A Political Kamikaze Mission

Then came the mike drop: “I told you last time I ran that Donald Trump was going to win, and you called me ‘stupid.’ Well, you’re stupid!”

And with that, Livingston, a perennial thorn-in-the-side candidate but never an officeholder, walked off stage.

Livingston’s speech elicited scattered boos and laughter. But mostly it was ignored, though maybe its message shouldn’t be. The day’s events for Utah Democrats began with a Bronx assemblyman’s rousing call to resist America’s “racist, sexist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, homophobic, demagogue” president and ended with the nomination of four candidates for federal office whose chances of electoral success are . . . not great.

Utah has not gone for a Democrat for president, senator, or governor in 50, 40, and 33 years, respectively. The party’s last congressman, Blue Dog Jim Matheson, departed the House in 2015.

Two years ago, the party convention’s choices for the Senate race were family therapist Jonathan Swinton and transgender grocery store cashier Misty Snow. Snow won the primary handily after Swinton was outed for having once called himself a “conservative Democrat” and “pro-life.” Snow lost to incumbent Republican Mike Lee by 41 points.

In February former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney announced his candidacy for the Senate seat being vacated by Orrin Hatch. At the Utah Republican convention in April, Romney failed to win enough votes to avoid a primary contest. But he remains the heavy favorite to claim the seat.

The interesting question raised at Utah’s Democratic convention is this: What motivates people to launch campaigns they are almost certain to lose? Is it hubris, delusion, naïveté or something more edifying, like hope?

For a gadfly like Livingston, it’s simply to make a point. Over dinner at a dive restaurant near his home in Bountiful, a few miles north of Salt Lake City, Livingston estimated that he’s run 15 races over 30 years, winning just 1, a primary in which he ran unopposed. A substitute teacher on “Mormon welfare,” Livingston said he would not have run if election officials hadn’t waived the $1,355 filing fee.

For Mitchell Vice, another long-shot Democratic candidate for Senate, the motivation to run came from his desire “to take the progressive message to the national stage.”

I met Vice at a candidate-training event in December. Vice said he shed his cynicism about politics while witnessing Bernie Sanders’s improbable presidential campaign unfold. Suddenly, Vice said, “I realized there’s power in getting involved.”

At the time, Hatch was weighing retirement and Romney was considering a run to replace him. So I asked Vice the obvious question: Which one of these political titans would you rather face?

“Romney,” he answered after a brief pause. “Because like Mitt, I served as a missionary in France and am a high priest in the LDS church. I’m 6′1″ and have a great head of hair with just the right amount of gray.”

Unlike Romney, Vice was a political novice with no money, few contacts, and almost no name recognition. Worse, his Sanders-like message of a $15 minimum wage, debt-free college, and Medicare for all seemed better suited to his native Los Angeles than to conservative Utah.

Romney, meanwhile, is arguably Utah’s most popular politician, the savior of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games and the man whom Governor Gary Herbert has called the state’s “favorite adopted son.” Popular former Salt Lake City mayor Ted Wilson has referred to Romney as “a guy who’s almost a god in Utah politics.”

Wilson, by the way, is a Democrat and father of Salt Lake County councilwoman Jenny Wilson, Romney’s Democratic opponent this fall.

When Wilson declared her candidacy last July, she did so expecting to face Hatch. When I met her for lunch in downtown Salt Lake City a few days after the Democratic convention, I asked her whether she would have preferred to run against Hatch.

“Oh yeah, oh yes,” she said without hesitation. “It would have been easier to overcome the Republican nature of the state had it been a wounded incumbent.” The Cook Political Report wrote that Hatch’s retirement made the “solid Republican” seat even safer.

Vice projected optimism in the run-up to the April 28 convention. In a planning session at his campaign headquarters two days before, Vice and his all-volunteer campaign staff—inevitably dubbed “the Vice Squad”—discussed their convention strategy and critiqued the candidate’s speech. “I can’t cry on stage,” Vice said after receiving some encouraging feedback from the group. “I have to be a badass.”

Vice was irked by the “Rolodex test” national Democrats had put him through. They informed him that he shouldn’t expect help unless he raised $250,000 for the party. “My dad’s a retired Teamster, and I’m paying rent,” he said by way of explaining the impossibility of raising that much money.

The national party needn’t have been concerned. Vice won just 19 percent of the convention vote to Wilson’s 81 percent, which may be the apex of her fortunes this year.

A February UtahPolicy.com poll showed Romney leading Wilson 60 percent to 14 percent. Romney led Wilson even among voters identifying as “somewhat liberal.” Wilson’s strategy is to portray Romney as a carpetbagger and a flip-flopper, a “political opportunist” who would “rubber stamp” President Trump’s agenda.

Calling herself a “moderate Democrat,” Wilson hopes her Utah roots will win over some Republicans, perhaps even some Trump voters who might appreciate her frankness. Unlike Romney, she said, “I’m not all over the map [on issues]. I don’t ping-pong around and never have. Ultimately it’s a matter of trust.”

Utah political experts I consulted universally expect Romney to cruise to victory. “He won’t run a bad campaign,” said Matthew Burbank, a political science professor at the University of Utah. “He might run a boring campaign but not a bad one.”

“Outside of an act of God that incapacitates Mitt Romney, [Wilson] has no shot,” said Michael Barber, who teaches politics at Brigham Young University. “And even then, I think they would elect him posthumously.”

If it seems like Wilson is on a political kamikaze mission, it’s one she has embarked upon with her eyes wide open and directed slightly toward the horizon. Professional that she is, Wilson has a Plan B. Democratic Salt Lake County mayor Ben McAdams is polling within the margin of error against incumbent Republican Mia Love in Utah’s Fourth Congressional District race. If McAdams wins, the state’s Democratic delegates would pick a successor to serve out the remaining two years of his term.

In that case, Wilson says flatly, “I would seek the support of my party to take his position of mayor. ”

“I’m running to win,” she says. “But I’m also not naïve.”