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SALT LAKE CITY — New results posted Thursday in Utah’s GOP gubernatorial primary election still show Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox leading former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., but now by just over 2 percentage points as ballots continue to be counted.
In the last substantial vote update of Tuesday’s election expected because of the Fourth of July holiday, Cox has 36.6% of the vote; Huntsman, 34.33%; former Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes, just over 21%; and former Utah GOP Chairman Thomas Wright, almost 8%. Hughes and Wright have conceded the race.
The race for the Republican nomination for governor continues to be close enough that state Elections Director Justin Lee has asked county clerks to be prepared for a recount after the final vote canvass by the state on July 27. A recount can be requested by the losing candidate only in races where the margin of victory is 0.25% or less.
“We definitely have the potential for being in recount territory,” Lee said.
The vote difference between Cox and Huntsman dropped from around 12,400 earlier Thursday to just under 11,000 in the latest results of the by-mail election. Around 63,000 ballots were tabulated Thursday out of an estimated 111,500 ballots left to be counted as of Wednesday, Lee said.
Some Cox supporters were already declaring victory Thursday, with state Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, tweeting his congratulations to the lieutenant governor and his running mate, state Sen. Deidre Henderson, R-Spanish Fork, saying he was ready to call the race for them.
But Cox’s campaign manager, Austin Cox, wasn’t ready to say the race was over.
“We’ll allow others to do that. People can tweet what they want to tweet. They have access to the same numbers we have access to. I did like that tweet, though. I put a heart on that tweet, for whatever that’s worth,” Austin Cox said.
“We feel good about today’s updates,” he said. “The lieutenant governor and Sen. Henderson overperformed in key counties today and we are heading into the weekend optimistic and look forward to updated results early next week.”
The lieutenant governor expects to end up winning the election by about 7,000 votes when the remaining ballots are counted, including some 30,000 GOP ballots in Salt Lake County that are expected to be largely done by Tuesday, a source inside the campaign told the Deseret News.
That projection is based on Cox getting about a third of the remaining vote in Salt Lake County to around half for Huntsman, along with a larger percentage of the vote from the rest of the state, including Utah County, where as many as 4,000 or so ballots still need to be counted.
If the projection turns out to be accurate, the margin of victory would be too high for a recount, at around 1.5%.
Huntsman’s campaign manager, Lisa Roskelley, said “we’re watching” the latest results but had no further comment. A source said later the Huntsman campaign believes there are “still a lot of votes to be counted.”
Vote counting has been slowed by changes to the primary due to COVID-19, including allowing ballots to be postmarked Tuesday rather than the day before the election. Ballots are also being quarantined for at least 24 hours before they can be processed by election officials, who are also limited by social distancing protocols.
The election has generated “phenomenal” voter turnout, Lee said, particularly among Republicans.
He said GOP voter turnout for the closed primary election was already at more than 53% as of Wednesday, compared to 39% in the 2016 Republican match-up between Gov. Gary Herbert and businessman Jonathan Johnson. Democrats and unaffiliated voters had only a few primary races, and in some areas none.
Cox and Huntsman have been the frontrunners throughout the race for the first open governor’s seat since 1992, with the lieutenant governor maintaining a lead over the twice-elected governor who resigned in 2009 to become U.S. ambassador to China, later running for president and most recently serving as U.S. ambassador to Russia.
A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll in late May showed Cox up 7 percentage points over Huntsman with Hughes and Wright trailing, but nearly a quarter of likely primary election voters were still undecided.
Jason Perry, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics, worked for both Huntsman and Herbert. He said the number of outstanding ballots is still enough to potentially shift the lead in the race and that there’s a “decent possibility” of a recount.
“For the Republican Party, it’s significant you have two such outstanding candidates in this race,” Perry said.
Herbert is not seeking reelection after more than a decade in office. Herbert, who served as Huntsman’s lieutenant governor, endorsed Cox in the race. The winner of the Republican primary will face Democrat Chris Peterson, a University of Utah law professor, in November.
