The Salt Lake Tribune compared the Legislature's five congressional map proposals to election data. Here's what a reported found about districts.
The Salt Lake Tribune compared the districts in each of the lawmakers’ five proposed maps with past election data. A presentation during a meeting of the Legislative Redistricting Committee at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Monday, Sept.
22, 2025. All five of the congressional maps proposed by Utah’s Legislative Redistricting Committee include at least one competitive seat, according to an analysis of recent voting data by The Salt Lake Tribune, posing at least a possibility of the state sending a Democrat to Washington for the first time since Rep. Ben McAdams’ defeat in 2020.would give a strong Democratic candidate a fighting chance — a better opportunity than the party has seen since at least the 2010 redistricting cycle., which provides the district-by-district results for each of the maps over multiple recent elections. For the analysis, The Tribune used the 2024 presidential race, the 2022 U.S. Senate race , the 2020 presidential and gubernatorial races, the 2018 U.S. Senate race, and the 2016 presidential and gubernatorial races.An average of the margins of victory for those seven races was then used in order to estimate the partisan performance in each district over the period of time., which runs a similar comparison, but uses a different selection — relying on a few older elections and including one race for attorney general — to estimate the partisan lean of each district.Under both models, the best opportunity for Democrats to win a seat would be District 4 in the Legislature’s Option B map — a district that keeps Salt Lake City whole and includes most of the west side of Salt Lake County, west of about 300 West, and stretches through Tooele County to the western border. The Tribune’s analysis with Redistricter showed the hypothetical district would be a virtual tossup, favoring Democrats by less than three-quarters of a percentage point. The Dave’s Redistricting data also has it competitive, but still leaning Republican by roughly 6 percentage points. District 2 on the Legislature’s Option A is almost identical to Option B’s District 4, but with some minor tweaks that tip it slightly to the Republicans. It would still essentially be a coin toss. President Donald Trump lost both proposed districts in 2024, 2020 and 2016, and Sen. Mike Lee lost them both in 2022. Gov. Spencer Cox won both districts in 2020, as did Sen. Mitt Romney in 2018 — highlighting the fact that the popularity of the candidates, and not the maps or political affiliation, can still determine which way the district swings. Option C would be the best for Republicans among the current plans on the table. The best chance Democrats would have to gain a seat with those boundaries would be in District 3, which includes the western portion of Salt Lake County, but does not include Salt Lake City.independent analysis concluded favor Republicans In fact, based on The Tribune’s analysis, Democrats would have a better chance of winning two seats under any of the five map proposals than they would have of winning one under the current maps. Lawmakers’ Option E is the most likely to put two seats in play, with District 2 encompassing Davis County, Salt Lake City and the county’s eastern suburbs of Cottonwood Heights, Draper and down to Riverton favoring Republicans by a little over 2 points, and District 4, including West Jordan, West Valley City and west through Tooele, favoring the GOP by just under 10 points.Utah Republican Party Chairman Rob Axson calls the entire process “unfortunate” and said it “undermines the principles of a constitutional republic and ignores important elements of our state constitution. … This whole thing is an example of manipulating outcomes, which I thought was the objection.” Regardless of how the maps end up, he said, the Utah GOP is “dedicated to earning the support of Utah voters. Our principles serve the state well and will continue to do so, in spite of judicial interference and the complaints of people who want to undermine representative government.”— the Better Boundaries initiative that sought to set standards for the redistricting process, including prohibiting districts gerrymandered to give one party an advantage over the other.that “Proposition 4 is the law in Utah” and the existing congressional maps did not comply with the initiative’s standards and could not be used in 2026.They have until Thursday to produce one map, give the public 10 days to comment on it, then hold a special session to officially adopt the map and submit it to the court for review. But Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the group that backed the 2018 initiative, said her main concern now is aBrammer’s bill, unveiled on Sunday, seeks to establish a “partisan symmetry” test as the only metric Gibson can use to determine if the Legislature’s map is fair. Academics disagree over the best tools to measure gerrymandering. “It feels like they’re putting forward maps and then looking for ways to rewrite Proposition 4 to fit their political goals,” Rasmussen said. “This process should be about fairness and transparency, not partisanship. Even the creators of the partisan test have said it doesn’t apply to states that aren’t competitive, yet it’s being used here to justify changes that tile the process.” Rasmussen also said that the Legislature deciding to hire an out-of-state consultant “who couldn’t even pronounce ‘Weber’ correctly, to draw the maps … doesn’t build trust with the public.”Here’s whom the Legislature picked to draw Utah’s new congressional maps Utah Supreme Court rejects Legislature’s bid to extend use of gerrymandered congressional maps, for now
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