Utah voters do not appear to like business mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump, and would consider voting Democrat if he were the Republican nominee, two new polls suggest.
Utah’s GOP caucus is Tuesday night, with 40 delegates up for grabs. If a candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, they will get all 40 delegates, but if the winner gets less than 50 percent, then the delegates are distributed proportionally.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is poised to win the state, with the latest poll from Deseret News showing him with 42 percent of the caucus voters. The poll was taken before Florida Sen. Marco Rubio suspended his campaign, so Cruz could end up with some of those voters and launch over the 50 percent threshold.
Trump comes in second in the poll (at 21 percent), ahead of Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. He, too, will likely pick up some of Rubio’s supporters, but it is unlikely that he will win the state.
Sure, second place is not bad (certainly better than Kasich’s third place), and if Trump can get enough votes to keep the delegate distribution proportional, that will be considered a good thing for him. But that’s not the extent of Utah’s disdain for Trump.
In another Deseret poll, Cruz and Kasich easily beat both former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who is poised to lose the state tonight) and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in head-to-head matchups. But if Trump is the Republican nominee, Utah may vote for the Democratic presidential nominee for the first time in more than 50 years.
Cruz beats Clinton and Sanders by 28 points and 14 points, respectively. Kasich beats Clinton and Sanders by 30 points and 19 points, respectively (so it looks like Kasich might over-perform in the state on Tuesday).
But Trump narrowly loses to Clinton, 38-36 percent. He loses worse to Sanders, 48-37 percent. Take the Clinton results with a grain of salt, however, as the poll had a +/- 4.38 percent margin of error.
“Wow. Wow. That’s surprising,” Chris Karpowitz, co-director of Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, told Deseret News. “Any matchup in which Democrats are competitive in the state of Utah is shocking.”
Additionally, 16 percent of Utahns said they wouldn’t even vote if Trump and Clinton were the nominees, with 9 percent saying the same if the choice was between Trump and Sanders.
Remember, however, this is just Utah, just the primary, and that polls this early aren’t conclusive. Trump appears poised to easily win the Arizona primary, which has 58 delegates up for grabs and is a winner-take-all state.
Utah also offers just six electoral votes in the general election, so it’s not really about the numbers here. It’s about the idea that Republicans could nominate someone that would turn a reliably red state into a blue state.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
