Utah Voters Finally Got a Fair Map. Republicans Are Making Sure It Never Happens Again.

Mother Jones illustration; Getty

President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity has promised a bloodbath for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. To head off that debacle, party leaders in red states have set off an arms race of political gerrymandering. They’ve made an unprecedented move to redistrict their states before the next census to create new, safe GOP districts that might allow the party to preserve its control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Blue states like California have responded in kind.

Amid that political tug-of-war, one red state will be holding its first non-gerrymandered congressional election of the 21^st century: Utah, which Donald Trump won in 2024 with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

The change has been a long time in the making. Voters first approved Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative in 2018. But Republicans in the state legislature, with support from the governor, have gone to extreme lengths to prevent it from going into effect. After eight years of bitter legal battles, Utah courts finally forced the state to follow the law and adopt fair voting districts that will be in effect for the first time this year. As a result, a Democrat has a real shot at winning one of the state’s four congressional seats—an outcome that could help swing control of Congress in November.

The mere possibility of Utah voters sending a single Democrat to Congress has sparked a fierce and desperately devious backlash from state Republicans hell-bent on making sure such an outcome never happens again. Emma Petty Addams, co-executive director of nonpartisan faith-based Mormon Women for Ethical Government, says, “There was, and continues to be, a sense among our leadership in particular that an un-gerrymandered outcome was not favorable to their political future.”

Despite its reputation as a hard-core conservative state, Utah has sent several Democrats to Congress in the past. In 1992, the state even elected a Democratic woman, Karen Shepherd, who served a single term before she was ousted two years later by the scandal-plagued Enid Waldholtz.

Back then, the state had only three congressional districts, and one of them was mostly limited to Salt Lake City and its suburbs, the state’s largest population center. In 2000, that district elected Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog Democrat whose father, Scott Matheson, was the last Utah Democrat elected to serve as governor in 1980.

But as the GOP nationally grew more radical, Utah Republicans who couldn’t beat Matheson at the ballot box tried to redistrict him out of office. In 2002, they changed his district boundaries to break up Salt Lake City and staple it to rural areas like Vernal or the fast-growing conservative area in Southern Utah, eight hours away.

Much to their chagrin, Matheson continued to win elections, even after the legislature split Salt Lake County into four different districts in 2010. In 2014, he gave up and retired after 14 years. But his district remained somewhat competitive. The late Republican Mia Love won the seat that year but lost it in 2018 to former Salt Lake County mayor Ben McAdams, who served one term before losing to former NFL player and Fox News commentator Burgess Owens in 2020. In 2020, the state legislature redrew the maps again to ensure that no Democrat could ever be elected to Congress.

The Utah state legislature has been able to do this because Republicans have a veto-proof supermajority, even though the state’s demographics have changed dramatically. The legislature is also more than 80 percent male, nearly 90 percent Mormon, and 98 percent white. Yet Utah is now about 16 percent Latino, only about 60 percent LDS, and increasingly liberal. Brigham Young University professor Jacob Rugh has calculated that since 2004, Utah has swung left more than any other state in the country—by about 24 points. Even Provo, home of BYU, where Mitt Romney won about 85 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential election, gave Trump only 56 percent of its vote in 2024.

Salt Lake City has become so liberal that democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won the Democratic presidential primaries there in 2016 and again in 2020. Kamala Harris beat Trump in Salt Lake by 23 points even as she lost the rest of the state by more than 20. Yet none of those shifts are reflected in the state’s congressional delegation, which is currently made up entirely of white Republican men.

In 2018, Utah voters tried to change all that when they approved a ballot initiative to require an independent redistricting commission to draw nonpartisan maps. The measure also banned the state legislature from unfairly advantaging one party in redistricting. Almost as soon as Prop. 4 passed, the state legislature moved to repeal it, and in 2021, the legislature once again cracked Salt Lake into four GOP-dominant districts.

The next year, eight groups, including the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, sued the legislature, arguing that the repeal of Prop. 4 violated the state constitution. In 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled in their favor and sent the case back to the trial court for more litigation over the maps. In response, the legislature tried unsuccessfully to amend the state constitution to ban citizen-initiated ballot initiatives.

Finally, in August last year, Judge Diana Gibson ruled that the legislature had violated the state constitution and gave it a month to come up with new maps that complied with the law in time for the 2026 election. The ruling ignited a national firestorm on the right. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?” Trump said on Truth Social. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”

Instead of following the judge’s order, the legislature once again drew partisan district maps; Gibson once again threw them out. She ruled that the 2026 election would be governed by the nonpartisan maps created by the independent redistricting commission. Rather than accept the ruling, members of the state legislature immediately moved to impeach Gibson, who received death threats, along with many court employees. They also appealed her decision, with support from Republican Gov. Spencer Cox.

“The Utah Constitution clearly states that it is the responsibility of the Legislature to divide the state into congressional districts,” Cox wrote on social media. “While I respect the Court’s role in our system, no judge, and certainly no advocacy group, can usurp that constitutional authority. For this reason, I fully support the Legislature appealing the Court’s decision.”

The Washington County commission, in southern Utah, even voted in January to ignore Gibson’s order entirely, despite being advised by their own lawyer that they would be out of compliance with state law. “I think she’s guilty of criminal conspiracy for conspiring with democratic socialists, and with outside money to try to flip a district in a state and basically control Congress,” fumed Commissioner Victor Iverson, calling Gibson “that lady who shouldn’t even be on the bench.”

In February, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously rejected the legislature’s appeal, but it didn’t result in a ceasefire. In December, the head of the state GOP and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) had started a group called Utahns for Representative Government to repeal Prop. 4 through a ballot initiative.

The enterprise was run by a dark money group aligned with Trump that, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, funneled more than $4 million into the campaign and helped bring in out-of-state workers to gather petitions needed to get the measure on the ballot. It generated a host of complaints from people who alleged that they’d been tricked into signing it, thinking they were actually opposing gerrymandering. Good-government groups launched a grassroots effort to encourage people to withdraw their signatures if they felt they’d signed in error.

The measure failed to get on the ballot, and the election has proceeded. And now, for the moment, at least, the prospect of actually winning an election has invigorated the state’s long-moribund Democratic Party. Four candidates are currently on the primary ballot for the new 1^st congressional district, and the state even saw a televised debate among them last month—an event that hasn’t happened since 2010. “It’s definitely a win for the people of Utah to finally have something they voted for working,” says Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the bipartisan organization that spearheaded Prop. 4.

Former Rep. Ben McAdams looks poised to return to Congress. But Republicans seem committed to ensuring that even if he does get elected, he won’t serve another term. As state judges have repeatedly blocked Republicans’ campaign to undo Prop. 4, GOP officials have focused on undermining the independence of Utah courts.

“The legislature is really losing its stranglehold on Utah, and they do not want to be politically accountable,” says Teneille Brown, a University of Utah law professor who helped found Co-Equal Utah, a nonprofit focused on protecting the state courts from political pressure. “Their relentless tactics are really evidence of why we really need better boundaries.”

Brown says Utah’s judges have historically been considered some of the best in the nation, largely because they have been selected on merit. A bipartisan judicial nominating commission was charged with identifying candidates for the governor to select from. But in 2023, the legislature removed the requirements for the commission to include Democrats and members recommended by the state bar. Now, the panel that selects appellate judges is entirely Republican, and includes members like Sen. Mike Lee’s nephew, who graduated from BYU law school in 2020, as well as the board chairman of the right-wing Sutherland Institute, a Utah think tank.

With that new system in place, Republicans have launched an attack on the judges who had decided the gerrymandering case. Utah holds retention elections for judges, and the GOP has actively urged voters to reject the Supreme Court judges who upheld the maps. They also instigated a particularly nasty smear campaign against Justice Diana Hagan.

Last year, Hagan had been involved in an ugly divorce, and her ex-husband had alleged to a friend that she had been having an affair with one of the lawyers who worked on the anti-gerrymandering litigation. Hagan was friends with the lawyer, but she had recused herself from any case in which he was involved. Nonetheless, her ex-husband’s friend, who has worked in the Trump administration, filed a complaint against Hagan with the Judicial Conduct Commission.

Hagan vehemently denied the affair allegations. After investigating, the commission found “very little credibility to this complaint” and dismissed it. The commission’s investigative report was supposed to be confidential, but the state legislature leaked it to a local news outlet, prompting Cox and the state legislature to demand an “independent” investigation.

The ensuing publicity, and a host of death threats, made Hagan’s life so miserable that in early May, she decided to resign. “[M]y family and friends did not choose public life,” she wrote to Cox in her resignation letter. “They do not deserve to have intensely personal details surrounding the painful dissolution of my thirty-year marriage subjected to public scrutiny.”

Meanwhile, in January, the legislature voted to expand the state supreme court by two additional judges, even though the existing court said it didn’t need more help. This month, Cox appointed two men with no judicial experience to fill the seats, including a senior counsel for the LDS church. Once the new judges are in place, it seems inevitable that the state legislature will go back to court to challenge the district maps to ensure that the 2026 midterm election will be the last time Utah Democrats have a shot at sending someone to Congress.