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With dueling television ads blanketing the airwaves here and competing blue and red yard signs planted on roadsides and front lawns, Utah is experiencing something as rare as a summer freeze: a competitive general election contest.Īs the sun began to set against a majestic mountain backdrop on a recent night, Andrew and Liz Mayfield opened their backyard to neighbors and strangers alike to hear McMullin spread the word about his candidacy. Utah's current junior senator, Mitt Romney, received 73% in the 2012 presidential race and 63% in the 2018 Senate race. He won Utah twice, with about 45% of the vote in 2016 and 58% in 2020. And Lee is an incumbent who won a second term in 2016 with 68% of the vote.īut while Utah is conservative, the state never fully embraced Trump. 'We've never seen anything like this in our history, particularly for a Senate race.'įor McMullin, the odds are long: Utah hasn't elected a Democratic senator since 1970. 'This is completely unique,' Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, said in an interview. Now, McMullin is confronting Lee, 51, in an unusual Senate campaign that will test whether there are enough Democrats, independents, and anti-Trump Republicans to elect a 'Never Trump' conservative to the Senate.

By 2020, Lee referred to Trump as Captain Moroni, a revered figure in the Book of Mormon, while later working to help craft a legal strategy to overturn Trump's failed reelection bid.

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McMullin, 46, a former undercover CIA officer and House Republican staffer, launched an organization for disaffected Republicans to air grievances about how a former TV celebrity had rewritten the principles of their party. Then, Lee threw his support behind McMullin, a fellow Utah native running a long-shot independent presidential campaign.Īfter Trump won the presidency and began remaking the Republican Party in his own image, the paths of the two men diverged. It was the fall of 2016 when Lee bluntly called on Trump to end his bid for the White House, following the release of the 'Access Hollywood' tape in which the GOP nominee spoke crudely about groping women. Radically different choices that both men made six years ago - surrounding the former President - still hang over this Senate race in deep-red Utah. 'We have to be willing to stand up to the broken politics of division and extremism.'

'We have to be willing to make a change,' McMullin implored voters here on a recent fall night.

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