The ‘fascinating’ dynamics in play for Utah’s 2026 congressional primaries

Editor’s note: This story is part of a partnership between KUER, PBS Utah and Utah News Dispatch to cover Utah’s 2026 midterm elections. 

After a yearslong anti-gerrymandering lawsuit led to a court-ordered congressional map governing Utah’s 2026 elections, Democrats here are energized like never before — and the national Democratic Party is now eyeing Utah as key to help them take control of the U.S. House this November. 

Under the new map, one of Utah’s previously reliably red congressional districts, District 1, has turned blue, while the other three remain deeply red. For the first time in years, Utah Democrats expect to send a candidate to Congress. 

As has been the case for Republicans in recent years — and because of the partisan makeup of the districts — the real winners for the new blue and red districts will almost certainly be decided in the primaries on June 23, well before the Nov. 3 general election. 

The new map has drawn a wildly crowded field, with 41 candidates filing to run in the congressional races alone. In District 1, seven Democrats are competing against each other in their primary. In the other red districts, Utah’s three GOP incumbents are each facing several challengers within their own party. 

It’s a primary unlike anything Utah has ever seen with high stakes, for not only Democrats but also the GOP. 

All of the candidates are confronting the map’s new political realities. While the new map has given Democrats not just hope but essentially a guarantee of federal representation, its critics (including prominent GOP legislative leaders like Senate President Stuart Adams) say it has created the most partisan districts Utah has ever seen and could produce more “extreme” candidates. 

Another factor at play is the fact that the Utah Democratic Party is holding an open primary while Republicans are holding a closed one. 

In the GOP’s closed primary, only registered Republicans can vote in those races, while Democrats allow anyone, regardless of party affiliation, to vote in their primaries.

That’s something Utah voters need to be aware of ahead of a fast approaching deadline next week. April 1 is the last day for already affiliated voters to switch their party affiliation if they want to vote in a specific primary other than their current party. Unaffiliated voters, however, have until June 12 to affiliate, which is necessary if they want to weigh in on any of the Republican primaries. 

Anyone, however, can vote in the Democratic primary — but if they aren’t a registered Democrat they’ll need to request a ballot from their county clerk. Primary ballots will be mailed to voters starting on June 2 and voters have until June 16 to request their ballot in the mail. Primary election day is June 23.

The open versus closed primary dynamics may seem wonky or innocuous, but depending on who you talk to, they could impact the race — especially the Democrats’ District 1 primary. 

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To Taylor Morgan, a political consultant with the Utah-based lobbying and public affairs firm Morgan & May, the Utah Democratic Party’s decision to hold an open primary could indeed have an impact. 

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“This is fascinating,” he said in an interview this week with Utah News Dispatch. 

Morgan predicts Ben McAdams — former Salt Lake County mayor and the last Democrat Utah voters sent to Congress in the more competitive 4th Congressional District in 2018 — will win the Democratic primary “easily” because it’s open. 

Because the winner of the District 1 race will likely be determined in the Democratic primary rather than the November general election, Morgan said “Republicans, unaffiliated voters, third-party voters are all going to want to vote in that open primary.” 

“So that means Ben McAdams has two or three times the voter base that any of the other Democratic challengers have,” Morgan said. “It will be his. And that really does a disservice to every other Democrat in that race.” 

Morgan is critical of the Utah Democratic Party’s longtime decision to hold open primaries. He says he’s repeatedly pushed Utah Democratic Party Chair Brian King to hold a closed primary — mainly because he argues it would not only help build the party’s numbers, but also data about the party’s Utah identity. 

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By holding an open primary, Morgan said Utah Democrats have “shot themselves in the foot.”

“You don’t know who your party is, you don’t know who your voters are,” he said. “That makes it really, really tough as a party to build and grow, to recruit candidates, to raise money, to organize.” 

As a political strategist, Morgan said he’s “frustrated” that the Utah Democratic Party is missing an opportunity to build its numbers and its strategic future by not holding a closed primary. 

“Really, this (District 1) race and the open-closed primary dynamic, I think it has huge implications for future politics in Utah,”  he said. “There really is a window in time and opportunity right now for Utah Democrats to build a party that could be … highly competitive in the future, given everything happening with national politics, given Utah voters’ frustrations with the current administration and current majorities in Congress.” 

But by continuing to hold an open primary, Morgan said “we won’t have key strategic takeaways from this because we won’t have good voter data relative to the Utah Democratic Party.” 

“They’re looking at the opportunity of a generation here and completely ignoring it,” he said.

Utah Democratic Party chair disagrees

King said he disagrees with Morgan “that the open primary is going to dictate who wins or who loses in the Democratic primary. I don’t think that’s going to have a meaningful impact at all.” 

“Look, we do the open primaries because we’re trying to energize and interest more people to come and vote with us,” said King, who has been encouraging Utahns who vote for Democrats to “come home” and register with the party. 

More important, King said, is how well Democratic primary candidates communicate with voters and how much “enthusiasm and energy they can generate” to get people to the polls, along with name recognition and campaign fundraising. 

“But low on my list of variables about having an impact is the open primary,” he said, “other than I really want that open primary aspect to bring more people out and say ‘I want to get involved voting for Democrats.’ That would be wonderful.” 

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King said the Utah Democratic Party has long held open primaries because “we want to appeal to as many Utahns as possible who are open to hearing about the values and the priorities of the Democratic Party.”

He said the aim of the open primary is to “set ourselves up as the competition to the Republican party in Utah, which of course” currently has supermajority control over all of the statewide offices and in the Legislature. 

In contrast, he thinks a closed primary, like what the Utah Republican Party does, leads to a “litmus test, leads to intolerance, leads to my-way-or-the-highway thinking.” 

“I think we want to present, as Democrats, just the opposite,” King said. “We want people that accurately and effectively represent the entire spectrum of what Utah stands for, what makes Utah great. And I think we do better to make sure that happens when we have an open primary rather than a closed primary.” 

When asked about the new Democratic-majority District 1 and whether there’s a higher concern from the Utah Democratic Party about Republicans voting in their open primary, King said he isn’t worried. 

It would be more of an issue in a district that’s “more evenly balanced between Republicans and Democrats,” King said. But because District 1 skews more blue, he argued the Utah Democratic Party’s base will still likely drive the outcome of the race. 

The new District 1 “certainly isn’t the kind of pure blue district that is going to elect the person to the farthest left on the spectrum, it’s not that at all,” King said. “But it is far enough on the left that I think people who are more on the progressive end of the political spectrum feel they have a shot there. A good shot.”

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King argued “party raiding” — whether its Democrats switching their affiliation to vote in the GOP primary or Republicans voting in the Democrats’ open primary — doesn’t happen widely enough to have much of an impact. 

“Here’s the reality,” he said. “The base of any particular party, in my humble opinion, is always going to be much stronger than any impact of ‘raiders,’ whether they come in as RINOs or whether they come in as DINOs.”

Will Utah’s new congressional map drive polarization and extremism?

Like Republican state leaders, Morgan is critical of Utah’s new court-ordered congressional map. He has argued that with the original intent of the 2018 voter-approved anti-gerrymandering law known as Proposition 4, the aim was to create more “competitive” districts to tamp down on polarization and extreme candidates. 

But Morgan argues the court-ordered map has done the opposite. 

“The congressional maps we have now are completely non-competitive when it comes to general elections,” Morgan said. 

He acknowledged, however, that the primary, especially when it comes to District 1, is “the first exciting, very competitive Democratic primary in Utah in my lifetime, frankly.” 

“I’m excited for Utah Democrats to have a really hotly contested, exciting primary,” he said. “Competition is good, and so it’s a good thing I think the Democrats can actually have a viable path to picking up a seat in Congress.”

However, he added that it’s “a concern” that District 1 “will not at all be competitive in the general election in November when more voters are even likely to participate.” 

“We will have noncompetitive general elections in all four districts,” he said, noting that the other three Republican districts are so deeply red, “no Democrat would ever have a shot” in a general election in any of those districts. 

But what does this mean for the Republican congressional incumbents?

Morgan said that two of the map’s three new conservative districts are now so deeply red that incumbents — especially Reps. Celeste Maloy and Blake Moore — could face a real challenge even against more “extreme” candidates. 

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He also said the only competition will come in the primaries, which he argues will drive polarized politics “because the candidates that win the party primaries will never have to worry about a viable challenger in November, so candidates are all going to focus their time, attention and messaging on only their party base and even the extremes within their party base in the primary.”

“And that’s not good for Utah,” he said. “That is really, in my opinion, the fundamental problem with Congress as a whole is that we have drawn boundaries in such a way that we’ve made the U.S. House of Representatives totally noncompetitive.”

Morgan noted that Republican primaries in three of Utah’s four congressional districts have typically been decided in the primaries and have been noncompetitive in the general election, whereas one district — the 4th Congressional District — had been competitive and, in some years, winnable for Democrats before the Legislature drew the previous congressional boundaries in 2021. 

Now, he said, all four are likely to be decided in the primary and not competitive at all for the general election. 

“What we’ve really done here is we’ve just entrenched partisan politics in our congressional maps in a way that, you know, frankly is just as bad or worse than any other state in the country,” Morgan said. 

King, however, argued that past gerrymandering and the state’s 2021 congressional map that was voided by the courts did more to drive polarization and extremism than the new map. 

King noted that the 2021 map was “safely Republican” for all four of those districts, and he argued that drove more partisanship than the new map because there was no pathway to win for any candidate other than a Republican. 

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