Utah Governor Spencer Cox on Wednesday asked state lawmakers to come back for a special session to set up a special election on November 21st to replace now-former Congressman Chris Stewart in the state’s 2nd District – while also pushing local elections back to the same date rather than the first Tuesday in November as they would normally been held, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.
It’s not clear why the hell Utah simply can’t hold the special election on the same date as regular elections given the lead time or, more pertinently, why they won’t try to fill the seat as soon as possible. Special US House elections are a scattershot process, but we would have to assume that a Republican governor would generally want to fill an empty seat in a red district quickly, going by Florida Gov Ron DeSantis’s cunty 2021 move to delay a special election to replace the late Dem Congressman Alcee Hastings by nine months. Then there’s Virginia Gov Glenn Youngkin doing the opposite after Richmond-area Dem Congressman Don McEachin died in late November 2022, setting the special election for February 21st, 2023, which also shows that it’s not that hard to slap one together in a reasonable timeframe. Utah Republicans ought to be pissed over this.