Utah Governor Spencer Cox: A Political Eulogy

Topic: Perspective

Yesterday, Utah populist right firebrand Phil Lyman knocked off incumbent “Republican” Spencer Cox in a vote amongst party delegates for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.  Unfortunately for Lyman (and the rest of us), Cox saw this repudiation coming from far off and managed to gather enough signatures to appear on the GOP primary ballot in a race to be decided June 25 by what Cox presumes are real Republicans, and not the so-called party extremists who sent him a not-so-subtle message to get lost.

I have met Lyman at a few election integrity events and have little doubt he understands the corruption of the Utah Republican mafia that gave us Willard “Mitt” Romney as a foil to the America First agenda in the U.S. Senate.  Lyman has built his following on notoriety following his battles with the federal government over the restricted use of a canyon in San Juan County, where he served as a commissioner.  He strikes the America First high notes of secure borders, ending corruption, and other supposedly radical ideas such as making the country work for the citizens first.

This article isn’t so much about Lyman as it is about Cox, who most onlookers feel is still the favorite to come out on top thanks to Utah’s purportedly moderate Republican voter base.  I may tend to agree with the forecasted outcome, but the voice of the Utah delegates yesterday suggests said moderation may be the result of Automatic Voter Registration and vote-by-mail, which is always accompanied by ballot harvesting, whether permitted or not.  Readers of this journal understand by now that the most surefire way to control the outcome of any election is to have access to a voter roll corrupted by fraudulent or duplicated entries and a mail-in system of voting that shotguns ballots to every entry on the roll.  Utah just so happens to be the one state out of eight mail-in-only states that votes Republican in presidential elections, although even those margins have dwindled in the past decade.

Cox was first elected in 2020’s corrupt quasi-election with a margin of victory of more than 32.6%, much higher than President Trump’s margin thanks to what appears to be substantial cheating in a state the 45^th President appears to have achieved what amounts to a full Republican vote share.  He says a lot of the standard Conservative, Inc., talking points that make him come across as entitled to the gratitude of his constituents, but takes little effort to hide his membership in the big club, better known as an organization that we ain’t in. Nothing highlights this point more than his recent commentary that Republicans are making a huge mistake by renominating Trump, and his belief that Nikki Haley, who couldn’t win a single race against Trump outside of Washington, D.C., without coordinating Democrats to cross over in one of the country’s smallest states (Vermont), would somehow vanquish Biden by Reagan-like margins, which would include wins in working-class states no Republican but Trump has won since the Cold War was still alive.  Cox had to hedge his commentary by predicting Trump would still win, but not without revealing his fealty to a group of do-nothings who prefer to message and fundraise while in the minority, where no real action can be expected and no real solutions can be delivered.

Cox, who virtue signals about having not voted for Trump in either 2016 or 2020, expressed his frustration with the Utah delegates over deafening boos, who, in turn, reflect a GOP voter base that elected Trump in 2016 and then generated one of the largest increases in net new votes for an incumbent in history (and made Trump the first incumbent to gain votes and “lose” since Grover Cleveland did so in 1888):