Red State Rebellion
At four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon, the lobby of Dragonfly Wellness is almost completely full. Clients perch expectantly on the sofas, waiting to be buzzed through the locked door marked PATIENTS ONLY. This might not be an unusual scene elsewhere—medical marijuana is legal in more than 30 states—but this happens to be Salt Lake City, within blocks of both the Utah state Capitol and the main temple of the Mormon Church, which proscribes consuming virtually any substance more potent than Diet Coke.
Utah might be the last place you would expect to find any kind of cannabis, but in 2018 Utah voters approved Proposition 2, a ballot measure legalizing medical marijuana, despite huge opposition from the Mormon Church and the conservative state legislature. Two years later, it’s clear that Prop 2 has had a much wider effect than merely legalizing medical weed; it’s begun to shake up one of the most entrenched and tone-deaf GOP legislative supermajorities in Red America.
Consider this: Utah voters not only approved medical marijuana in 2018, they also passed ballot measures calling for Medicaid expansion and independent redistricting, two major progressive priorities. This in a state where Republican candidates routinely clobber Democrats by 30 percentage points or more in statewide races. Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and the Republican establishment fought all three measures—Proposition 2 in particular—many good Republicans and Mormons clearly voted for all three of these “liberal” laws, in defiance of church and party.
“We have districts where Republicans won by a large majority, but the ballot initiatives passed,” says Rebecca Chavez-Houck, a former state representative who helped implement Proposition 4, which established an independent redistricting commission. “These were specific initiatives on issues that [the legislature] had voted against, year after year after year. So you have Republicans who feel like their representatives are not aligned with them on these issues.”
That’s a nice way of saying that Utah is in the middle of a voter rebellion, driven by a growing gulf between what people actually want (marijuana, Medicaid, and fair districts) and what their conservative, religious elected representatives have been willing to give them.
It happened again in December 2019, after the state legislature passed a sweeping tax reform package it had spent several months crafting. The main thrust of the “reform” was to cut the state income tax rate while increasing the state sales tax on groceries, and imposing new sales taxes on certain everyday services, such as dog grooming. This was so transparently rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else that even Utah’s generally Republican voters rebelled. Within weeks, organizers on both the left and the right had gathered more than enough signatures to compel a ballot measure repealing the tax “reform.” The legislature folded immediately and repealed the bill it had just passed.
“It was an incredible exercise of the people’s power,” says Chavez-Houck, a Democrat. And to many, it was a harbinger of change to come.
of Utah as a rock-ribbed red state. After all, although many Mormons view him with distaste, Donald Trump recently carried it by
