Late Tuesday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox expressed hope that former President Donald Trump’s reelection victory would provide an opportunity to unite the Republican Party.
Cox, a longtime Trump skeptic, had expanded his support for Trump days after the failed assassination attempt in July, in an effort to encourage a more conciliatory approach to Trump’s politics.
In reaching out to Trump, Cox said he wanted to continue spreading Utah’s civil discourse by bridging divisions within the Republican Party.
But Trump wasn’t the only Republican critic Cox interacted with in recent months. In an interview with the Deseret News on Wednesday, Cox said his priority is to make the same appeal here at home that he made to Trump to Republicans in Utah.
“We will work hard to unite the party over the next four years and ensure that conservatives and the values that made Utah special for so long will remain Utah values,” Cox said.
Around the same time he joined Trump in August for a visit to Arlington National Cemetery, Cox decided he would embark on a listening tour to sit down with some of his fiercest opponents and hear their concerns.
Cox had just returned from a nail-biting primary, which he won by a smaller margin than incumbent governors of the past, and which showed two different visions for Beehive State Republicans.
Cox’s leading Republican challenger, state Rep. Phil Lyman, who received the support of a two-thirds majority of state delegates at the party’s April convention, claimed Cox was out of touch with conservatives on hot-button issues like immigration and transgender participation in sports . .
The Cox campaign, in turn, labeled some of Lyman’s supporters as “far-right delegates” in a fundraising email and focused on Cox’s support of GOP legislation that cut taxes, limited abortion and increased diversity, equity and inclusion in schools forbidden.
After the primaries, Cox began scheduling meetings with disaffected Republicans in small groups of about a dozen individuals, or in one-on-one sessions — including with a handful of Lyman’s most outspoken advocates — and took responsibility for some of the lack of understanding between himself and Lyman’s supporters as he tried to find common ground.
Although Lyman’s campaign was unusual for Utah in terms of aggression and false claims of election fraud, Cox found that the two sides of Utah’s Republican Party are actually not that far apart. And he is determined to prove this during his next administration.
‘Disagree better’ to bridge the divide among Republicans
Utah’s governor has built a national reputation on his “Disagree Better” initiative, which aims to lower the political temperature by improving the quality of political dialogue. But Cox says one of the “lessons” he learned from the primaries is that he may have neglected conversations with dissidents in his own party.
“I’ve worked really hard to bridge some of those divides between right and left, and that’s certainly been my focus, and I haven’t spent as much time as I probably should have on the divides between right and right. ,” said Cox.
Before the primaries, Gunnar Thorderson, a conservative activist on the Republican Party’s Central Committee, said he saw Cox as a Democrat in Republican garb, more concerned with “appeasing the left,” with his support for some COVID 19 policies and using his pronouns in a viral video, then “advancing conservative interests.”
But after Cox’s unexpected endorsement of Trump, which Thorderson called an “olive branch” to Trump, Thorderson wrote his own letter to Cox, describing the delegates’ sense of dismissal after the state GOP convention and his desire to ” to resolve differences of opinion’. To Thorderson’s surprise, Cox agreed.
At one of several rallies Cox later hosted, Thorderson said he and a group of Lyman fans, Cox skeptics and party activists took their anger directly to Utah’s governor. What followed wasn’t a perfect agreement, but Thorderson said he came away with a sense that Cox respected his views and the realization that he had sometimes judged Cox unfairly.
“I’m sure we still have a lot of disagreements,” Thunderson said. “But the key difference now is that he’s willing to listen, and he’s willing to work with Trump to find that common ground and really create a platform or an agenda for the future that we can get behind.”
At the convention and in the primaries, Thorderson voted for Lyman. In the general election, Thorderson cast his vote for Cox, despite Lyman continuing his campaign as a write-in candidate. As of Wednesday evening, Cox had won re-election with 55.8% of the vote, compared to the 30.5% that Democratic candidate state Rep. Brian King received and the 8.9% that Lyman received.
One of Cox’s gatherings was Emilie Brown, the wife of Utah Attorney General-elect Derek Brown, who describes herself as a Cox supporter. Those in attendance included state delegates and primary voters who supported Lyman. Brown described them as “true conservatives” who had genuine – if sometimes “hostile” – questions for Cox and were willing to put aside differences to achieve shared goals.
The intimate format allowed Cox to understand the concerns of these voters, sometimes apologize and correct the facts when necessary, Brown said. Instead of turning into shouting matches, in many cases attendees walked out ready to cast their general election votes for Cox, Brown said.
But what was most impressive to Brown was that a sitting governor would take the time to have tough conversations with “regular” voters.
“There is a humanity that I saw in Spencer Cox, and an authentic commitment to truly understanding the people of Utah. It took incredible humility to let people criticize him to his face,” Brown said. “I came away with even more respect than I already had for the governor, watching him sit down with his critics and really listen to their concerns. This is what leadership looks like to me.”
