I am not going to pretend to understand Utah, Mormons, or the Church of Latter Day Saints, but I got an inkling from looking at the presidential campaign of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman that business comes before ideology with a lot of folks in the Beehive State. Yeah, Mormons are certainly socially conservative, but they have a practical streak, and they care a lot about the bottom line.
So, I am not surprised that many people in Utah are upset with Senator Mike Lee for his allegiance with Ted Cruz and his support for a government shutdown that shuttered Utah’s spectacular national parks.
To hear grievances with Lee’s no-compromise, no-apology governing style, just head to the executive floor of Zions Bank, founded by Mormon settler Brigham Young. Bank President A. Scott Anderson, who raised money for Lee three years ago, sat in his corner office this week harboring second thoughts.
“I think people admire him for sticking to his guns and principles, but I think there are growing frustrations,” Anderson said. “If things are to happen, you can’t just stick to your principles. You have to make things work. . . . You’ve got to be practical.”
Spencer Zwick, a Utah native and national finance chairman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, was more direct, calling Lee a “show horse” who “just wants to be a spectacle.”
“Business leaders that I talk to, many of whom supported him, would never support his reelection and in fact will work against him, myself included,” Zwick said.
Mike Lee was able to oust long-time incumbent Bob Bennett largely because the Republican nominee in Utah is determined at a lightly-attended state convention rather than in a primary where all Republicans are able to vote. It appears that there are enough people angry with Mike Lee’s performance in office that the party may change the way candidates are nominated to make it harder for mental cases to carry the day.
Establishment figures in Utah have long loathed the convention system and are launching a well-funded effort to change it. A bipartisan group including former governor Michael O. Leavitt (R), a George W. Bush Cabinet official and close Romney adviser, has launched Count My Vote, a ballot initiative to overhaul Utah’s nominating process. The group has raised more than $500,000, most from major GOP donors.
A shift to an open primary could hurt Lee, who supports the convention system because his most passionate supporters are the conservative activists who become delegates.
It appears that Mike Lee is too conservative for Utah, which is really saying something.
Actually this isn’t about how conservative he is – this just is a more-prominent-than-usual example of the point you’ve been making about the tensions between the pure teabaggers and the business leaders who support them.
Utah is a remarkably uniform state culturally. Mostly this is due to Mormon history, but also due to the fact that geography it’s all rugged semi-arid rocky mountains (all the other rocky mountain states have much more variety). Both of these factors lead to the state being more close-knit than usual for such a large territory, so that events in towns hundreds of miles away reasonate more than they would in other states.
For example, when the iconic Ruby’s hotel-restaurant-gas-station-RV park-tourist trap that sits strategically outside the only entrance to Bryce Canyon National Park suffered a massive financial hit due to the National Park shutdowns people hundreds of miles away in Salt Lake City were very aware of it. (You don’t see the same emotional connection in, for example, Denver to a shut down of Mesa Verde National Park 350 miles away near Mancos.)
(And if you haven’t seen Bryce or Mesa Verde yet, do so before you die. Both are extremely special places – and Ruby’s is a nice place to stay.)
So, add in the fact that the government shutdown hit a lot of parts of Utah really hard – because Utah sucks on the government teat even more than most of the rugged individualist red states – and you can see why the shutdown (which seems so neato to conservatives in theory) turned out to be highly unpopular in Utah.
What’s going on here is twofold. First, over the years wingnuts have talked themselves into believing the government does nothing and that all their tax dollars are wasted – and they are shocked when the extensive services that they unconsciously rely on are taken away due to their own anti-government actions.
Second, conservatives lack empathy unless it impacts them directly. They LOVE the idea of stranding distant New York liberals in difficult situations due to a government shutdown of their causing, but change their tune when it affects them.
It’s the same way Texans loved Rove and Delay when they were doing that shit in Washington … but many of them also admitted that they were very relieved to get those characters out of Texas because they were such pains locally.
Well just my personal experience. I had my vacation planned and was going to go to the National Parks in sourthern Utah. As it became more and more likely that the shutdown was going to occur, I realized there would not be a whole lot of other things to do in southern Utah if the parks were closed. Rather than run the risk of flying there and having nothing to do, I changed my plans.
My wife and I ended up going to San Francisco instead and even though the state of Utah stepped in to reopen the parks on their own dime, it was too late for me to change my plans again and ended up making an unintended political statement of spending my vacation dollars in a blue state rather than a red one.
Did you send a note to the Utah Department of Tourism, the offices of Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch, and a LTTE for some of the newspapers?
People on the left politically tend to view Mormons as indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christians. In fact the LDS church doesn’t even consider itself a Protestant church. Another important factoid is the emphasis in the Mormon community on education: if you check survey data, you’ll find that the fraction of Mormons with a college degree is much greater than in the general population. Bilingualism among Mormons is off the charts by US standards because so many Mormons serve as missionaries abroad.
If you live in the western US, as I do, it’s pretty difficult to go through life and not have Mormon neighbors or co-workers. Some of them are even liberal Democrats. I was stunned to discover that, frankly, because I had uncritically adopted all the silly stereotypes.
This is true. The western Colorado town that I spent half of my childhood in was 1/3rd Mormon so to me living with Mormons was a normal part of life. At the time (1970s) very few people cared whether you went to church, let alone what church you went to, so we didn’t think much about it. Only later after moving east did I get a sense of how the rest of the country perceived Mormons.
I could not possibly give a full description of all the ways in which Mormon culture differs from fundamentalist culture (and if I could it would take up a full book), but the two are far apart. As noted above, you don’t have to believe all of the right wing crap the elders spew to be a Mormon – basically as long as you don’t take action against the church you’re still a Mormon even as a non-practitioner (a “jack Mormon”) or non-believer.
I live in Crestone in the San Luis Valley. I have also lived in Norwood and Nucla CO. All in the 3rd CD. But I was raised in New Jersey. Where in western CO were you talking about being raised?
And we have land and good friends on the other side of the valley, near Blanca. waves
Cortez
perhaps, but this is still a group that votes overwhelmingly republican. Harry Reid may be a democrat, but he is an exception.
Harry Reid is from Searchlight, Nevada, not Utah. Nevada and Utah are not at all similar.
My experience with Utah is mostly limited to the Salt Lake area. I ski their every year (Snowbird/Alta) and have a few impressions. Most locals I meet are transplants who came to ski. There are definitely Mormon skiers but we never meet them. The locals we meet do stuff like have hot tubs, drink and have fun (skiers) and their neighbors do stuff like close the doors and windows and act grumpy.
My wife’s friend is a female law partner in Salt Lake and works with 200 mostly male lawyers who have conniptions that she is a working mom. She says that for all the education of the Mormon women, they are expected to bear 7 kids and stay home, leading to the highest prescription rate of Prozac in the nation.
The gist is the majority Mormon population based upon religious requirements is very strict (read conservative) and is easy prey for the teahaddist/theocratic pitch. That said they are definitely not allergic to money. 10% tithing and all the rest is part of the game. The LDS church is a huge corporate entity unto itself.
As Rachel pointed out in a segment, Lee forgot that a huge portion of Utah employment results from Federal Govt employment…check out the IRS branch in Utah for instance; and so it wasn’t just the business sector that was hit hard but a groundswell from Fed’l employees furloughed during shutdown.
I forgot about the IRS branch – but a very large number of us in the west mail our tax returns to Utah.
You are confusing conservative with bat shit nuts. Even thought those things overlap constantly, they are technically not the same.
the largest employer in the State of Utah is the federal government.
take it for what it is
I keep wondering if the moderate vs. teahadist split in the Republican party will start to show stronger geographical trends. The mountain states, while staying Republican, seem to have leaned a bit more to moderate Republican sentiment than the southern states.
( http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/17/1248179/-There-are-three-U-S-parties-now-with-maps )
Also, if Mike Lee is feeling pressure, the 3 congressional reps from Utah that voted for shutdown and default will also likely catch some heat in 2014.
The southern states have that flag…you know….the one they have been rallying around since 1861. I have no idea how you move the south out of the 19th century.
Lost in most of this thread is that while the LDS runs Utah, both culturally and business-wise, it is a state that (like Texas) is changing pretty quickly demographically. Even though Mormon families have comparatively high birth rates compared to the rest of the US, it hasn’t come close to matching the number of people moving from other states, especially California, to the Salt Lake area and Wasatch Front. And the non-white (especially Latino) population is rising quickly, too.
Small-town Utah is as reactionary as ever, but almost all the state’s population is in the five county, 90 mile stretch from Logan to Spanish Fork. And Salt Lake City itself has been Democratic for a while – Rocky Anderson (who ran an independent presidential campaign last year from somewhere to the left of Ralph Nader) was a popular SLC mayor last decade. Not only is the LDS not a monolith politically, but neither is Utah, stereotypes notwithstanding.
Did Spencer Zwick just call Mike Lee “Rafalca”? Ha!