• AZ-01: GOP Rep. David Schweikert and his allies reached a $50,000 settlement this week with wealthy businessman Elijah Norton over ads they ran during the 2022 primary falsely implying that Norton is gay. Schweikert turned back Norton 44-33 before winning a tight general election a few months later.
The congressman this year faces intra-party opposition from two underfunded intra-party foes, while six Democrats are competing to take him on in a constituency that Joe Biden carried 50-49 in 2020.
• AZ-08: American Principles Project, a conservative group that's aired transphobic ads in multiple races, has publicized an internal poll from Spry Strategies that shows venture capitalist Blake Masters outpacing Trump-backed attorney Abe Hamadeh 26-16 in the July 30 Republican primary. A 37% plurality are undecided, while none of the other candidates take more than 9%.
The sponsor group made it clear where its rooting interest lies, with an APP official tweeting that its survey has Masters, who lost a bid for Senate in 2022, "up ten in his congressional race against some random grifter… LFG!" Hamadeh, the "random grifter" in question, lost a tight race for attorney general last cycle to Democrat Kris Mayes, a defeat he's refused to accept.
• UT-Gov: State Rep. Phil Lyman announced Monday evening that he would ask the Utah Supreme Court to prevent election officials from booting his running mate, former Trump administration official Layne Bangerter, from the June 25 GOP primary ballot after an outside adviser to Lt Gov. Deidre Henderson concluded that Bangerter did not meet the state's residency requirements. The Lyman-Bangerter ticket is waging an uphill battle to deny renomination to Gov. Spencer Cox and Henderson.
The state constitution says that candidates for both governor and lieutenant governor must have been Utah residents "for five years next preceding the election." Bangerter grew up in Utah but moved away in 1990 and says he did not return until 2021. During the intervening time, Bangerter led Donald Trump's 2016 campaign in Idaho and mulled a bid for the U.S. House there the following year.
Bangerter dismissed concerns about his eligibility after Lyman announced him as his running mate on Saturday. (Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run together as a ticket in both the primary and general elections.)
"I was raised here," he told the Salt Lake Tribune, adding that he'd spent "30 years of my life" in the state. "If I don't meet the requirements to hold office, then Mitt Romney didn't, either."
Bangerter, though, didn't seem to know or care that the rules that allowed the former Massachusetts governor to claim a Utah Senate seat in 2018 four years after changing his voter registration are different from the ones he's subject to. Utah, according to Ballotpedia, is one of 44 states that imposes a residency requirement on candidates for governor, which range from one year to 10 years (the six that don't are Connecticut, Kansas, Ohio, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin).
The Tribune notes that this law hurt Beehive State Democrats in 2000 when their favored candidate for governor, Gregg Lassen, had to end his campaign because he'd only moved to Utah in 1997. (Their eventual nominee, Bill Orton, ultimately lost to GOP Gov. Mike Leavitt 56-42.)
Requirements for lieutenant governors are similar, since, after all, the number two might have to step into the number-one position at any time—including on Inauguration Day. The only state residency requirements set in the U.S. Constitution, by contrast, simply mandate that members of Congress must be "an Inhabitant" of their state when they're selected.
Henderson, who as lieutenant governor is charged with overseeing state elections, previously tapped former Lt. Gov. Greg Bell to serve as an independent adviser so that she could "sequester[] herself from questions" concerning her own race. Bell determined in his report that Bangerter's previous decades of Utah residency can't help him overcome the five-year requirement.
Bell noted that Bangerter voted in Idaho as recently as 2020 and cited a clause in Utah law saying that "if an individual leaves the state … and votes or registers in another state, the individual is no longer a resident of the state the individual left." Lyman and Bangerter disagreed, unsurprisingly, and filed a suit in state court arguing that Bangerter's many prior years as a Utah resident do in fact make him eligible for Henderson's job, despite Bell's conclusions.
Lyman, a far-right election conspiracy theorist, was already in for a difficult battle against Cox even before these new struggles. A mid-April survey conducted by Noble Predictive Insights, a firm that sometimes polls for conservative clients, showed Cox at 51% while Lyman took a mere 4%.
That survey was finished about a week and a half before Lyman walloped Cox 68-32 at Saturday's state GOP convention, but observers were quick to note that far-right delegates tend to be far more hostile to establishment candidates than primary voters.
Henderson's certainly hoping that convention attendees aren't representative of the primary electorate.
"I'm mortified by the vulgarity and viciousness my young nieces were exposed to by another gubernatorial campaign's supporters," she posted over the weekend. One local news editor had a similar reaction.
"[T]he anger and the animosity and I think just flat-out contempt that has shown itself was really disturbing," Holly Richardson of the news site Utah Policy told KSL NewsRadio. "So not only did the lieutenant governor's family have a very unfortunate incident, there were fists thrown."