A Biden-Voting Republican Could Pull Off A Shock Special Election Win In Utah
A Utah Republican who says she voted for President Joe Biden and doesn’t toe the party line on abortion is competing to represent Utah’s 2nd Congressional District in a little-noticed special election happening Tuesday — opening up the possibility of a wildcard member of the House GOP caucus.
The race could put former U.S. Senate candidate Becky Edwards on a glide path to becoming the only House Republican who says they didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2020. Edwards would be an extreme outlier in the GOP-controlled House, where Republicans are strongly aligned with the former president.
Edwards topped an early August poll of the three-person GOP primary field conducted by the Mormon Church-affiliated Deseret News and the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and released Monday, creating some national buzz around her campaign. It’s the only public survey of the race so far and showed nearly half of the respondents were undecided on whether to support Edwards, RNC committeeman Bruce Hough or attorney Celeste Maloy. The winner advances to a general election against Democratic state Sen. Kathleen Riebe.
Edwards is running to replace Republican Chris Stewart, who is leaving office this month in the middle of his sixth term due to his wife’s health issues. His resignation announcement in May set into motion a special election for a House seat extending from the southwestern corner of Utah north to Salt Lake City.
Since GOP gerrymandering eliminated Utah’s only competitive House seat in 2022, the contest to replace Stewart’s safe Republican seat had gone largely under the radar.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/becky-edwards-donald-trump_n_64f1edbce4b02f61505e9014