Gov. Cox engaged with critics to heal Utah GOP rifts, beginning with Trump

Late Tuesday night Utah Gov. Spencer Cox expressed hope that former President Donald Trump’s reelection victory would provide an opportunity to unify the Republican Party.
Cox, a longtime Trump skeptic, had extended his support to Trump days after July’s failed assassination attempt in a bid to encourage a more conciliatory approach to Trump’s politics.
By reaching out to Trump, Cox said he aimed to continue to spread Utah’s brand of civil discourse by bridging divides within the GOP.
But Trump wasn’t the only Republican critic Cox reached out to in recent months. In an interview with the Deseret News on Wednesday, Cox said his priority is to make the same appeal he did to Trump to Utah Republicans here at home.
“We will work hard to to unite the party over the next four years and to make sure that conservatives and the values that have made Utah so special for so long will continue to be the values of Utah,” Cox said.
Around the same time Cox joined Trump in a visit to Arlington National Cemetery in August, Cox determined he would embark on a listening tour to sit down with some of his fiercest detractors and listen to their concerns.
Cox had just emerged from a bruising primary election, which he won by a smaller margin than past incumbent governors, that showcased what appeared like two different visions for Beehive State Republicans.
Cox’s chief Republican challenger, state Rep. Phil Lyman, who won the support of a two-thirds majority of state delegates at the April party convention, alleged Cox was out of touch with conservatives on hot-button issues like immigration and transgender participation in sports.
The Cox campaign, in turn, labeled some of Lyman’s supporters as “extreme right-wing delegates” in a fundraising email and focused on Cox’s support of GOP Legislation that cut taxes, restricted abortion and banned diversity, equity and inclusion in schools.
Following the primary, Cox began scheduling meetings with disgruntled Republicans in small groups of around a dozen individuals, or in one-on-one sessions — including with a handful of Lyman’s most vocal advocates — and took responsibility for some of the lack of understanding between himself and Lyman’s supporters as he attempted to find common ground.
While Lyman’s campaign was unusual for Utah in terms of its aggression and spurious claims of electoral fraud, Cox found that the two sides of the Utah Republican Party are really not so far apart. And he’s determined to prove it during his next administration.
Utah’s governor has developed a national reputation based on his “Disagree Better” initiative which seeks to lower the political temperature by improving the quality of political dialogue. But Cox says one of the “lessons” he learned from the primary is that he may have neglected talking with dissidents in his own party.
“I worked really hard to try to bridge some of those divides between the right and the left, and that’s certainly been my focus, and I’ve not spent as much time as I probably should have on the divides between the right and the right,” Cox said.
Before the primary election, Gunnar Thorderson, a conservative activist on the GOP’s State Central Committee, said he perceived Cox as Democrat in Republican clothing, more preoccupied with “appeasing the left,” with his support of some COVID-19 policies and use of his pronouns in a viral video, than “advancing conservative interests.”
But following Cox’s unexpected endorsement of Trump, which Thorderson called an “olive branch” to Trump, Thorderson penned his own letter to Cox, describing delegates’ feeling of dismissal after the state GOP convention and his desire to “talk out our differences.” To Thorderson’s surprise, Cox agreed.
In one of many such meetings Cox subsequently hosted, Thorderson said he and a group of Lyman fans, Cox skeptics and party activists vented their anger directly to the governor of Utah. What followed wasn’t perfect agreement, but Thorderson said he came away with a sense that Cox respected his views and a realization that he sometimes had judged Cox unfairly.
“I’m sure we have tons of disagreements still,” Thunderson said. “But the key difference is that he’s now willing to listen, and he’s willing to work with Trump to find that common ground and to really create a platform or an agenda moving forward that we can coalesce behind.”
At convention and in the primary, Thorderson voted for Lyman. In the general election, Thorderson cast his ballot for Cox, despite Lyman continuing his campaign as a write-in candidate. As of Wednesday evening, Cox had won reelection with 55.8% of the vote, compared to the 30.5% received by Democratic candidate state Rep. Brian King and the 8.9% received by Lyman.
One host of Cox’s meetings was Emilie Brown, the wife of Utah’s attorney general-elect Derek Brown, who describes herself as a Cox supporter. Those invited to attend included state delegates and primary voters who supported Lyman. Brown described them as “true conservatives” who had sincere — if occasionally “hostile” — questions for Cox and were willing to put aside differences to achieve shared goals.
The intimate format allowed Cox to understand these voters’ concerns, at times offer an apology and correct the record when needed, Brown said. Instead of turning into shouting matches, attendees in many cases walked away ready to cast their general election vote for Cox, according to Brown.
But the most impressive piece to Brown was that a sitting governor would take the time to have difficult conversations with “rank-and-file” voters.
“There’s a humanness that I saw in Spencer Cox, and an authentic commitment to really understand the people of Utah. It took incredible humility to sit and have people criticize him to his face,” Brown said. “I went away with even more respect than I already had for the governor, watching him sit down with his critics and really hear their concerns. To me, that’s what leadership looks like.”