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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox didn't watch the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night but caught enough highlights to have one candidate impress him.
The first-term Republican said Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that like most Americans, he had a lot of work to do and didn't have a couple of hours to watch TV in the evening.
"I did think that actually Nikki Haley really stood out to me," said Cox, adding he's partial to GOP governors and former governors who run for president. "I was very impressed with her, with her knowledge and her ability to communicate, her ability to communicate honestly, her ability to take on some really hard topics and do so in what I think was as a respectful manner."
Haley is the former two-term governor of South Carolina who also served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was among eight candidates to participate in Wednesday's GOP debate and is languishing in single digits in national polls, well behind former President Donald Trump, who did not attend the event.
During the debate, Haley was the first candidate on the stage to attack Trump by name, saying he added $8 trillion to the national debt and the next generation is never going to forgive current leaders for that.
Haley also said, "Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can't win a general election that way."
Cox has expressed a similar sentiment.
When asked during his monthly PBS news conference in Salt Lake City earlier this month about who he favors for president, Cox declined to throw his support behind a single candidate, but endorsed the six current or former Republican governors in the race. He said he doesn't think Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges in four separate cases, can win the presidency as the GOP nominee.
On Thursday, Cox said historically polling hasn't mattered much but the presidential race is unique with a former president running with a big lead who seems impervious to anything that would normally happen in politics.
"I don't know that there's anything that could change that direction, except that I do think it's important to point out that polling in just the last week show — and I think this just remarkable and also kind of insane — that 70% of Republicans actually don't even want Donald Trump to run and 75% of Democrats don't want Joe Biden to run," he said.
Still, Cox said the country is headed down a path where the "two least popular candidates ever" are likely to win their party's nomination.
On the program, Cox, the new chairman of the National Governors Association, also talked about his "disagree better" initiative to combat the "toxic partisanship that has infected our country, that has infected our neighborhoods and, quite frankly, that has infected our families."
Republicans and Democrats used to collaborate more, he said.
"Certainly, we've gotten away from that as a country," Cox said. "I think Americans are actually getting tired of it. We've seen some recent polling that shows that more Americans wish that members of Congress would work together."
