Sen. Orrin Hatch announced Tuesday that he would retire at the end of his term. Hatch’s retirement is interesting from a political perspective—former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents within his party—may end up in the Senate. But it’s less interesting electorally. While a lot can change between now and November, and Democrats can sometimes win in very red states (see Jones, Douglas) this race starts out leaning heavily toward the Republicans.
Utah is a very red state. In 2004, President George W. Bush won the state with 71.5 percent of the vote. John McCain won there by 28 points while losing in a landslide to President Barack Obama. Romney won 73 percent of the vote in the Beehive State while losing the national race to Obama by four points. The state’s Cook PVI (which measures the partisanship of a state compared to the country as a whole) is R+20 – meaning that it leans further to the right than Texas, Kentucky, Idaho, either of the Dakotas, Kansas, Arkansas or even Alabama.
Trump, who won the state by only 18 points, is the outlier here. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 27 percent of the vote in Utah—a total not so far off Obama’s 25 percent from 2012—while third-party conservative candidate Evan McMullin took 21 percent of the vote. In other words, Clinton performed about how a generic Democratic should perform while Trump likely lost some voters to a more traditionally conservative, Mormon candidate.
In other words, Utah is one of the most Republican states in the country. It’s simply hard for a Democrat to take a Senate seat in a state that’s that right-leaning.
Of course, less than a month ago, a Democratic candidate managed to win a Senate seat in Alabama, a Republican stronghold. So why couldn’t the same thing happen in Utah?
Again, it’s hard to know exactly who will win a race this far in advance. But there are reasons to think that Utah will turn out differently.
One is that Utah Republicans are unlikely to nominate a candidate as problematic as Roy Moore. In 2012, Moore won his race for chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama by only four points while Romney won the state by 22 points. And that was years before the Washington Post published credible allegations that Moore, while in his 30s, had improper sexual contact with teenage girls.
Moore was simply a bottom-of-the-barrel candidate, and Utah Republicans would have a hard time finding someone as problematic as him. The Republican candidate in Utah might still underperform the state’s baseline partisanship (Democrats are polling well and performing well in special elections), but a more generic Republican should be able to hold the seat.
Moreover, Romney has been polling well in that race. A November Utah Policy poll showed him winning 72 percent of the vote, and a December poll from the same firm showed Romney with a 69 percent approval rating. He also made it through a presidential campaign without a major scandal coming to light. If Romney runs and wins the primary, it’s not hard to imagine him winning the seat by a significant margin.
The basic math here is straightforward. Romney, a mainstream Republican who is probably the most famous Mormon politician in America today, would be an early favorite in conservative, heavily Mormon Utah. Moreover, Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the race as “Safe Republican” Cook calls it “Solid Republican” and FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten argued (using some similar evidence) that Hatch’s retirement is “unlikely to provide Democrats with much of an opportunity to win another Senate seat.”
As long as Republicans nominate someone who is differentiable from Trump (who underperformed in Utah and is still registering a lower approval rating than a more generic Republican might) and more or less scandal-free, they’ll likely start with a big advantage.
