John Curtis (bio here) is the 2024 GOP nominee for the Utah Senate seat being vacated by Mitt Romney.
Curtis is a boring man. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a management degree, worked in business, got tired of losing as a Democrat in a deep-red state so became a Republican, and was elected mayor of Provo, Utah, then to Congress. As you’d expect of a Mormon, he has 6 children, 14 grandchildren, and his hobby is collecting socks.
His Democratic opponent, who has ZERO chance of winning, has climbed Mt. Everest. She’s a professional skier and climber. Now that’s exciting! She has an anthropology degree from the University of Utah, where her parents are doctors, and advocates for the environment. Her name is Caroline Gleich (bio here; photo at bottom).
She will NOT be a U.S. Senator from Utah. That state hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1970. Its other GOP senator, Mike Lee, is a screwball (see post here) who doesn’t believe in democracy (see post here), but the last Democrat to run against him got 27% of the votes. Do you see what she’s up against?
So why bother? The Democrats didn’t bother the last time Lee ran for re-election. They ran someone against Romney in 2018; she got less than 31% of the votes.
Gleich is also an Instagram influencer with 220,000 followers, most of whom probably don’t live in Utah. Vox says (here) she took a training course devoted to helping women run for public offices, then she was recruited to run against Curtis. She hesitated at first, but decided to step up. Here’s why:
“Sometimes even if they’re going to lose, having a candidate to demonstrate to the opposition party that they also have to listen to their preferences [is important],” explains Juliet Carlisle, a political science scholar at the University of Utah. “The influence of a young Democratic candidate can make [Curtis] aware of what the vibe in Utah politics is among the younger generation.”
Yeah, well, good luck with that; Republicans aren’t famous for listening to people who disagree with them, which these days is everybody who isn’t a diehard Trumper. Actually, Curtis isn’t as bad as many of them, but he’s a pro-fossil fuels guy, and not the greatest friend of public lands, which probably is part of Gleich’s motivation for running against him even though she won’t win.
Vox points out that influencers like Gleich are increasingly playing a role in politics, although usually a supporting one, not as candidates. She’s apparently the first. It’s fair to ask whether content creators whose experience is branding and selling, while very useful to political campaigns, are the best people to make laws and shape national policies. Shouldn’t that be done by people with experience in governing?
Gleich, by the way, doesn’t agree with that; she says, “I absolutely do think that America would be better served if we had more content creators in office.”
Trump was an influencer of sorts, although TV was his medium, not social media. He got elected president, with no prior governing experience, and you know how that turned out. We saw he’s no good at governing. In fact, he’s not much good at anything; certainly not at marriage, and he cheats at golf too (see story here).
I’m not saying Gleich wouldn’t be a better senator than Curtis. She just won’t be a senator, that’s all. But her Senate campaign will raise her profile, and possibly increase her influence, and given who she is, and what she believes, that isn’t a bad thing. That alone probably makes it worth the effort.
