Did Utah Republicans just give Democrats a chance to flip two House seats?
If the legislature's new map takes effect, Utah will go from zero competitive seats to as many as two. But the GOP has reason to believe it can hold off Democrats.
🍺 What’s on tap 🚰
Today’s newsletter features:
Opening Bell: Must-read items about elections and politics.
The Frontrunner: We continue our coverage of mid-decade redistricting with a look at Utah. There, the Republican-controlled legislature just drew a new congressional map with two seats that Democrats could target in the 2026 midterms.
DDHQ Quarterly Report: An excerpt on educational polarization from Decision Desk HQ’s September 2025 quarterly report.
Around the Corner: Upcoming elections we’re tracking at DDHQ.
🔔 Opening Bell 🐏
Must-read items about elections and politics.
On Tuesday, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is expected to announce a bid for the U.S. Senate against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, according to Axios. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has worked to recruit Mills to give Democrats an A-tier candidate in one of the key 2026 Senate races. However, some progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, are backing oyster farmer Graham Platner in what could become one of the more interesting establishment-progressive showdowns in a Democratic primary next year.
Late last week, Vice President JD Vance made another visit to Indiana to meet with Republican leaders and press for the state to pursue mid-decade redistricting. The visit came on the heels of a report from Politico that top GOP officials in Indiana had warned the White House that efforts to redistrict the state had stalled.
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📊 The Frontrunner 📈
Did Utah Republicans just give Democrats a chance to flip two House seats?
Quick summary:
Under the newly-passed lines, Utah would have two light-red seats that Democrats could target in the midterm elections. This would give Democrats a shot at winning two Utah congressional seats for the first time since 1992.
But this map gives Republicans a better chance of holding onto all four seats than any of the alternative maps they considered. Plus, the GOP brand has been stronger than Trump in downballot races in Utah.
While the map still faces judicial approval, parties and politicians are already making plans based on its boundaries. And there could be some real political musical chairs over which district each House Republican incumbent contests.
In 2018, Democrat Ben McAdams won an extremely close race to flip Utah’s 4th Congressional District. McAdams then lost reelection by 1 percentage point in 2020. Since then, no Democrat has won a U.S. House seat in Utah.
But that could change in 2026. Last week, Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a new congressional map in response to a state court ruling that the state’s 2021-22 redistricting process and the resulting map impermissibly disregarded Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering initiative passed by Utah voters in 2018. Under the old lines, Utah had zero competitive seats, all of which were firmly Republican red. But under the legislature’s new lines, Utah would have two light-red seats that Democrats could target in the midterm elections.
The new map must still receive court approval, but its prospective boundaries would make Utah a state to watch in 2026. Democrats will hope the lines turn into a “dummymander” — a map drawn by one party that backfires and helps the other — and give them a chance to flip not just one seat but two. However, Utah Republicans clearly chose this plan from the five proposals they drew because it gives the GOP a better shot at retaining all four of Utah’s seats than any of the alternatives. Plus, Republicans are betting that stronger GOP downballot voting strength will make it harder for Democrats to actually flip either competitive seat next year.
Below, I dive into the new map’s features, how the lines affect the parties’ chances of winning each seat, and what the plan could mean for the state’s four GOP incumbents.
From zero competitive seats to two
The provisional new map dramatically alters the competitiveness of Utah’s congressional elections. Following the 2020 census, the GOP-drawn redistricting plan split Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County across all four Utah districts, which created four safe Republican districts. Utah’s 3rd District, the least GOP-leaning seat in the 2024 election, voted for President Donald Trump by 19 points. That’s far less competitive than the most unfavorable House seat won by either party last year: Maine’s 2nd District, which Democratic Rep. Jared Golden won even as Trump carried the seat by 9 points, according to data from The Downballot.
But the redraw creates two districts that Trump carried by fewer than 7 points in 2024. To better comply with the court’s order, Republican cartographers split Salt Lake County between only two districts. Correspondingly, those two seats are now far less red because each district population includes more voters from the county that was responsible for roughly half of then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s votes in Utah.1 Under the new lines, the 3rd District voted for Trump by about 2 points, while the 2nd District supported him by just under that 7-point threshold.
The new 3rd District becomes nearly a 50-50 seat based on the 2024 presidential vote, and it retains around 60% of the population in the current 3rd. Importantly, the new version takes in Salt Lake City, the state’s bluest locality of any size (Harris won 76% there), which the overturned map split between two districts. Meanwhile, the 2nd District sees substantial changes, retaining only about one-third of its current population. The new 2nd District is more compact: It includes only part of Salt Lake County (about 60% of its population) and Tooele County to the west, whereas the present version extends down to the state’s southern border.
While Democrats would not be default favorites in either seat, these districts give Democrats their best chance of winning two House seats in Utah for the first time since the 1992 election.2 Just consider McAdams’s situation in 2020 when he was Utah’s last Democratic House member. Although McAdams narrowly lost in the then-4th District, Trump carried that seat by slightly more than 9 points at the top of the ticket. That placed the old 4th District almost 14 points to the right of the country in 2020 (Trump lost the national popular vote by about 4.5 points). Yet the new 3rd and 2nd districts would only sit about 1 point and 5 points to the right of the 2024 national vote margin (Trump +1.5), respectively, leaving Utah with two seats that are bluer than McAdams’s old seat.
Republicans aim to keep all four seats
Why did the GOP choose a map that might give Democrats an opportunity to win not just one seat, but two? Republican legislators selected this option because it gave them a better chance of holding onto all four seats than any of the alternative maps they considered. Of the five proposals put forth by Republicans on Utah’s Legislative Redistricting Committee, this was the only one that did not include a seat that Harris carried.
The GOP’s chosen lines attempt to balance the party’s interest in complying with the court order and maximizing the number of districts it can carry next November. Any of the other options considered by the legislature would have created a somewhat bluer seat. Republicans opted to risk losing two seats in a very bad cycle for their party rather than risk making it more likely than not that they would lose a quarter of the state’s House delegation.
Moreover, Utah Republicans are betting that their party is stronger than the 2024 presidential numbers might indicate. After all, Trump performed much worse than GOP candidates seeking other offices in Utah. The Republicans who ran for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and state Auditor all carried the two competitive seats by at least 12 points, according to data from Dave’s Redistricting App, whereas Trump only carried them by low-to-mid single-digit margins.3
This speaks to the relative weakness of Trump and the MAGA brand in Utah compared to more traditional forms of Republicanism. While conservative, the state’s majority-Mormon population has never held as favorable a view of Trump as people in other red states. Recall that Trump won Utah with just 45% of the vote in 2016 while independent Evan McMullin’s “NeverTrump” campaign garnered 21% (Hillary Clinton won 27%). In 2022, hard-right GOP Sen. Mike Lee only won reelection 53%-43% over McMullin, who ran as an independent with an endorsement from Utah Democrats. Notably, McMullin would have carried both the new 2nd and 3rd districts.
The Republican legislature also risked passing this map because of its simultaneous effort to add more constraints to the redistricting rules surrounding Proposition 4. That proposition, which provided the basis for the ruling that overturned the current map, called for district lines to meet certain standards, “including measures of partisan symmetry” that show they do not disproportionately favor one party. But along with the new map, the legislature also passed legislation that created a series of tests for whether a map passes that “partisan symmetry” criterion. Critics have argued that the tests would allow for more GOP-leaning maps than other criteria, but Republicans hope this move will give the legislature greater latitude in redistricting and constrain Utah’s 3rd District Court as it considers whether to approve the new lines.
Still, if the state court rejects the new map, Utah could end up with lines that all but guarantee a Democratic pickup. The plaintiffs in the redistricting case have asked the court to block the legislature’s plan and consider two alternate proposals, each of which includes a fairly blue seat. The first plan contains a Salt Lake City-based seat that would have voted for Harris by nearly 24 points. The second is based on the legislature’s plan but, in the words of the plaintiffs, “with changes made to correct its failures to conform to Proposition 4’s requirements.” It moves Salt Lake City and the cities around it into the 2nd District, which as a result would have backed Harris by 14 points. The court might also offer a proposal if it rejects the legislature’s map.
Who might run where
While some uncertainty hangs over the implementation of the legislature’s map, the parties and their politicians are already making plans based on its boundaries. First and foremost, the state’s four Republican incumbents have to decide what districts to run in, which is only an absolutely straightforward choice for one of them. Rep. Blake Moore, who represents the 1st District in the northern part of Utah, will almost certainly run in the new 1st District, which has 84% of his current seat’s population. For the other three, there could be some real political musical chairs over which district to contest in the weeks and months ahead.
Rep. Celeste Maloy, the present occupant of the state’s 2nd District, faces the most dire situation under the new lines. Because the new map splits the Salt Lake-area part of her seat from the southern part, no new district has more than 36% of her current seat’s population. Perhaps most notably, Maloy’s home turf in southwestern Utah is excised from the new 2nd District and placed in the new 4th District.
However, that doesn’t mean Maloy would necessarily want to run in the 4th, which will be far and away the most conservative seat in the state (Trump +48). After winning a special election in 2023, Maloy barely won renomination in 2024 against a more conservative opponent. As noted by J. Miles Coleman at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Maloy actually did very poorly in Washington County (where she once served as deputy county attorney) and only survived thanks to a far stronger showing in the Salt Lake area. That might push her to run in the new 2nd District, even though it lacks her original base of support.
But Maloy might then find herself in a primary matchup against Rep. Burgess Owens, whose present 4th District overlaps with more of the new 2nd District (62%). However, Owens arguably has a more conservative reputation than Maloy, and the new 2nd will be about a Trump +7 seat, meaning the GOP nominee will likely face some general election competition. That might prompt Owens to consider running in the new dark red 4th District, which has 31% of his current constituents.
The other Republican incumbent, Rep. Mike Kennedy, also has at least some uncertainty. While 62% of his current territory in the outgoing 3rd District is also in the new 3rd District (including his home in Alpine, Utah), Kennedy may be a poor fit for the most competitive seat (Trump +2) on the new map. That’s because, 10 months into his first term, he has a voting record that is to the right of more than 90% of all House Republicans, according to data from VoteView. Kennedy also made a splash back in 2018 when he ran against Mitt Romney in the GOP nomination race for U.S. Senate. Kennedy defeated Romney at the state party convention, which is always very conservative, but lost badly in the ensuing primary. Kennedy might prefer the makeup of the redder 4th District, which will have 32% of his current seat’s population.
Lastly, a quick word about the biggest Democratic name: McAdams. The former congressman reportedly plans to seek a return to Congress, per Politico, although it’s not clear in which of the two Salt Lake-area seats he would run. The more competitive seat, the new 3rd, would make sense as it’s slightly less red and includes his original home base of Salt Lake City, which he represented in the state legislature. However, most of the population of his old House seat is actually in the new 2nd District (nearly 80%), the somewhat redder of the two competitive seats. As the former Salt Lake County mayor (not a typo, the title for the county executive is mayor), McAdams is a familiar name across the region, so he would have his pick of the seats if he runs.
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📋 DDHQ Quarterly Report 📉
Excerpt from Decision Desk HQ’s September 2025 quarterly report, produced by the DDHQ Data Science team:
The data on educational polarization continues to show fault lines coming out of the 2024 elections.
Among white voters, this divide has become stark: the single most predictive factor in determining how white voters in a given precinct will cast their ballots is the percentage of residents holding bachelor’s degrees. This educational sorting has created two distinct political worlds, with college-educated white communities increasingly Democratic and non-college white areas becoming reliably Republican.
The broader national picture reveals an even more dramatic trend. When examining all voters regardless of race, educational polarization is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. For years, the “diploma divide” appeared less pronounced in national elections because Democrats maintained strong support among lower-educated nonwhite voters, which helped mask the growing educational split. That Democratic advantage, however, has been steadily eroding.
Voters in lower-education areas across all racial groups shifted around 10 points towards Trump in 2024, with the steepest declines occurring in precincts where fewer than 15% of residents hold bachelor’s degrees. This shift represents a fundamental realignment of the Democratic coalition, as the party becomes increasingly dependent on college-educated voters while simultaneously hemorrhaging support in working-class communities of all backgrounds.
You can read more about educational polarization and other big electoral topics in DDHQ’s September 2025 quarterly report here.
📆 Around the Corner 📌
November 4, 2025
Election Day 2025
December 2, 2025
TN-07 Special Election
Harris won about 274,000 votes in Salt County County, carrying it 53%-43%, while garnering almost 563,000 statewide.
In 1992, Democrats won two of the state’s three U.S. House seats. However, they were aided by the fact that votes for president and House (and other downballot races) were not as closely aligned as they are today in our more polarized political era.
I chose the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Auditor races for downballot analysis because they had relatively few third-party votes (less than 8% in each district), and included two open-seat races (Senate and Auditor) and the election for the same office (House). By comparison, minor candidates won at least 14% in Utah’s 2024 races for Governor and Attorney General, and an incumbent ran in the race for Treasurer.