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SALT LAKE CITY — There's a bigger disconnect between Republican voters and state delegates on the top issues facing Utah than among Democrats, according to a new Utah Foundation survey released Thursday.
The survey of state party delegates for the 2016 Utah Priorities Project found that Republican voters see health care as the most important issue, but Republican delegates place states' rights at the top of the list.
The same delegates said public lands, also an issue seen as pitting the state against the federal government, ranked No. 4, behind state taxes and government spending, and K-12 education. Health care was sixth on their list.
GOP voters put public lands at the bottom of their top 10 list of issues and ranked states' rights in sixth place. And two of the same voters' priorities, crime at No. 4, and air quality at No. 7, didn't even make the Republican delegates' list.
But the lists for Democratic voters and state delegates were "remarkably alike," the report found. Both groups agreed air quality was their biggest priority, followed by health care and the environment.
Although Democratic voters and delegates had the same issues on their lists, there were some slight differences. Democratic voters ranked homelessness and poverty higher and K-12 education lower than delegates.
Another finding in the survey of 973 delegates by Dan Jones & Associates earlier this month was that Republican delegates are more "consistently conservative" than Republican voters.
But Utah's GOP, which holds a majority in the state, is also only "slightly more conservative" than national Republicans. Utah's Democratic voters and delegates, though, are "much more liberal" than their national counterparts, the survey found.
Utah Democratic Party Chairman Peter Corroon said that's because the population is concentrated along the Wasatch Front and an urban population tends to be more liberal.
"Utah's not a rural state like we think it is," Corroon said during a forum on the survey Thursday at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics. "It's an urban state where 80 percent of our people live within an hour of Salt Lake City."
Republicans and Democrats are holding their state conventions Saturday, and for the first time, they'll nominate candidates under a new system that allows an alternative path to the primary ballot: gathering voter signatures.
While the Utah GOP has battled unsuccessfully to stop the new system from taking effect, Corroon said it could help "deal with some of the skewing that we see" between the views of voters and delegates.
For Kathleen Anderson, president of the Utah Federation of Republican Women, the answer may be increasing the number of women delegates.
She said while 56 percent of Republican voters are female, women make up only 24 percent of delegates. Yet among Democrats, 47 percent of the delegates are women.
Anderson, who also spoke at the Hinckley Institute forum, said women need to be heard in the GOP.
"We need their voice at the table to elevate the conversation and speak up on these issues," she said, "because every issue is a woman's issue."
Contributing: Ladd Egan
