♪♪♪ male announcer: Funding for the "Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by the Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund.

Jason Perry: Tonight on the "Hinckley Report"...

Governor Cox marks his first 100 days in office with strong approval ratings from voters.

Utah's historic redistricting commission meets for the first time as they prepare for the battle over new political boundaries.

And as the conversation over vaccines evolves, Utahn's weigh in on how and when to return to normal.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Jason: Good evening and welcome to the "Hinckley Report."

I'm Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics.

Covering the week, we have Sonja Hutson, political reporter with KUER; Marty Carpenter, president of 24Nine; and Jay Evensen, columnist with the "Desert News."

I'm so glad you are all with us tonight.

We have so many interesting things to talk about but I want to get to one interesting event we've just hit and that is the first 100 days of the Cox administration.

It feels like we just barely had this election, but Sonja, I want to start with you because you did a pretty serious interview with the governor over this past week, where he talked about the first 100 days, kinda the priorities he set, and the successes he found.

Talk about that interview and what he sees happened.

Sonja Hutson: Yeah, so we hit a couple of topics.

I mean, so much has happened in the last 100 days.

It's hard to pick just a few things, but one of the things we talked about was the vaccine roll out.

That was obviously really high up on his priority list when he took office.

We were just starting to roll out vaccines at the beginning of January and, you know, it's a success in the sense that we have been very efficient at using the vaccine doses that we've been allocated.

We consistently been in the top 10 or top 15 for several months now, but we also talk about the equity piece of this because if you look at demographic data from the state Department of Health, racial minorities are underrepresented in the people that have been vaccinated.

And so, we talked a little bit about what his plan is going forward to kind of close that gap, part of the strategy is in implementing this equity plan that they have where, you know, they partner with community organizations.

They take mobile clinics out.

Part of making that successful was opening up eligibility to everyone so that they didn't have to discriminate or try to filter people.

They could just go into a community and say like okay, who wants it?

Let's vaccinate everybody.

Jason: Yes, so Marty, this was a huge part of this administration 'cause I want to talk about some of those approval numbers in a second but the effectiveness of the vaccine delivery seems to be top of mind for him and maybe that's at the heart of all of his approval numbers right now.

Marty Carpenter: Well, most administrations in their first 100 days would have to figure out what it is they want to focus on and the Cox administration sort of had it handed to them pretty clearly.

Only two issues that matter for governor in the first hundred days at this time in world history.

One is Covid vaccine distribution and the second one is the economy.

The economy seems to be going very well.

The vaccine distribution seems to be going very well.

Of course, as Sonja pointed out there are some discrepancies or disparencies when it comes to the distribution among different racial groups, but really if you're looking at the overall picture for administration, they're saying we have to go get two things right and if we get those two things right our first 100 days and probably driving right into the next 100 days, everything's gonna be just dandy for us in those poll numbers, because we're going to nail those two things.

Jason: Such an interesting point.

In fact, it's led to what just happened this morning.

Some news from the governor's office, Jay, Governor Cox said, well, here's the next 100 days and there are three top issues that he said he's going to focus on.

They are equity in education, eliminate disparities in health care and, unity in politics.

Wow, those are some-- Jay Evensen: Hundred days, I'd love to see that.

Unity and politics, I mean, that's something, that's a huge one but, you know, his poll numbers show he's got some support from Democrats, which indicates perhaps some that he has accomplished some of that at least as far as he's concerned.

Jason: So, let's hit a couple of those polling numbers, Jay, because I was so happy that the Hinckley Institute and the "Deseret News" was able to do this most recent poll.

And let's get those numbers because it does hit all sides of the aisle.

There was this: 66% approval rating overall for Governor Cox, got 70% with the GOP, 64% with the Democrats, but interestingly, 62% with the other category.

People who don't affiliate as one of those parties.

Those are really big numbers across the board.

Jay: I mean, there are Democratic governors in this country would love to have that kind of Democratic support, right?

And it's interesting to look at it and see why.

And I think the governor's done a pretty good job in separating himself from the right wing of the Republican Party, which kinda manifest itself during the legislature.

He spoke out in opposition to the bill that would have barred transgender athletes from competing.

He was-- the legislature wanted to do away with the state masked mandate a lot earlier than April 10th.

The Governor made it clear he didn't think that was a good idea.

In fact, I don't think he wanted them to do it at all.

But he was able to negotiate the April 10th day, which was a little bit farther down the road.

I think those things have kind of signaled that he's separated himself.

It is maybe a bit more of a moderating voice with a legislature.

And I think that may explain some of that Democratic support.

Marty: That's the beauty of those first hundred days, right?

Once you get past the primary you no longer have to message yourself toward the far right part of the party.

Instead, you can move yourself back to the middle.

He's done a good job focusing on the two issues most important to everyone in the middle of that political bell curve and that's why you see those high approval numbers across the board.

Jason: Well, what do you make of the Democratic side too?

Because you're involved in politics so much and you've followed lots of polls and the popularity among these candidates, but usually you will see, love for Republican candidate, strong support in the person's own party, pretty strong support in Utah any way for that other category, but it's very uncommon to see the number of Democrats higher than that other category.

Marty: Yeah, I think that Jay speaks to that a little bit where there are some social issues, where the governor has been pretty vocal and those tend to not just go into the middle bell curve portion.

You know, into the middle portion of the bell curve politically but maybe skewing slightly left for most people in our state, but in a way where he hasn't necessarily picked a fight with anyone on the right on key issues they care about.

So, he's really doing a nice dance for the first hundred days.

Interestingly, the first hundred days is also usually the honeymoon with the press there hasn't really been a major bump in the road.

So, we'll see how things work out over the next hundred and hundred after that.

Jason: I'm curious, Sonja, at the heart of this thing with the Democrats, the social issues for sure, but we did do a follow up question in terms of how people perceived the governor is doing with the Covid vaccine and this was interesting too because that was a 68% approval from Utahns for the governor.

in your mind, as you've done so many of these stories and interviews, is that really the foundation of the support numbers and is that something he's going to be able to sustain with these next stated priorities or the next thing that comes once we emerge from the pandemic?

Sonja: I think it's absolutely a big part of the foundation of those numbers.

I mean, when you talk about things that the government can do that very immediately impact your life: being able to go see friends again, not having to worry about getting a deadly virus, like that has to rank above, you know, some more abstract issue.

While those issues are important to a lot of people, they don't have the same immediate real life impact that vaccines do.

And so, I think that's why we're seeing such high numbers during these first 100 days and we'll see what happens in the next 100 days of vaccines.

I think we'll probably play a little bit less of a role because now we're kind of through the phased rollout and it's just open to everybody.

And so, we're kinda just waiting for everyone to be able to make that vaccine appointment.

I do think that he'll face another task, if we get to a point where we can't get people to take the vaccine, and vaccine hesitancy becomes a real problem, and we can't reach herd immunity.

That's going to be another big test for him.

Jason: Well, Jay, he's already got that particular part of a test right now with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine being put on hold because he had to make some statements pretty quickly this week because it's critical in his mind first for this recovery that people don't let this be the thing that keeps them from getting vaccinated.

Jay: Right, and the Johnson and Johnson is an important one because its a single dose vaccine and so it's a lot easier to reach out to communities that are typically underserved.

You really only have to give one dose.

You don't have to say to track them down for the second dose.

And so, I think that's why this is so important to the governor and to this vaccine rollout.

And he's pointing to the numbers and yet if you look at the numbers six or seven people with serious side effects out of almost 7 million doses given, it's a pretty low fit here.

So yeah.

He's saying look, why are we pausing with this when the overwhelming odds are that everything's gonna be good with this vaccine?

Marty: I actually did my math homework on this one and so out of like 6.8 million Johnson and Johnson vaccines distributed and about seven cases, where there have been some blood clot issues, it's 0.00000081% have had any kind of complication.

Not committing any HIPPA violation speaking as the one who's got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine flowing in my veins.

You know I think that this was very much on the far side of overly cautious.

I understand that but I agree with the governor.

I think it can have a longer term negative impact if people only read the headline: Johnson and Johnson paused.

Now they don't want to get it and suddenly we're not vaccinating at the rate we need to be.

Jason: Right.

There seems to be a lot of optimism in spite of what we are hearing about this Johnson Johnson pause, which probably be temporary is we're hearing right now, but to our-- this poll that we did-- because we wanted to find out are Utahn's ready?

It turns out they are ready.

It's just a matter of when, and Sonja, I want to ask you about this and then Jay, some of your insights on the cross tabs on this.

We wanted to see when Utah's felt like they were feeling like things would get back to normal.

When they're comfortable going out and those numbers have improved substantially over this last month.

In fact, 53% of Utahns say they believe by this fall things are gonna be largely back to normal.

That is a big change from what we saw over just the last couple of months when so many people were so uncertain.

What's at the heart of the optimism in the interviews that you are having out there in the community?

Sonja: I think it's getting that shot in your arm.

I mean, it changes everything.

It opens everything up for you or not everything but it opens a lot of things up for you.

And I think that drives a lot of the optimism.

For me like I see myself getting vaccinated.

I see my friend's getting vaccinated.

That's really exciting and produces a lot of optimism.

And I think that also follows what public health experts have been telling us is that if we can continue at this clip and you know vaccinate people like we'd been vaccinating people.

We can get back to some sense of normalcy by fall or winter of this year.

But a question I always have when I see polls like this is like what is normal?

I don't know any more.

I don't know if normal is gonna be some new normal that we have to do for a little bit before we go back to like 2019 normal.

So, I think there's a lot of optimism but I think we're also not on the same page about what normal is.

Jason: True.

Marty: It's also a matter of polling the entire state and if you've driven around the state much over the last couple of months, we realize we're out of one mind on this anyway.

Go to Washington County, wear a mask somewhere, you get some funny looks in a lot of places.

Stay up on the Wasatch Front and then go somewhere without a mask on you get some of those same funny looks.

So I think there are pockets of the state that have different opinions on this but I think there will come a tipping point, where people who have been vaccinated, who recognize that we've had a lot of people in the high risk categories be vaccinated.

Once you get that shot or that second shot, you start to get that feeling of antsy-ness.

I want life to go back to normal.

I did my part, my arm hurt for a couple of days, I felt really tired.

Now I'm ready to go back to normal life.

Leave me alone.

Jason: Whatever the new normal is as opposed to the last year's normal.

Yeah, go ahead, Jay.

Jay: We're not going to have a day where someone holds a press conferences and says hey, it's over.

Go back to what you were doing.

I think it's going to be a gradual thing.

I think you're right, as more and more people become vaccinated they'll become more and more confident and as we-- if we see the numbers going down, as that happens, we'll gradually get to a point businesses will say, hey, you don't need a mask anymore and then, but you're right.

What's the new normal?

I don't know.

I think in our poll, most people are saying you can correct me if I'm wrong, three to six months or so they feel.

I think a lot of people are reacting to experiences they're having at work and their bosses are saying look we plan to come back in August or in July.

And I think that that's what's fueling that number as people see that.

And now we're fortunate, we haven't had some of the variance in some of the outbreaks that other states have in the North, Midwest, and the East.

And we can hope that that doesn't happen here, but for the moment it looks like the numbers are going down.

People are getting vaccinated and there's a real sense of optimism that we're going to have some semblance of normal sometime this summer.

Marty: I'm just disappointed.

No press conference?

I thought they were dusting off the mission accomplished banner.

Jay: Well, maybe but I kind of doubt it.

Jason: Before we leave this, I just want one more point, Jay, in this poll, which I thought was interesting is when it comes to the responses to the pandemic, in the realities of today.

And whatever's coming next couple days.

I thought it was interesting when we asked who should be making these decisions for the state and there are lots of decisions to be made.

There have been and there will be in the next couple of days, but 42% of Utahn's said the decisions should be made by a combination of these people: healthcare experts, economic leaders, and elected officials together.

What I thought was interesting was it was only 4% of people felt like decisions should be made by elected officials.

Only 3% said by economic leaders.

Jay: Right, right, and unfortunately, we've kind of had the elected officials sort of take the lead in terms of the mask mandate and that's why we asked that question was to try to understand who should be leading it.

I do think overall in this pandemic it has been a combination of health officials, and elected officials, and the public is saying that's kind of the way we want it.

We recognize that elected officials do have a role in issuing emergency orders and telling us what we need to do in order to combat this but we like them to do it in cooperation with health officials.

We don't want health officials to have all the power.

We want it to be a collaboration.

If you have health officials make the decision they might wait until the risk is zero or negative one and we'd be in this forever.

And that might be a very valid opinion from them.

If you had elected officials do after responding to people we might have thrown it all out already and still been the mess.

So a nice combination in some checks and balances I think is a system that's worked out fairly well for us.

And so, we like to have that in practice.

Jason: And that Constitution, particularly interested as you talk about separation of powers into this very interesting thing that's coming.

Sonja, we're gonna start with you because we had the very first redistricting commission, all right.

Talk about the separation of powers, all right.

This is quite the week, all right.

The very first meeting maybe that didn't go quite as some had hoped.

Sonja: It definitely didn't.

The meeting got zoom bombed, which for anyone who doesn't know what that is basically some people came in and they were they were spoofing people's names, playing explicit music, showing pornographic images, using racial slurs, and the commission just couldn't get it under control.

It went on for like 15 minutes and then eventually they decided to call the meeting.

I'm kinda surprised they let it go on for that long, but it was really interesting.

We're a year into this pandemic and I still have never had that happen to me.

But they tried their hardest.

For me what that illustrated was that this commission is really in its infancy.

It doesn't have the structure yet.

It doesn't have staff.

It doesn't have legal counsel.

Literally they don't have, you know, what they're doing in terms of IT setting up the virtual meeting.

And that'll kind of all fall into place, you know, we're not going to get the redistricting data from the Census Bureau until much later this year.

I believe it's in September.

And so, they have a lot of work to do in the meantime to kind of set up the infrastructure of the commission and to hear public feedback before they actually get into drawing those maps using the new population data.

Jason: Jay, you go-- wrote a great article about this.

Maybe give us some of that history right there which what led to this moment because this is back to 2018, right?

As proposition four.

Jay: Passed by less than 1% of the vote.

I don't-- we'll have to wait to see what happens at the next meeting, but I don't think this was a deliberate attack on that meeting because people don't like proposition four.

I've done a bit of research on zoom bombing.

What happens is people post in chat rooms links to public meetings, and then people just kind of gather and they attack.

I interviewed Rex Facer, the director of the commission and he thinks yeah, it was a deliberate attack and I think it was.

As soon as they would delete somebody from the meeting, somebody else would pop up, you know, it was relentless.

And so, they had no choice but to end the meeting.

But I think it'd be interesting to see the next time they meet if the same thing happens.

I don't think this is like the inland port where you have people who are targeting the meeting, you know, over and over again.

I think this was kind of a random sort of event.

He told me he's been talking with state technology people and they're looking at ways to keep this from happening again.

I don't know, I read a lot about zoom bombing around the country.

I don't know that there is a foolproof way to keep that from happening.

Jason: That might be true.

One of the issues apart from it happening itself, Marty, is that it disrupted what is really critical thing for the state of Utah.

There are candidates out there that are going to be directly impacted by these lines.

Marty: Yeah, and you know, I was trying to think through this this week, who does that advantage or who was at an advantage because everything is going to kind of come down to the wire whether or not they, you know, how quickly they can get this all sorted out.

I would think to to to benefit for an incumbent but it does throw in some interesting questions like what happens if CD2 and CD1 kind of morph a little bit.

And is Representative Chris Stewart suddenly in CD1 and what does that mean for Blake Moore or what does that mean for Chris Stewart?

And incumbents I think will have the advantage because they always have the advantage of being able to plan ahead.

This does put a wrinkle into that.

And particularly interesting, when you get a couple of incumbents, who may be impacted mutually.

Jason: On top of that what Sonja mentioned just a moment ago is so critical is normally by this time, we would have this census data.

We don't have that at all.

We don't even know what the population numbers are officially from those parts of the state.

Marty: It does show you sort of what the ripple effect of the pandemic is that we saw this going back even last year when we were going through primary season for, you know, all offices and the governor's race and in, you know, House races, and so on.

That there were delays-- there were things that changed in society that made it difficult to gather signatures.

There were things that made it difficult for how they can hold a convention.

How are we going to do-- all that process got eliminated and we're not really done with that because the census sort of got delayed.

And now, here it is.

Even as we're talking about vaccines and getting back to normal.

It's still delaying some of the process in our political process.

Jay: This is a really difficult thing to do and the commission set out some goals that they want communities of interest to be preserved, etcetera, etcetera.

You have to define what that means.

What is a community of interest and do we want competitive districts?

The fourth district was very competitive, but I spoke to a researcher this week from the Marin Institute has been looking at Utah and he says most of the people don't like that.

They don't like to live in a competitive district.

They want to be someplace where they feel like they can be represented and they worry that maybe the other guy will be representatives competitive district.

So, we have to tackle some of those issues and there won't be a lot of time to do it.

It's a difficult thing.

Marty: Sometimes will say they want a competitive district.

Ask people during the heat of the election, when it's Burgess Owens commercial and a Ben McAdams commercial nonstop throughout every commercial break and they'll say well maybe not so much with the competitive stuff.

So it probably depends on when you ask.

Jason: So it's a very interesting point, Sonja, there's the competitive nature of this thing too, but the question comes up in a place like Utah, considering our demographics has every time, particularly from the last time, we got to congressional seat is how do you do that representation?

There's the competitiveness, but there's also the urban rural issues at the heart of this thing.

In Utah it's this, you want the donut hole, you want the pizza slice, and right now we've got the pizza slices.

Tell me about the interviews you have and is that issue going to be ripe again is that going to be at the heart of some of this apart from just the competitive nature?

Sonja: Yeah, I think it absolutely will be.

I mean, so it's kind of what we used to have where there was one district that was basically you know Salt Lake County, and then two other districts that represented the rest of the state.

Now we have the pizza, where, you know, Salt Lake County is kind of cut up into a couple of different districts and then there's-- so they kind of fan out like back to the center of pizza.

Redistricting in Utah has really weird because two-thirds of our population live in this really concentrated area.

And so, when you get down to tryin' to divide up districts all of them have to have roughly equal population of people.

And so, you can't necessarily, you can't make a district that's like all Salt Lake County now because the population has grown so much.

That would be basically a third of the population that we all know there's four congressional districts.

That doesn't work.

And so, there's that question about you know, what's what's fair in terms of that geographic distribution.

There's also, you know, a lot of rural voters don't like they get lumped in with urban areas, right?

You have District 2 for example, which includes Salt Lake City, but also goes all the way down to St. George and includes a huge swath of rural Utah.

And so, you know if you live in rural Utah, it's like why am I being represented by the same person that someone in Salt Lake City is?

We have such different interests.

We have such different ways of looking at the world.

Our lives are so different.

And so that's part of the discussion as well.

Jason: Before we leave this entirely, Jay, because your articles I was reading too, it's an important point that this commission, I assume they're going to be able to meet for real in the near future.

They just get to submit proposals and the legislature is gets to decide if they like any of them and adopt any of the final outcomes.

Jay: They will submit three proposals and the legislature could decide to just throw them all in the trash can.

And Mr. Facer, the director says he doesn't think that will happen because he has such a distinguished group of people on that panel.

You do have a former Supreme Court Justice, Christine Durham.

You have Rob Bishop, former Congressman.

Lyle Hilliard was in the Senate.

And so, we'll see what happens if that's distinguished enough group that the legislature will want to ignore them.

Jason: That it will be interesting to watch and what you all said is so true.

You know, through political lives of some of these people is on the line literally on that line that is drawn which is so interesting.

I want you to get to a couple issues on the D.C. because they have not left some impacts on the state Utah, mostly our elected officials are getting involved in these substantially.

Marty, you're an old sports sports broadcaster, is that right?

Marty: Emeritus.

I still like free t-shirts and free food.

Jason: So, Mike Lee, goin' after baseball, professional baseball.

Antitrust issues.

So curious what you have to say and Jay on this particular issue because this is in the headlines and it's just so interesting.

Marty: Jay is probably far more the expert on the antitrust side, but you know they used to be an American politics.

Don't go after Apple Pie and baseball, right?

Instead we're gonna right after baseball.

So maybe that shows us where baseball sits in the sports landscape now, well below the NFL.

But it is interesting, I look at it and say from a communications standpoint, Mike Lee only wins with his base and fundraising base by going after something that's teed up for him by the Fox news crowd and ultimately nothing's going to come of it.

So it's a nice way to go raise some money and sort of have nothing issue at the end of the day 'cause it nothing's going to change.

Jason: So, it may not but Jay, but talk about talk about it because it's coming on the heels of major league baseball pulling out of Georgia.

Moving that game to Colorado.

So there's just politics wrapped up entirely around this key issue.

Jay: As well as and this is a 99 year old thing.

Baseball is exempt from antitrust legislation.

If you go way back to the teens.

There was a new league that came up called the Federal League and they were challenging the major leagues.

And so, what happens when you get competition, salaries went up, ticket prices went down, and profit margins became slimmer.

And so, the major league owners banded together and they basically bought out the owners of the Federal League team except for one team the Baltimore Terrapins.

And they sued and claimed that baseball was violating the Sherman Antitrust Law and it went to the Supreme Court.

And in 1922, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned a decision that some people say is the stupidest decision he ever made where he said that baseball is not engaged in Interstate commerce.

Therefore, it's not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Law.

And ever since then baseball has been immune from any real competition.

And I think under normal circumstances, you could get Democrats and Republicans to agree that yeah, maybe this is a dumb thing.

No other professional sport has this kind of protection, but when you do it in the context in the backdrop of the Georgia voting law becomes completely different.

Jason: Thirty seconds.

Marty: Change would only mean this that baseball teams would be more powerful in their ability to move from city to city.

Something the fans really don't want anyway, and you know, usually when you're talking about antitrust, you're talkin' about wage suppression, which is one of the things you said.

I don't think Mookie Betts with his 350 million dollar contract or Bryce Harper with his 313 million dollar contract can argue that their wages have been suppressed in any reasonable way.

Jason: It's going to have to be the last word on that one.

Just so interesting seeing these national issues right at home here in the state of Utah.

Thank you all for your great insights tonight and thank you for watching the "Hinckley Report."

This show is also available as a podcast on PBSUtah.org/HinckleyReport or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

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