Recently I attended the Utah County Republican Convention as a delegate. I know that reveals something about me that may be controversial to some, but I am not afraid or ashamed to admit that yes, I do live in Utah County.
The whole point of this thing was to determine who will actually end up on the Republican primary ballot for local elections this year. Obviously, the only sensible way to accomplish this is cramming 1500 people into a high school gymnasium for 9 hours.
By contrast, I have it on good authority that the Utah County Democratic Convention was four people in an elementary school basement repeatedly announcing their pronouns to each other.
There was a bit of controversy at the beginning when it was revealed that our ballots were not going to be individually counted, but weighed. This concerned some, but their qualms were allayed when they realized weighing the ballots would help determine the ballots’ bone density and ensure there’s no transsexual ballots sneaking in there.
Each of the candidates got to give a two-minute speech. They also got to invite apparently any number of people to go up and stand next to them as they did so. At one point, so many people stood up to stand with a candidate for sheriff that I started to wonder if I was supposed to go up there, too.
The great thing about local politics is it’s totally divorced from the toxic nature of national politics, and instead focuses entirely on practical, local issues that impact you directly. So naturally, most candidates’ speeches focused on such local issues as election security, ESG scores, and Joe Biden. Several candidates offered dire warnings of Utah County going the way of California–or, even worse, Salt Lake County.
It was difficult to choose between such a strong field of politically conscious candidates for such critical offices like county clerk. My own decision-making was confounded when another delegate showed me an infographic detailing how various candidates were all tied to George Soros. In the end, I generally picked whichever candidate wore the biggest cowboy hat.
So I turned in my vote for each of the offices, they announced the results, and then I headed home to — wait, what? What do you mean, a second round of voting?
Candidates have to get over 60 percent of the vote to eliminate their competition, and since only one guy managed that, we had to vote again for all the other races. And then the candidates that were eliminated can just collect signatures and petition to be on the ballot anyway, which at least one guy is doing.
So in the end, after 9 hours of local politics, and weeks of carefully studying the candidates, we accomplished very close to nothing at all.
But isn’t that politics?
