AP
Senators John Curtis and Trent Staggs.
CNN
—
CNN projects that Utah Rep. John Curtis will win the state’s Republican Senate primary, defeating a challenger backed by Donald Trump in the race to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Mitt Romney.
Curtis, 64, is expected to win a four-way primary that includes the former president and Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs, who is backed by the state Republican Party. Curtis will have a commanding lead in November’s general election in a heavily Republican state that last elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 1970.
The anti-Trump Republican Party will lose a standard-bearer in Romney, but in a state with strong Republican support but where the most hardline conservative candidates in Republican primaries don’t always get rewarded, Curtis has steered clear of the former president. Curtis did not support Trump in this year’s Republican presidential primary, but voted mostly with the former president during his presidency.
Curtis, founder and chair of the Washington Caucus of Conservative Climate Caucus, regularly hosts what he calls “hiking town halls,” where he guides constituents through some of the state’s most beautiful places while talking to them.
Trump endorsed Staggs in April, hours before the mayor beat Curtis at the state party convention and qualified for the primary. Such conventions tend to be dominated by party hardliners, and their winners don’t necessarily fare better in the broader Republican primary. (Curtis qualified for the primary after collecting enough signatures.)
Staggs, who was a vocal opponent of COVID-19 measures as mayor of Riverton, a suburb of Salt Lake City, Posted a video on social media Last week, the former president called him “a fantastic guy running for the seat of one of the worst senators in Republican history, Mitt Romney.”
Still, in the video, Trump acknowledged that Staggs was “a little unlikely.”
Curtis was first elected to Congress in 2017 when he won a special election to replace former Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz. He previously served as mayor of Provo, the state’s fourth-most populous city.
CNN’s Andrew Menezes contributed to this report.
