congressional map with one left-leaning district surrounding Salt Lake County.
“Washington seems to have forgotten families like mine,” he told KUER. “They've forgotten what it's like to live a real life, and they're just playing politics instead of helping feed our children and making sure that we have affordable health care and homes that we can afford. I think it's cruel, and so that's why I'm running for Congress.”
McAdams is no stranger to Utah’s political landscape.
An attorney by training, he started his political career as an advisor in Salt Lake City Hall before becoming a state senator and then Salt Lake County mayor. He first ran for Congress in 2018, besting Republican Mia Love for the District 4 seat. He then narrowly lost that seat in 2020 to Rep. Burgess Owens, the Republican currently representing Utah in the 4th District. Since leaving office, he has led a policy-focused consulting firm, the Common Ground Institute.
McAdams joins Democratic state Sen. Kathleen Riebe, who announced her candidacy one day earlier.
Democrats now have an opportunity to flip one of Utah’s four congressional districts after Third District Court Judge Dianna Gibson ruled Nov. 10 that a lawmaker-drawn map did not comply with Proposition 4, the state’s ban on partisan gerrymandering. Gibson ultimately chose a map drawn by the plaintiffs in the case.
For McAdams, thoughts of another run had been in his head since the beginning of the year. Things really ramped up in the last few months, he said, partly because Judge Gibson tossed out the 2021 congressional map and because of “a few breaking points.” That included a dramatic incident at the Salt Lake City airport, where federal agents arrested a 39-year-old woman with a deportation order for failing to report to an immigration court appointment.
“I’ve just seen over the last several months several things that, for me, said, I cannot stay on the sidelines,” he said.
“Plenty of Democrats like me are angry about where things are and the damage that we're seeing happening in our country, but I want to get involved to fix it.”
McAdams said he would like to be hands-on with solutions to pressing issues like housing and affordability.
“I've got a lot of ideas that I've been seeing and implemented in cities and counties across the country,” he said.
As a self-described “policy wonk,” McAdams said he wants to move forward on legislation “that can help bring down the cost of housing, that can bring down the cost of groceries, and then make sure that people have access to quality health care.”
In addition to a long track record of public service, McAdams is also a veteran of bruising political campaigns. In 2018, he narrowly defeated Love for the 4th District seat, only to lose to Owens two years later by a similar margin.
But the redrawn district is likely to present different challenges for candidates than a swing district.
With the new 1st District heavily favoring Democrats, director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service Leah Murray explained that the primary will be a stress test for someone like McAdams, who is widely seen as coming from the centrist wing of the Democratic establishment.
“[The new district] is deep into the D side of the column, which suggests, to me, you don't have to be centrist,” she said. “What I would expect is that's going to push campaigns to the left in that district, and you might see Democrats running that you might only previously have seen coming out of, like, a Salt Lake City, very narrowly-drawn district.”
For his part, McAdams welcomes the contest.
“I would say competition is good for democracy,” he said. “It is exciting to see so many people feeling motivated to jump in and to run. I've never run unopposed for the nomination, and I look forward to reminding Democratic voters why they've trusted me in the past, and I look forward to earning their support in this race.”
