It’s been more than seven years since Utah last elected a Democrat to Congress. Republicans have overwhelmingly swept all four of the state’s U.S. House seats ever since former Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, narrowly lost his re-election bid in 2020.
But Tuesday, the morning after a Utah judge again ruled in favor of anti-gerrymandering advocates who have spent years suing the Utah Legislature over redistricting, those groups celebrated what they called a victory in a drawn out battle for fairness in a state where Republicans have long kept a strong grip on state and federal representation.
To the plaintiffs in the redistricting lawsuit — which include the League of Women Voters of Utah, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, the Campaign Legal Center and a handful of Salt Lake County voters — Monday night’s court ruling wasn’t about Democrats versus Republicans, but rather fair representation.
“There will be many who will try to frame this victory through the lens of partisanship. Some will co-opt this as a win for their party, and others will see it as a loss,” said Emma Petty-Addams, co-executive director of the nonpartisan group Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
However, she said the court case has always been about standing firmly against gerrymandering “no matter which party initiatives or benefits from it.”
She said it’s always been about restoring Proposition 4 — a ballot initiative Utah voters narrowly approved in 2018 to create an independent redistricting process with neutral map-drawing requirements.
In 2021, the Utah Legislature undid that initiative and turned the commission into an advisory body that lawmakers could ignore. But the courts ruled lawmakers acted unconstitutionally when they repealed and replaced it, and they’ve since restored Proposition 4 as law.
“Today, the people of Utah are getting what they voted for seven years ago. A fair map,” Petty-Addams said during a news conference Tuesday morning. “Utah is a special place. At a time when politicians are rushing to gerrymander their states for political advantage all over the country, a cross-partisan group of Utah citizens — Republicans, Democrats, independents — are finally seeing the fruits of their persistence and years-long commitment to do the opposite.”
Still, the new court-ordered map will have major implications for the two-party dynamics in Republican-dominated Utah.
Next year — if 3rd District Judge Dianna Gibson’s ruling holds — Democrats will have a strong chance of winning the 1st Congressional District under the map the judge ordered to be used for the 2026 elections. Gibson sided with the plaintiffs in the redistricting lawsuit and rejected the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature’s preferred map, which would have created four Republican-leaning districts.
The Legislature’s preferred map, known as map C, would have been more competitive for Democrats when compared to the 2021 congressional map that Gibson voided in August as the result of an unconstitutional process — but Republicans would have likely still dominated all four seats.
Under the court-approved map, known as the plaintiffs’ Map 1, District 1 is concentrated around the state’s urban core.
A recent map analysis by the Better Utah Institute — a nonpartisan nonprofit that is related to the progressive advocacy group Alliance for a Better Utah — said the plaintiffs’ Map 1 would create one safe Democratic district and three safe Republican ones, with District 1 estimated to be 42.7% Republican and 52.7% Democratic, with a 10-point margin in favor of Democrats.
Utah’s Republican legislators have long favored a “slice of the pie” approach to redistricting, or mixing urban and rural voices into all four congressional districts. But the judge rejected the Legislature’s preferred map and instead chose the plaintiffs’ Map 1, writing in her ruling that redistricting expert evidence and testimony showed the Legislature’s map was an “extreme partisan outlier” that exhibited “pro-Republican bias.”
Republicans argue the plaintiffs’ map was gerrymandered to favor Democrats — but the plaintiffs’ attorney, David Reymann, said expert evidence showed that a map of its nature is “the natural result of Utah’s political geography, where you have a large proportion of the minority party concentrated in a single place.”
“That is not a partisan gerrymander,” he said. “A partisan gerrymander is taking a state’s political geography and manipulating it so you don’t have the natural result.”
Reymann said Utah’s Republican-controlled Legislature has long preferred mixing urban and rural voices in their redistricting maps as cover for “cracking” Salt Lake County, where most of the state’s Democrats are concentrated.
“The urban-rural mix was always a canard that the Legislature spread that had no textual support of Prop 4,” he said. “The voters didn’t say we want a mix of urban and rural. That was always just a justification to crack Salt Lake County.”
Utah’s Republican legislative leaders are likely to continue fighting Gibson’s order in court — and some GOP legislators have threatened to try and impeach Gibson — but barring a successful appeal, the plaintiffs’ Map 1 is the most likely to govern congressional boundaries for the 2026 election.
Candidates can begin filing their bids in January. Already, some potential Democratic congressional hopefuls are lining up.
McAdams, a former Salt Lake County mayor and Utah’s last Democratic congressman, recently invited his supporters to a formal campaign launch party scheduled for Thursday, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, has also said she’s exploring a congressional bid.
Though it’s likely they’ll both want to run for the 1st Congressional District, it’s not yet clear what district they’d file to run in. In bids for the U.S. House, candidates aren’t required to live in the district where they run for office.
This story was originally published by Utah News Dispatch.
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About the Author
Katie McKellar covers Utah government as a senior reporter for Utah News Dispatch. She specializes in political reporting, covering the governor and the Utah Legislature, with expertise in beats including growth, housing and homelessness.
