A calling, a coalition builder, a party leader and Utah’s progressive example. That’s how the candidates in the newly drawn 1st Congressional District answered what they would do as the only Democrat in Utah’s federal delegation.
All four candidates — state Sen. Nate Blouin, attorney Michael Farrell, former congressman Ben McAdams and former Big Tech government relations employee Liban Mohamed — answered questions ranging from their plans to help save Great Salt Lake to driving down the cost of housing to whether artificial intelligence data centers have a place in Utah during a live televised debate organized by the Utah Debate Commission and moderated by Fox13 reporter Max Roth.
With the debate finished, voters in the new left-leaning district are one step closer to knowing who their nominee might be. The primary election is June 23.
Farrell sees the office as the de facto “state figurehead for the Democratic Party” and pointed to his professional experience as an attorney as proof that he can get real work done for constituents.
“If we send someone to Congress from this seat who gets nothing done, who passes zero bills, who just says fancy words and platitudes, why would anybody care about supporting Utah Democrats?” he said. “We're going to show them that it's not worth fighting for us. We're going to show them that we can't deliver well. When I’m elected, I’m going to deliver.”
Blouin touted his prominent national progressive endorsements, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, and said, “a crowd waiting to work with me day one in D.C.”
“I have done the hard work of being a state senator and helping down-ballot candidates, I've been supporting candidates for my own seat, for other seats, and I want to continue building this party to make sure that it represents every single Utahn, not just the Democratic establishment that you see folks on this stage talking about,” he said.
For Mohamed, the winner of April’s Democratic Nominating Convention, the opportunity is “calling for us to build a rainbow coalition, a beautiful bouquet of flowers that reflects the full beauty and strength of Utah.” Just his being on stage as a Muslim man and son of Somali immigrants, he said, is proof of that reality.
“We're going to bring people into this process, expand our electorate, help us down the ballot,” Mohamed said. “Democrats need to be helped down the ballot in Utah and most importantly, have our values represented in Congress, while simultaneously getting things done.”
McAdams leaned on his experience as the lone Utah Democrat in Washington, having served the old 4th Congressional District from 2019 to 2021. He singled out his vote to impeach President Donald Trump in 2019 as a hard choice that the position sometimes requires.
“That job requires you to stand alone, and I'm proud of the times that I stood alone and stood out,” he said. “But the job isn't just standing alone. The job also requires building coalitions … I've done this job before, and I look forward to doing it again.”
The evening’s most spirited exchanges were over AI and data centers. All four candidates said they oppose the controversial Stratos Project data center in Box Elder County. Lines, however, were drawn on just how far the candidates would go to limit construction.
Leaning on his past professional expertise in energy policy, Blouin said it’s not just an issue of data centers syphoning water resources that could be used elsewhere.
“I am particularly concerned about the emissions aspect of this,” he said. “And putting all of the emissions of 9 gigawatts of new natural gas generation into our airshed would just choke off our communities even worse than they are being choked off now.”
As someone who worked for Big Tech and companies such as Meta and TikTok, Mohamed felt he was uniquely qualified to bring industry and government together. He also suggested several pro-environment steps, like prohibitions on data centers in water-stressed areas, to curb development.
“It is time that we make sure that we have comprehensive environmental standards,” he said. “Including renewable energy requirements, including water-neutral requirements, including cost causation rules. Because if [companies] cause a cost, they should pay for the cost.”
Farrell went further than any candidate. He called for a nationwide ban. For him, the AI boom in recent years is a bubble akin to the dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“When it inevitably bursts, who's going to be holding the bag?” he said. “Are [billionaires]? Absolutely not. We're going to be holding the bag again. We, the American taxpayers, are going to be bailing out these rich jerks who wasted all of our water to advance what, like, ChatGPT giving us the wrong answer yet again?”
On AI, McAdams took the most arrows from his opponents. Several pointed to him having a financial stake in a data center project near Delta in Millard County. McAdams said he was “the only candidate who has worked to make a data center better by adding renewable energy” to address the accusation. Later, he told reporters that his financial position was in stock options and part of the compensation for consulting work two years ago.
“Artificial intelligence is going to transform our economy in some good ways and in many bad ways,” he said during the debate. “What we need are federal standards to make sure that when, as the economy is transformed, that the American people are the ones who benefit, not tech billionaires, tech moguls, foreign powers, but the American people are benefited through that.”
Utah has not been immune to spikes in fuel prices after the start of the U.S. war with Iran, which have helped drive up the cost of everything from groceries to airplane tickets. Housing has also been a years-long issue in the state. Candidates were pressed about how they would handle affordability.
Farrell sees the American dream of home ownership and raising a family “rapidly slipping away from people's fingers.” His solution would be to push for more federal funding for starter homes and a $25,000 first-time homebuyer assistance program.
Additionally, he said the United States “desperately needs to tax the rich.”
“We have a broken tax system that puts most of the burden for funding our social safety net, as beaten down as it is by Republicans, onto the shoulders of middle-class folks. It's unacceptable,” he said. “I'm going to increase rates on billionaires and millionaires, and what I'm going to do with that is lower taxes on folks in the 90% and below.”
Blouin called it tragic to watch people have to choose between paying for childcare and owning a home. The culprits he pointed to are special interest groups “profitizing things that should be human rights like housing, like food, like other things that we need to live with on a daily basis.” Beyond that, he said, healthcare would be his first focus.
“Moving forward with Medicare For All, to make sure that people in college, as they are hitting that 26-year age where they lose their parents' healthcare, they can find something better,” he said.
Mohamed called housing “a human right, not a corporate speculative asset.” He wants measures to prevent corporations from buying up single-family homes and regulations that allow affordable housing to be built faster.
For him, affordability boils down to a lack of willpower to address the issue.
“Look, the resources are abundant,” he said. “If we're the wealthiest [country] in the history of humanity, the issue is not scarcity, it's how those resources are being allocated. And as long as we're prioritizing billionaire tax breaks over serving the average person … It's not going to work”
McAdams used the opportunity to tout his past work in housing affordability. He stressed the importance of “leaders who know how to build coalitions” as the real way to tackle affordability and told voters that “passing a law is harder than promising one.”
“We must end this reckless, unconstitutional war that has driven up the price of gasoline, driving up the cost of food,” he said. “We must, I think, reverse the tax cuts for billionaires in Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill that gave enormous tax cuts for billionaires and passed it on to working people in the form of cuts to SNAP and ACA benefits. We must address this for the people who are really hurting.”
McAdams hopes for a return to Congress, getting another shot after he was narrowly defeated by Rep. Burgess Owens in 2020.
Blouin first entered politics in 2022, when he defeated long-time state Sen. Gene Davis in the Democratic primary before taking office in 2023. He’s made a name for himself as an outspoken progressive in Utah state politics on issues like energy policy, immigration enforcement, the Great Salt Lake and public lands.
He’s betting that voters in the new district want a progressive voice, going as far as trying to consolidate that vote against the more centrist McAdams. Blouin declared that he would drop out of the race if a self-funded popularity poll wasn’t in his favor and is pressing to Mohamed and Farrell to take the same pledge.
Despite being an unknown in Utah politics, Mohamed emerged as the surprise convention winner, guaranteeing himself a spot on the primary ballot. The 27-year-old hopes to ride that wave of support through the primary and has also secured endorsements from prominent national figures like Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Farrell is the other political neophyte in the race and is banking on that outsider experience to appeal to voters.
Whoever wins the primary will face the lone Republican in the first district race, Riley Owen, who secured the GOP nomination at the April state nominating convention.
Ballots will be mailed to voters on June 2. Primary election day is June 23.
