Unique situation

Pence admits to 'unique situation in Utah'

By Louis Nelson

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence admitted Friday that his campaign is dealing with “a unique situation in Utah,” one of the nation’s deepest-red states where the GOP vice presidential nominee nonetheless spent time campaigning earlier this week.

The “unique situation” that Pence referred to is independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin, a late entrant to the 2016 race who has struggled to gain traction elsewhere in the country but has polled well in Utah, his home state. The Real Clear Politics polling average of the state’s five-way race, which includes McMullin, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein, gives the Manhattan billionaire just a 5.8 percentage point edge in the state. McMullin and Clinton are tied for second.

But the most recent Utah poll, conducted earlier this week by Heat Street and Rasmussen, shows an even closer race. In that poll, Trump leads McMullin by just 3 points, 32 percent to 29 percent, while Clinton sits just 4 points back of the GOP nominee at 28 percent.

Pence visited Salt Lake City on Wednesday, part of what he described to "CBS This Morning" as a "western swing" that also took him to Colorado and Nevada, two more traditional swing states.

That the Republican ticket felt the need to campaign so close to Election Day in a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964 raised some eyebrows nationally and seemed to confirm Trump’s past statement that “I’m having a tremendous problem in Utah.” That problem stems in no small part from the hesitancy of the state’s sizeable and generally conservative Mormon population to embrace Trump.

Many of the state’s Mormon political leaders, including Rep. Mia Love and Gov. Gary Herbert, abandoned Trump in the wake of a 2005 recording published by The Washington Post on which the real estate mogul can be heard describing sexually predatory behavior in vulgar terms. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, another Utah Republican, also withdrew his endorsement of Trump in the immediate aftermath of the tape’s publication but wrote this week on Twitter that he would be voting for his party’s nominee because Clinton “is that bad.”

Both of the state’s major newspapers have been critical of Trump, with The Salt Lake Tribune opting to endorse Clinton and The Deseret News, which is owned by the LDS Church, calling on the Manhattan billionaire to drop out of the race.

But Trump’s struggles in Utah predate his most recent string of controversies. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) explained last June that Trump’s past proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. likely rubbed some Mormons the wrong way.

“We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant,” Lee said in an interview when he was asked why he had not yet endorsed Trump. “We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. A people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And, statements like that make them nervous.”