Former congressional staffer wins House seat in Utah special election

Initial results of the state’s primarily mail-in election showed Maloy with 56% of the vote, ahead of Democrat Kathleen Riebe’s 35% at 9 p.m. Tuesday. The Associated Press called the race for Maloy shortly after 8:30 p.m., less than an hour after the polls closed. 

There are seven candidates vying for the seat, including January Walker of the United Utah Party, Cassie Easley from the Constitution Party, Libertarian Bradley Garth Green, and independent candidates Joseph Geddes Buchman and Perry Myers.

Final election results will be certified by Dec. 5.

Maloy thanked the buzzing crowd in a short speech at the GOP watch party in West Valley City, assuring the crowd she wanted to let them get home and prepare for Thanksgiving. 

“I’ve been very careful not to make a lot of promises while I’ve been running because I have spent enough time around members of Congress to know it’s really tough to deliver on some of those big promises. But one thing I can promise is that I’m going to do everything I can to be the best representative of the people in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District,” Maloy said. 

“I know that not everyone in the second district voted for me, and I know I haven’t met everybody in the second district yet, although I’ve got to be getting pretty close. But I want everyone in the second district to know that I really want to be their representative. I want them to know me, I want them to know how to get ahold of me and I want them to say ‘That’s my representative and I know she cares about the things happening in my town.’” 

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox stopped by the event to offer early congratulations to Maloy.

“Our state needs her right now, but our country needs her even more. I promise you, I promise all of you, that she is going to make us proud,” Cox said, applause breaking in.

With voter turnout in the 2^nd Congressional District at 30% as of Tuesday afternoon, before the polls closed, Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, said a lot comes down to where in the district those votes are coming from. Even before the state’s redistricting, the area has traditionally favored Republicans, he noted.

“There are more Republicans there, and if they turn out for this election, it will bode very well for Celeste Maloy,” Perry said. “This is the first time in quite some time we’ve had a candidate that was raised in rural Utah. And as we saw in the primary for this district, (rural voters) were a deciding factor in that race.”

Utah’s contingent in the House has been down one since Stewart’s exit. With the battle over spending and Congress’ efforts to pass a budget that will keep the government operating, Perry pointed out that filling the final seat will have an impact.

“Right now, the Republicans control the House of Representatives, and the majority is slim. And we’ve seen that a small number of representatives have been able to have outsized influence in those votes of Speaker of the House and on the budget negotiations,” Perry said. “So if Celeste Maloy wins this election, and Republicans are wanting to add to their majority, every one of these votes have proven to be significant.”

Both candidates said they would work in the House to pass a budget and prevent government shutdown.

With Utah’s special election coming two weeks after municipal elections in most of the country, including a number of votes that favored Democrats, Perry said he will be watching to see what turnout looks like for Riebe.

“What happens in Utah is often a microcosm of what we see across the country. And that’s why we see candidates coming here in the state of Utah, trying to understand where Utah voters are on both sides of the aisle. The turnout in this election will be a little bit of a forecast for what we’re likely to see in 2024 on both sides of the aisle,” Perry said.

Maloy was updating her resume earlier this year after Stewart said he would be stepping down from the seat he has held since 2012 due to his wife’s illness, when the congressman approached her about running for his seat. With her boss’ endorsement, Maloy secured the party’s nomination at a convention in June and went on to win a three-way primary in September.

While Maloy’s primary campaign focused on the rural voters in Utah expansive 2^nd Congressional District — her most popular campaign sign is one perched atop a large hay bale along I-15 in remote southern Utah, she says — her race against Riebe has moved to where the district reaches the more urban Wasatch Front.

“Since the primary I’ve spent a lot of time in the more urban areas because it became clear in the primary vote tally that the rural counties came out really strongly for me, and southern Utah came out really strongly for me. So I’ve done a lot of work in Salt Lake and Davis counties since then trying to make sure they know who I am and know that I care about their issues and that I’m willing to work hard for them,” Maloy said.

In addition to pushing for Utah to have more control over public lands in the state, her campaign site highlights border security, religious freedom, curbing government spending, preserving Second Amendment rights, opposing abortion and supporting Hill Air Force Base as major issues. 

Riebe, a state Senator since 2018, said she joined the race to give Utahns a strong Democratic option on the ticket.

“I thought the people of Utah need to have an alternative. We have abortion bans going on in our state, which, you know, we don’t really want. We had the (school) voucher bill go through, which the public doesn’t want, and they keep cramming these things that are counterintuitive to what the people of Utah want,” Riebe said.

Riebe’s campaign agenda includes opposing book bans in schools while improving and standardizing quality in education, pushing for an affordable cost of living while reigning in government spending, protection for unions, support for first responders and veterans, affordable health care, defending Social Security and Medicare, protecting elections and preventing gerrymandering, and regulating artificial intelligence.

Celeste Maloy: Farm to politics

The road to Tuesday’s election has been unexpected, says Maloy, who notes she hasn’t “spent my whole adult life preparing to run for Congress.”

After growing up in a small Nevada town just over the Utah border surrounded by government-controlled public lands — which shaped her views today on land management — a soil judging contest won her a scholarship to Southern Utah University, so long as she pursued a degree in agriculture. After college she worked with farmers and ranchers “solving problems,” she said, especially focusing on designing more efficient irrigation systems for Utah’s dry environment.

“I started to notice the people that I was trying to help had some of the same concerns the people I grew up with had, which is, you know, they’re depending on natural resources to make a living and the government controls a lot of the resources and there’s a lot of government process involved in using those resources. And they didn’t feel like it always made a lot of sense,” Maloy said. “I got to a point where I decided I needed to go change policy.”

Maloy then went to law school at Brigham Young University where she “took all of the public lands and water and natural resources classes they had to offer.” After graduation she worked with the Washington County Attorney’s Office as a civil deputy, the Utah Association of Counties and the Washington County Water Conservancy District, until she got the attention of Stewart’s office.

“Instead of working for the counties and trying to get the congressman’s office to help solve problems, I was at the congressman’s office helping solve problems that the counties have. And I really love that work. And if it hadn’t been for my time there, I never would have dared run for Congress — I’m still kind of surprised I did run for Congress,” Maloy said.

Kathleen Riebe: Going for the hat trick

A New York native, Riebe came to Utah to ski after college and never left. She has worked for 22 years as a teacher, and currently works as an educational technology specialist for grades K-5. Through the years she had made a number of appearances before school boards and legislators, and after feeling like she wasn’t being listened to, decided to run for office herself.

Her political career has been marked by upsets, since her first race running for a seat on Utah’s State School Board in 2016 when she ousted the board’s sitting — and well connected — chairman. But once she started working in that role, she found herself frustrated when policy from the Utah Legislature wasn’t lining up with what the board was recommending.

“One of the people that I worked with on the board was like, ‘Oh, we think we’re so cute, having priorities and asking them for things.’ Like, this isn’t cute, this is how it’s supposed to work, we’re supposed to work together to create policies that are beneficial to students,” Riebe said.

In 2018 she flipped a seat in Utah’s Senate, then kept it blue through the next election “by a pretty big margin that is kind of alarming for my Republican peers,” she said.

If she wins again after the final vote count, she’ll call it her hat trick.

Even in deep red Utah, Riebe has been motivated by people from across the political spectrum who have offered their support.

“People are coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘Kathleen, we really appreciate the work you’re doing protecting students protecting reproductive rights.’ And so I think even our most conservative Republicans do not align themselves with these extreme thoughts. And so it’s been really exciting to have people reach out to me and tell me that,” Riebe said. “It just keeps putting gas in my engine, you know?”