"Sometimes people mistake my calm tone for not being feisty and getting my teeth dug into things — and they could not be more incorrect."
That's what Brad Wilson, the Speaker of the Utah House of Representatives until recently and now a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat opening up as a result of Mitt Romney's retirement, told me this week.
"Just because you're not screaming and yelling does not mean you do not dig in on issues and refuse to give up," the 13-year veteran of the Beehive State's legislature emphasized. "I wouldn't have accomplished what we've accomplished...without being pretty stubborn. And that's a good thing."
For conservatives in Utah — and there are a lot of them — that was a good thing. Representative-turned-Speaker Wilson was chosen unanimously, twice, to wield the House gavel, a level of support from his peers that is especially foreign to the federal lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol down the road from where we met in D.C. to talk about his just-announced campaign.
During his time in the Utah legislature, Wilson ushered in victories for conservatives that included the largest tax cuts in state history, school choice legislation, constitutional carry, guardrails against COVID mandates, and strong protections for the unborn in the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs opinion (Utah's pro-life law remains enjoined amid a legal challenge from Planned Parenthood). Wilson, however, almost wasn't a part of any of those conservative victories.
"Sometimes people say I've been an 'accidental politician,'" Wilson told me of his entry to politics. "I think there's some truth to that." In 2010, the businessman and community leader was recruited to run by friends who thought the state legislature could use his voice and point of view. "I had 24 hours to decide whether or not to even run," Wilson recalled. "It was a very quick decision — ended up filing, running, winning, and the rest is sort of history."
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Although public service "was never even on my bucket list," Wilson explained, "it's been a really great experience and I feel like I've made a difference."
Wilson's now-former colleagues in the state legislature seem to agree that he's made a difference — already, a majority of Utah lawmakers have endorsed his U.S. Senate bid according to campaign literature, hoping to see the "accidental politician" take his businessman point of view and his experience leading the Utah House to Washington.
That so many state lawmakers back Wilson is unsurprising given the House's unanimous expressions of confidence in his abilities twice over. But his ability to unify and draw 100 percent support from Utah's ideologically diverse GOP-dominated legislature and become speaker could serve him well in Congress amid an ever-fracturing Republican contingent barely contained by the Capitol's dome.
Now, however, it's not just up to Wilson's state legislative colleagues to decide whether he gets the job, it's Utah's voters — beginning with the Republican primary scheduled for next June.
As Wilson made his case for why he's the candidate Utahns should pick out of the handful of declared GOP candidates, he said he fits what Utahns are looking for. "The people of our state feel very strongly, based on what I've been hearing for the last six months, that they want to have someone that understands our state, that has lived in our state for the majority of their life or all their life, and can really strongly represent their conservative values," said Wilson.
Invoking the legendary Senator Orrin Hatch who served from 1977 to 2019 and passed away in 2022, Wilson said his state has a "strong record of having strong, hardworking conservatives that like to really make a difference back in Washington. I think I'm cut from that cloth," he told me.
Describing the Utah-western-state paradigm through which he sees the world as one where "we do not like the federal government in our business" and "want them in our business a lot less," Wilson commented that "the reason Utah is so successful as a state" is because its one where "government stays out of the way."
With that point of view seemingly being shared by many of his fellow Utahns, Wilson explained that his state's residents are "just baffled" by the fact that federal legislators "can't get their act together on the budget and manage the fiscal affairs of the country better." Each time he talks to voters, Wilson said, they tell him to "go fix that."
In Salt Lake City, Wilson said the tax cuts came not "because the economy was growing and the revenues were growing" but "because we constrained spending. We have specific tools and levers we use to make sure that our spending can't get out of control," he explained, allowing the legislature to "give that money back to Utahns. It seems like that's something here that just isn't even understood," he emphasized of D.C.'s love affair with spending taxpayer dollars.
While keeping Utah's fiscal house in order during his years in Salt Lake City may have been one thing, Wilson also explained the national issues he's looking to tackle in Washington while explaining he is "not naive to to think it's as simple as running a state, but numbers are numbers."
Among the issues Wilson hopes to work on in Washington for his fellow Utahns back west? Energy policy. "We've gone from being a country that's energy independent to one that's energy dependent, and at the same time in doing that — which is a self-inflicted wound — we've created inflation," Wilson said. Rising prices for energy and other needs are hitting Utahns and "hurting their ability to raise their kids, to pay their bills, to have a quality of life that matters, and we're doing it at the expense of the quality life of everyone in Utah," he added of the state-level impact of the energy policies enacted by President Biden and congressional Democrats.
"We are a western, energy producing state," said Wilson, hyping up his state's coal production. "Our coal is significantly cleaner than the coal in China, yet we're being told to shut that down while we're watching China and other countries make the air dirtier and dirtier at our expense," he explained. "Utahns are fed up with this and I don't blame them."
Another notable federal overreach into the everyday lives of Utahns is D.C.'s bungling of federal lands, a "huge issue" in Utah according to Wilson. "The last time Washington has paid the right kind of attention to that issue was when President Trump came out and downsized a couple national monuments that Obama created. Of course, the whipsawing of our state continues with, as soon as Biden became president, he undid all of that," Wilson explained. "We know we can manage that land better and more responsibly and more environmentally friendly than the federal government is, yet we're being prohibited from doing it."
"What I think has so many people dismayed in Utah is, what we think of as the core functions of government" — defined by Wilson as "national defense, some basic infrastructure, some very very simple regulation" — "we are so far outside the bounds of all of that," Wilson continued in a discussion of the proper role of government compared to where things are now. "What Utahns want, and I think honestly what most Americans want, is to get government back into that place where it's providing for the essential government services that only government can provide."
On the role-of-government front, Wilson is also enthusiastic about the Supreme Court's recent opinions reining in the federal government by checking the executive branch's power. "I love what the Supreme Court has done in terms of trying to return federalism back to the balance that it should have struck over the last number of decades on a number of issues — not just the Dobbs decision — and hopefully we see more and more of that out of the Court."
On Dobbs and the debate over legislation to protect life, Wilson emphasized that he stands by the strongly pro-life trigger law passed by the legislature in while he was speaker, one that for now remains enjoined during a court challenge brought by Planned Parenthood.
"Utah is a red state, is a pro-life state, and the Dobbs decision said 'let local states make this decision for themselves,' and Utah has — in a very overwhelming way — been clear on what lawmakers in our state feel is the right policy." That policy, passed in 2020, protects life through all nine months of pregnancy and makes exceptions for the life of the mother, in cases of rape and incest reported to police, and for fetal anomalies verified by two doctors.
When asked whether a federal law protecting the unborn should be enacted, Wilson said "where it belongs right now is at the state level. If we were to see something come up at the federal level we'd have to see what that looked like," he explained. "If it's in conflict with what we've got in Utah, that would be problematic," he said as an example. With so much still being debated as hypotheticals, Wilson noted it's best to consider such proposals for federal laws dealing with abortion "on a case by case basis."
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