Everything You Need To Know About Tuesday’s Special Elections In Rhode Island And Utah
ABC News Photo Illustration Usually, Labor Day is considered the traditional start of campaign season — but here in 2023, it marks the end of the competitive phase of two heated special elections. Neither Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District nor Utah’s 2nd is expected to be very competitive in November’s general elections, so Tuesday’s primaries will likely determine their new representatives. And whoever wins will have really worked for it; both primaries have had no shortage of drama. Races to watch: 1st Congressional District Polls close: 8 p.m. Eastern When Rep. David Cicilline resigned at the end of May to become president of the Rhode Island Foundation, he left behind a rare opening in a deep-blue district that President Biden carried 64 percent to 35 percent, according to Daily Kos Elections — and ambitious Democrats rushed in to fill the void. Twelve names are on the Democratic primary ballot on Tuesday, and the race has been so chaotic that at least four of them have a legitimate shot at winning. The early favorite was Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos, whose name recognition gave her a decent base of support (albeit only around 20 percent) in early polls of the race, while most other candidates were stuck in single digits. But in July, election officials in several towns flagged certain signatures on Matos’s nomination papers as potentially fraudulent — for example, they were from dead people or living people who said they never signed them. Matos still had enough valid signatures to make the ballot, but in the end, 559 of the 1,285 signatures she submitted were disqualified, and the state attorney general and state police are conducting a criminal investigation into whether fraud was committed (in Rhode Island, it is illegal to forge nomination signatures). Matos has blamed a campaign vendor for the snafu, but the scandal may have turned voters against her. According to internal polling from a rival campaign (so take it with a grain of salt), Matos’s net favorability rating among Democratic primary voters fell from +20 percentage points in June to -20 points in mid-August. Another early contender was businessman Don Carlson, who — thanks in large part to a $600,000 loan to his own campaign — had raised the most money of any candidate in the race as of Aug. 16 (nearly $970,000). But in late August, local news reported that Carlson had made romantic overtures to a student while a faculty member at Williams College. Carlson eventually admitted that the report was true, and he dropped out of the race on Aug. 27. In the wake of these scandals, two other candidates have emerged as possible front-runners. Former state Rep. Aaron Regunberg, who might be the governor of Rhode Island right now if 2,466 people had voted a different way,2 But Maloy, who has Stewart’s endorsement, won the party convention on June 24 to garner a spot on the primary ballot, an indication of her potential appeal to conservatives, as Utah GOP convention delegates tend to be more right-leaning than the primary electorate as a whole. Edwards and Hough each gathered enough signatures to qualify for the primary despite being eliminated at the convention. Limited polling and fundraising numbers do suggest Edwards has a potential edge. Edwards led an early August poll from Dan Jones & Associates/Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics with 32 percent, while Hough and Maloy sat well back at 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively. But with about half of voters undecided, the survey may have said more about Edwards’s name recognition advantage than her final vote percentage in this race. She also raised the most money from individual contributors, tallying $368,000 compared to Maloy’s $250,000 and Hough’s $202,000, as of Aug. 16. On top of that, Edwards has loaned her campaign $300,000, allowing her to outdistance Hough in total fundraising (he’s loaned himself around $335,000). She entered the home stretch of the campaign with $228,000 in the bank, about two and a half times what Hough and Maloy each had. But the ideological divisions in this race could provide opportunities for Maloy or Hough to outdistance Edwards, who clearly occupies the moderate lane. After all, Edwards voted for Biden in 2020 — she did say in a recent debate that she regretted her vote — and worked to pass a resolution recognizing climate change in 2018. Meanwhile, Maloy and Hough have both criticized the indictments of Trump as politically motivated and taken firmly anti-abortion positions, although Maloy said she would potentially vote for a federal ban while Hough said it should be left to the states. Hough has also argued that he’d be the most reliable Republican in the race because he voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, a dig at Edwards’s Biden vote and a shot at Maloy for having failed to vote in 2020 or 2022. And similar to the Rhode Island primary, this race also has its own ballot drama. After Maloy won at the GOP convention, it was revealed that her failure to vote in the past two statewide elections had caused Utah’s election officials to mark her as an inactive voter and begin the process of deleting her from the voting rolls. In fact, Maloy had only updated her Utah voter registration three days after she filed her candidacy. She has argued that because she moved to Virginia while working for Stewart on Capitol Hill, she did not want to cast a potentially fraudulent ballot in the past two elections. Still, this revelation prompted one of the eliminated Republican candidates at the convention to sue to have Maloy removed from the ballot. But a state court denied that request, and Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s chief elections officer, said Maloy properly filed for office. The state GOP also lacked any mechanism under party rules to undo Maloy’s convention victory, reported The Salt Lake Tribune, even as her credentials came under scrutiny. Despite her troubles, Maloy may have a shot at winning