President-elect Donald Trump increased his vote share in Utah by over 5% in the days following election night, according to final results, giving him his biggest winning margin ever in the state.
The state board of canvassers, including State Auditor John Dougall, State Treasurer Marlo Oaks and Attorney General Sean Reyes certified statewide and multi county election returns from the 2024 general election on Monday.
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, whose office oversees Utah elections, conducted the meeting while her director of elections, Ryan Cowley, presented vote totals and winners of the state’s major general election races to the board.
Utah’s final election figures show the state is as Republican as ever, even as the Republican Party was somewhat split in the gubernatorial race, with Phil Lyman winning over 13% of the vote as a write-in candidate.
Trump secures biggest win ever in Utah
The presidential race was called in Utah when Trump led with 54% of the vote on election night, Nov. 5. Based on these initial results, Utah was reported as being one of only two states in the country that did not shift toward Trump from 2020 to 2024.
But as counties updated their vote totals, it became clear that Utah had actually delivered Trump his biggest winning margin in the state ever, with an increase of more than 1 percentage point from four years earlier.
Trump secured the Beehive State’s six electoral college votes with 883,818 votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 562,566, beating his Democratic opponent by 21.6 percentage points with 59.4% of the vote, compared to his 20.5-point win in 2020 with 58.2% of the vote.
While the state as a whole shifted a darker shade of red this year, a majority of Utah counties, including Davis and Utah counties, saw Trump’s support shrink slightly relative to his Democratic opponent from 2020 to 2024, bucking national trends.
Trump was outperformed among Utah voters by most other statewide and congressional Republicans, including Sen.-elect John Curtis, who received 62.5%, Rep. Blake Moore, of Utah’s 1st Congressional District, who received 63.1%, Rep.-elect Mike Kennedy, of Utah’s 3rd District, who received 66.4%, and Rep. Burgess Owens, of Utah’s 4th District, who received 63.4% of the vote.
Utah Director of Elections Ryan Cowley, left, responds to questions by concerned citizen Fred Hayes, right, after a State Board of Canvassers meeting at the Utah State Capitol Complex in Salt Lake City on Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News
Cox wins by large margin, Lyman receives write-in support
Rep. Celeste Maloy, of Utah’s 2nd District, slightly underperformed Trump, receiving 58%, while Utah Gov. Spencer Cox underperformed Trump by 6.5 percentage points statewide with unsuccessful GOP primary candidate Phil Lyman running as a write-in candidate.
On election night, the race for Utah governor was called in Cox’s favor with Cox leading with 56% of the vote, to Democrat Brian King’s 31.4% and Lyman’s 8%. As counties updated their election results over the following days Lyman’s vote share slowly increased. Then, over the last week, Lyman’s share of the vote jumped to 13.6% as Utah County uploaded its write-in results.
The final results for Utah’s gubernatorial race show Cox with 52.9% of the vote, totaling 781,431 votes; King with 28.5%, totaling 420,514 votes; and Lyman with 13.6%, totaling 200,551 votes.
Natalie Clawson, Lyman’s running mate, told the Deseret News, “the results of this election show there is a significant number of people in Utah who support Phil and my efforts to protect conservative values, and bolster election integrity and transparency.”
During an event on Friday, Lyman told supporters he plans to run for governor again in 2028, as reported by the Daily Herald.
Gabi Finlayson, King’s campaign manager and a senior partner at the Democrat-leaning Elevate Strategies, said Lyman’s relative success as a write-in candidate points to division within the Utah Republican Party that Democrats can exploit to shift the state their way.
“Governor Cox may have won reelection, but his lackluster performance in critical areas and the unexpected surge in support for Phil Lyman show that the GOP’s grip on our state is starting to slip,” Finlayson said. “We remain hopeful for a future where Utah’s government is balanced, representative, and focused on getting back on track — free from corruption and cronyism.”
When asked for a comment, the Cox campaign referred back to the governor’s statements on election night where he said the results “put an exclamation point” on the work his administration had accomplished in his first term.
Why do Utah elections take a long time to count?
When asked why Lyman’s vote share increased from around 8% to over 13% multiple weeks after the election, state elections director Ryan Cowley said Utah County delayed updating its write-in ballot totals while every other county had updated most of theirs on election night.
Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson told the Deseret News that the ballot tabulation software used by the county, ES&S, requires election workers to adjudicate all ambiguous ballots before they can move on to assigning write-in ballots to candidates.
As the second largest county in the state, Davidson said he and his employees were unable to assign the write-in ballots to Lyman until they had completed all of their adjudications. The state’s largest county, Salt Lake County, uses Dominion machines and likely does not encounter that same problem, Davidson said.
No state finalizes its election results on election night. But many observers noted how in the 2024 election Utah lagged behind the rest of the country in uploading vote totals. Only California appeared slower in updating its election results on Election Day and the days that followed.
Utah Director of Elections Ryan Cowley reads off election results during a State Board of Canvassers meeting at the Utah State Capitol Complex in Salt Lake City on Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News
Following the canvass on Monday, Cowley said that 96% of ballots had been counted by the Friday after the general election. Some of the delay came from the large number of provisional ballots this year, Cowley explained. Provisional ballots are the ballots cast by previously unregistered voters in-person on Election Day.
If an individual fails to meet the deadline for online voter registration in Utah, they can register in-person at a voting center on Election Day if they fill out a provisional ballot. However, these ballots require election workers to go through additional voter registration information, sometimes in difficult-to-read handwriting, before the ballots can be counted.
In 2024, there was 85.3% turnout of registered voters, Henderson shared on Monday. Of these, 87% chose to return mail-in ballots via the postal service or drop boxes. Of the remaining voters who chose to vote in-person, 3% voted through provisional ballots, Henderson said.
Davidson also pointed to the state’s paper provisional ballot process as something that slows down vote counting. Davidson’s Utah County office received over 11,300 provisional ballots on Election Day, he said. Davidson called for an online pre-registration process to save election workers time going through voter registration forms on Election Day.
