Trump endorsement no longer a golden ticket in red state: 'Don't think it carries weight'

In most Republican primaries, President Donald Trump's endorsement settles the race. In one state, it barely moves the needle.

The 80-year-old president has backed Rep. Celeste Maloy on Truth Social — the same blanket endorsement he gave two other Utah GOP incumbents, one of whom doesn't even have a primary opponent, but Brigham Young University political scientist told NPR the backing won't hurt those candidates but won't provide the decisive advantage it might have elsewhere.

"There's many Republican voters in Utah who have sort of made their peace with Donald Trump enough to vote for him," said Chris Karpowitz, a BYU political science professor. "But that doesn't mean they necessarily support either his style of politics or some of the policies that he pursues."

"They are loyal to the party, not the president," he added.

Utah gave Trump his narrowest margin of any Republican state in 2016, under 50 percent, and even after gains in 2020 and 2024, he's never cracked 60 percent there. By April, his approval rating in the state had fallen to an all-time low of 44 percent, with support among Utah Republicans specifically dropping 10 points.

Voters have made peace with Trump enough to back him at the ballot box, but that tolerance doesn't extend to embracing his style or his signature policies — particularly on immigration and his past remarks about Islam and other faiths, which have grated in a state shaped by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its history of religious-freedom advocacy.

That dynamic is playing out directly in Utah's new 3rd Congressional District primary, where Maloy faces Phil Lyman, a Trump-pardoned former state legislator running as an anti-establishment, Freedom Caucus-aligned candidate. Both men are unquestionably Trump supporters, but neither is running on it.

Maloy touts her work on tax cuts and committee assignments without invoking the president's own branding for the legislation; Lyman centers his campaign on rooting out government corruption and decentralizing power, not on MAGA loyalty.

Utah State University political scientist Damon Cann described the pattern as a careful balancing act: Republicans there run as Republicans who happened to have had Trump's support, not as Trump Republicans, and not as candidates hostile to him either.

The result is a primary fight that doubles as a test case for the party's future. As national Republicans eventually confront life after Trump, Utah suggests one possible shape that takes a base still nominally loyal to the president, but one whose actual allegiance, when push comes to shove, belongs to the party brand he temporarily leads.

"Republicans in Utah are ambivalent enough about Donald Trump that I don't think it carries quite the same weight that it might in other states," Karpowitz said.