One day after Gov. Spencer Cox concluded his national “Disagree Better” initiative, the nation was shocked by a gunman taking aim at Donald Trump.
The assassination attempt against the former president sparked calls for pundits and politicians to stop labeling each other and to lower the temperature of their political rhetoric.
However, Cox’s effort over the past year to push a similar message — of having real debates without degrading your opponents — has revealed the difficulty of encouraging respect amid social media-driven hyperpartisanship. In fact, Cox’s “Disagree Better” campaign became one of the central targets during the governor’s contentious primary race against state Rep. Phil Lyman.
Cox secured the nomination of the Utah Republican Party for the second time on June 25, following a four-year term noted for legislative action on housing, water, abortion and taxes. But his win over Lyman, who won the support of delegates at the GOP state convention in April, may have reflected the political costs of championing healthy political discourse over culture war victories.
“We learned that there are lots of incentives lined up against this,” Cox told the Deseret News about “Disagree Better” during last week’s National Governors Association meeting. “But I think this is the message that matters.”
A shifting political climate
The message of the Lyman campaign focused heavily on criticisms of Cox for his “Disagree Better” approach to politics. Lyman has referenced the initiative at least 40 times on his X account so far this year, arguing that civility and compromise can be obstacles to taking a firm stance on issues like transgender participation in sports and detaining migrants who enter the country illegally.
By the time election results were finalized, Lyman trailed Cox by about 9% — a narrower winning margin than that of recent Utah governors. In 2016, Cox’s predecessor, Gary Herbert, defeated a well-funded primary attack from his right by more than 43 percentage points.
While some out-of-state observers were surprised that Cox won at all as one of the seemingly few Republican leaders who has not endorsed Donald Trump’s brand of politics, some local politicos saw the results as indicative of the opposite trend among Utah’s GOP electorate.
“I attribute it mostly to the national political climate,” said Utah political strategist Marty Carpenter, who directed Herbert’s 2016 campaign. “But a 9-point victory is hardly a close race by most standards.”
In an interview with the Deseret News, Herbert said “Disagree Better” has made Cox stand out on the national stage but it may not have helped him in the current electoral environment.
The definition of “conservative” has shifted in recent years from Ronald Reagan’s “big tent” of free market and limited government principles to the policies and tone of Donald Trump, Herbert said, which makes it more acceptable to attack fellow Republicans who aren’t “more pure.”
“With how we treat each other it sounds like we are enemies,” Herbert said.
Cox’s emphasis on bringing civility back to conservatism is laudable, Herbert said. But he worries that what “Disagree Better” may have failed to do in this election is respond to what Herbert called “half truths, outright lies (and) false misrepresentations” that chipped away at the incumbent’s support.
“There’s just so much stuff out there that’s negative about Spencer that kind of overshadowed a lot of the good things that he had done, and possibly hurt him in connecting with the electorate,” Herbert said.
The most common concern Herbert heard was about a video of Cox sharing his preferred pronouns of “he, him and his” in 2021. Cox made the statement in response to a high school student who first shared her pronouns in a virtual town hall. A year later, the clip circulated on conservative media, earning criticism from hosts like Michael Knowles, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, who devoted an entire 11-minute monologue to the topic.
Herbert said the one-off instance of Cox sharing his pronouns was an attempt to meet a struggling teenager where she was. The video was just one example of something that was “exploited by his opponent” but that wasn’t a “fair representation of where Spencer Cox is at,” Herbert said. “And obviously it worked.”
“That makes you wonder whether people are really looking at the issues, or just looking at something to be angry about,” Herbert said.
Why are some GOP voters angry?
Nearly 46% of Utah Republicans voted for an alternative to Cox on June 25. A small sample of Lyman supporters told the Deseret News their qualms with Cox stem from specific policy issues, like border security, as well as a feeling that the “Disagree Better” approach is ill equipped to counter the excesses of the left.
“The whole Disagree Better thing, it sounds great, but ultimately, there’s a hard line in the sand for some things,” said Neil Sebring, a fleet manager at Godfrey Trucking who worked on Lyman’s campaign. Sebring said he thought that one example of Cox crossing a line no conservative should was by supporting policies that allow “men in women’s bathrooms.”
However, one of the first bills Cox signed into law in 2024 prohibited individuals from using restrooms or locker rooms in public buildings that don’t align with their sex designation at birth. The bill makes an exception for transgender people if they have undergone transgender-related surgery and changed their birth certificate to match their gender identity. The bill also mandates more unisex bathrooms in future public buildings.
David Liffick, a resident of Syracuse, Davis County, who attended the Lyman election-night watch party, said immigration was his biggest source of discontent with Cox. “It impacts us on a daily basis on taxes, resources, infrastructure, everything, that impacts all of us,” Liffick said.
Utah is known for taking a unique approach to immigration. The state made national headlines in 2010 when hundreds of Utah leaders signed the Utah Compact on immigration, a statement laying out a commitment to the rule of law and the compassionate treatment of migrants.
In February, Cox joined 14 other Republican governors at the southern border to support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to enforce border security. He told the Deseret News while at the border that America can both secure the border and “fix legal immigration so that we’re not forcing people to do it the wrong way.”
While Lyman has repeatedly accused Cox of making Utah a sanctuary state, Utah does not fit the definition of sanctuary state because state code requires law enforcement to work with ICE officers when apprehending migrants who break the law after entering the country illegally. The Supreme Court has ruled that the U.S. Constitution prevents states from deporting migrants because immigration law enforcement is a federal issue.
A now-retracted statement from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement designating Utah as a sanctuary state, as well as the absence of ICE detention centers in the state — caused by stringent Biden administration regulations — and the state’s immigrant-friendly policies have been used by Lyman to cast Utah as a sanctuary state.
For Emily Schultz, a Parowan resident who was also at the Lyman watch party, it is a general sense that Cox has strayed from “family values” and has facilitated “the expansion of government, rather than paying attention to individuals and voters.”
The Utah government has grown in the last decade as the population has increased by half a million and there has been cumulative inflation of 33%. The budget for fiscal year 2014 was less than $14 billion. By fiscal year 2024, it had doubled to nearly $29.5 billion.
Needless lies, or a need for listening?
Since the election, Cox has said he was the real “conservative in the race,” evidenced by the fact he received more Republican votes than any other statewide primary candidate.
Cox’s winning margin would have been larger if not for the dishonesty of the Lyman campaign, according to Cox campaign manager Matt Lusty.
“When you make up a hundred lies about another person, it’s hard for at least one or two of those lies not to stick,” Lusty said. “Phil lost with Utah voters. He’s already lost once with a judge during this election cycle, and he’ll lose again with the future lawsuits he says he plans to file.”
Lyman has still not conceded the election, saying he will wait until he has fully analyzed the election results which currently show him behind by over 37,500 votes. Lyman has said he is pursuing at least one lawsuit questioning Utah’s signature-gathering path to the primary. He also created The Lyman Group, a nonprofit organization, in an attempt to increase transparency in elections.
Some influential Lyman supporters say it’s wrong to attribute the candidate’s underdog success to lying. Instead, the Cox administration should take the election results as a sign that some Republican voters feel like the governor is out of touch. That’s according to Don Guymon, a third-time GOP national delegate, former state central committee member of 20 years and the author of the GrassRoots legislative scorecard.
“I think Utah voters have a concern about the direction the state has taken. I think we saw all too often a governor that sought to appease a national crowd instead of looking at the citizens of the state of Utah,” Guymon said. “This is a concern that many conservatives have had for years, that we could be one or two elections from turning blue.”
A turning point for some Republican voters who may have voted for Cox in 2020 was when the governor vetoed an attempt to completely ban transgender participation in high school female sports, Guymon said.
In 2022, Cox vetoed HB11 because he said the bill was flawed and “substantially changed” from a previously negotiated version of the bill “in the final hours of the legislative session with no public input.” The modified bill would have opened up the Utah High School Athletic Association to lawsuits and did not follow the nuanced approach Cox had hoped for, he said at the time in a letter explaining his veto.
The veto was overridden by a supermajority in the Legislature but lawmakers agreed to a special legislative session to fix some of the flaws Cox saw in the bill.
Former Salt Lake City police officer and podcast host Eric Moutsos has been one of Cox’s strongest critics and actively campaigned for Lyman through his social media following. Moutsos pointed to examples like Cox’s role in the state’s COVID-19 response as lieutenant governor, his use of pronouns in the clip from 2021 and his veto of the transgender girls sports ban as reasons he is “very concerned with the direction of our state.”
“That alone is a disqualification — to be the person that’s supposed to lead us when you’re vetoing bills to prohibit men to play in women’s sports. I don’t know how anybody gets past that,” Moutsos said. “For me, everything is cultural.”
In recent years, Utah leaders have said the state’s unique culture includes the ability to find nuance and compromise on tough issues. Utah led the nation with its model 2015 legislation referred to as the “Utah Compromise” that aimed to balance religious freedom and protections against discrimination of LGBT people in the workplace and housing.
Convention vs. primary
The 2024 primary season placed the GOP nominating convention with 4,000 state delegates in stark contrast to the primary election process open to all 900,000 registered Republicans.
While Cox won at convention in 2020 with 55% of delegate support, he lost to Lyman in 2024, 67.5%-32.5%, becoming the first signature-gathering incumbent not to meet the party’s 40% threshold at convention since a signature route was established 10 years ago, according to former GOP party chairman Spencer Stokes.
But the disparity between Cox’s performance at convention and in the primary has become something of a new Utah norm.
Before his commanding primary win in 2016, Herbert lost to Overstock.com CEO Jonathan Johnson at convention 55%-45%. This year, Rep. John Curtis lost in convention for Utah’s open Senate seat by 40 percentage points and then went on to win with a near-majority of votes in the four-way primary.
A similar pattern was repeated in Utah’s 1st and 2nd Congressional Districts, though the 2nd is headed for a recount later this month. In the 3rd District, state Sen. Mike Kennedy won by large margins at convention and in the primary.
During his convention speech, Cox suggested his unpopularity among some segments of the party had very little to do with a lack of conservative accomplishments.
“Maybe you’re upset that I signed the largest tax cut in Utah history. Maybe you hate that I signed constitutional carry. Maybe you hate that I signed the most pro-life legislation in Utah history. Maybe you hate that I signed school choice or sent troops to the border. … Maybe you hate the 60 lawsuits that we filed against President Biden and this administration. Maybe you hate that we stopped DEI and ESG and CRT,” Cox said to a group of booing delegates. “Or maybe it’s something much more simple. Maybe you just hate that I don’t hate enough.”
A few days after his primary victory, Cox sat down for an interview with Politico, who called Cox perhaps the only Republican who “can stand against Donald Trump and still hold on to their political viability.” Cox has said he is not “anti-Trump” but that he has never voted for him and will not in 2024.
During the interview, Cox said he would have to change who he was to be elected anywhere else in the country. The Utah Republican Party is “still a little bit of an outlier,” he said, because it maintains the Reagan brand of optimistic and forward thinking conservatism, “not necessarily the populist way that we see in other places in the country.”
But he expressed worry that across the country, and in Utah, Republicans “are confusing conservatism with anger and hate and polarization.”
“And I think that’s very unhealthy for our party. I think it’s unhealthy for my state. I think it’s unhealthy for our country,” Cox said.