Utah Sen. Mike Lee Betrayed the Constitution and Won Reelection

Independent candidate Evan McMullin didn’t even come close.

Mother Jones illustration; Rick Bowmer/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

For most of the past year, Sen. Mike Lee’s approval ratings never cracked 50 percent. He was surprisingly unpopular for a Republican in Utah. He offended LDS voters in 2020 by comparing President Donald Trump to Captain Moroni, one of the most revered figures in the Book of Mormon. His fealty to Trump wasn’t always appreciated in a state where voters have been lukewarm on the crass real estate mogul. Lee’s text messages to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows laid bare the work he was doing to try to help Trump overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.

That’s why, for a while this summer, the national news media were awash in stories on the race suggesting that independent candidate Evan McMullin might actually have a shot at knocking off the incumbent with his campaign focused on preserving democracy.

But in the past few weeks, McMullin has been hammered with an onslaught of negative ads, most paid for by outside spending groups like the Club for Growth, and the close race opened up with Lee cruising easily to victory. Lee prevailed in the final vote by 55 to 41 percent.  

McMullin had previously been a Republican working on Capitol Hill in DC before running for president in 2016 as an independent, and he had promised that if elected, he wouldn’t caucus with either party. He hoped to appeal to principled Republicans offended by Trump and his party’s turn away from democratic norms. But his independent Senate campaign relied heavily on Democrats who’ve been gerrymandered out of much of political life in Utah, despite their concentration in Salt Lake County, the state’s largest. McMullin won Salt Lake but that wasn’t enough to get him elected. As I explained recently:

He has virtually no support in the state’s rural areas, which account for about 20 percent of the population. Earlier this year, McMullin attended a Democratic caucus night event in Vernal, in rural Uintah County. Three people showed up—both a sign of McMullin’s challenges and those of the state Democrats he’s leaning on to help elect him.

He has lured some big-name national Republicans to campaign with him, namely former RNC chairman Michael Steele and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. And he’s got Luke Skywalker. Yet not a single prominent Utah Republican has endorsed him. Both Romney and Gary Herbert, who retired last year after 12 years as Utah’s governor, have declined to endorse fellow Republican Lee, which is striking for what it says about Lee. But they haven’t thrown their weight behind McMullin, either.

The Senate race was Utah’s most expensive political campaign ever. McMullin raised $7 million on the campaign, while Lee raised $11 million. Despite all that money, McMullin did only marginally better than Democrat Misty Snow, the transgender supermarket clerk who spent $35,000 running against Lee in 2016 and garnered nearly 30 percent of the vote. Lee underperformed Trump’s 2020 record, when the former president won nearly 60 percent of Utah votes, but not by much. The race proved once again that Utahans may have occasional flashes of independence, but when it comes to pulling the lever, most of them will vote Republican, regardless of how bad the candidate may be. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate