There are 11 Republican candidates vying to replace Mitt Romney in the Senate. There isn’t much public polling but the polls I’ve seen show Rep. John Curtis and Orrin Hatch’s son Brent as the front-runners. Brad Wilson, the former state House speaker, is also a contender. As of the end of the last quarter (Dec 31), most of the candidates hadn’t raised enough money to run competitive campaigns. The ones who had:
Brad Wilson- $3,524,917 (a self funder who gave his campaign $1.8 million)
John Curtis- $1,509,076
Trent Staggs- $787,196 (a self funder who gave his campaign $50,000)
MAGA world has coalesced around extremist Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs, who’s been endorsed by Kari Lake, Charlie Kirk, Kash Patel, Richard Grenell and other Mar-a-Lago characters. Plus the dumbest Senator anywhere in the U.S., Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville, in fact, was in Utah this week, campaigning for Staggs. In most states the kind of campaigning he did would not be welcomed by any candidate.
According to a Salt Lake Tribune report by Bryan Schott, “Tuberville had a stark warning for the approximately 100 Utah GOP delegates who crowded into a Bluffdale warehouse to hear him speak on Friday afternoon: Malevolent supernatural forces are working to undermine America. ‘I’ve traveled all over the country— all 50 states— I’ve been in good places and bad places. The one thing I saw, we are losing our kids to a satanic cult,’ Tuberville, who traveled to Utah to campaign for GOP U.S. Senate candidate Trent Staggs, warned. Brandishing an upside-down pocket Constitution, Tuberville said the 2024 election wasn’t Republican vs. Democrat but ‘anti-American vs. American. We’ve lost our moral values across the country. We’ve got to get back to the Constitution, and we have got to get back to the Bible. We’ve got to get God back in our country,’ Tuberville said. ‘There’s not one Democrat that can tell you they stand up for God.’”
Pretty over the top bullshit, right? Well… Schott reported that “Republican delegates ate it up as he careened from anti-transgender statements to discussion of immigration and chaos at the border to a prediction left-wing mobs are set to wreak chaos across the country this summer to help Joe Biden win reelection. Tuberville even went so far as to claim the federal government has been corrupted to go after conservatives instead of criminals, which was seemingly an indirect reference to the hundreds of Trump supporters who were charged after attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. ‘We’ve lost our Department of Justice. In most of the country, we don’t have a criminal justice system anymore. Nobody goes to jail, unless you’re an innocent person that really loves this country, then they’ll put you in jail,’ Tuberville said. ‘We have never overcome a cult like we’re dealing with right now.’”
The loudest boos from the GOP delegates on hand came when Tuberville and Staggs took swipes at Sen. Mitt Romney, who was the party’s presidential nominee just a dozen years ago.
“I’ve seen Mitt Romney make promises to Utahns that he didn’t deliver on,” Staggs said. “This is the choice you have before you. Do you want to replace Mitt Romney with Mitt Romney 2.0?”
During a brief interview with the Salt Lake Tribune following his speech, Tuberville doubled down when asked if his references to a satanic cult were bourne from political zeal.
“They’ve basically taken God out of everything that we’re doing. I don’t know any other way to express it other than it’s some kind of cult that they’re trying to push on our kids and all Americans,” Tubervill said. “We have got to get back to our moral values. If we can’t get back to that and let the Democrats continue to push this cult on us and take God away from our country, we’re going to have huge problems.”
…Staggs recently attended an event at Trump’s Mar a Lago resort in Florida, where he was praised by Roger Stone, whom Trump pardoned after Stone was convicted for lying to Congress as part of special counsel Robert Muller’s Russia investigation. In 2022, former Utah GOP congressional candidate Jason Preston hired Stone and several members of the far-right Proud Boys militia to work on his campaign. Preston is a supporter of Staggs’ campaign for Senate.
In addition to campaign events with Staggs on Friday, Tuberville will be the main attraction at a $6,600 per couple fundraiser for Staggs in Lehi on Saturday. After that, he will head to Arizona to campaign with Lake.
The Democrats aren’t fielding a serious candidate and none of the Republicans are moderates. Staggs is the outright fascist in the race but the others are all very conservative. Curtis, probably the most mainstream of the conservatives in the race, has been endorsed by the House Main Street Partnership. The last Democrat Utah sent to the Senate was Frank Moss in 1970, subsequently defeated for reelection by Orrin Hatch 1976. Utah voted for Republican candidates to be president in every election since 1960, when LBJ beat Barry Goldwater. Before that it was Harry Truman in 1948. Trump won 58.1% in 2020.