From Charlie Kirk to redistricting fights, a look at the biggest political stories of 2025

SALT LAKE CITY — President Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office kicked 2025 off in January, and with it came a nearly constant news cycle as Trump moved to remake American immigration policy, foreign policy, the federal workforce, higher education and more.

The speed with which things change makes it hard to remember what happened last month, let alone earlier this year, but a few stories stand out when looking back at the past year and promise to shape what's to come in the future of politics, both nationally and in Utah.

From the assassination of Charlie Kirk to Utah's fight over congressional map boundaries, here are five of the biggest political stories of 2025.

Charlie Kirk killed while speaking at UVU

The killing of Kirk while the conservative activist was speaking to students on the campus of Utah Valley University is arguably the biggest national political event of the past year. And it happened to occur in Orem — a city that dubs itself "Family City U.S.A."

The shooting followed years of rising tensions and instances of political violence — Trump survived two assassination attempts during the campaign in 2024, and a Minnesota lawmaker was shot and killed at her home over the summer — but Kirk's killing brought the issue home for Utahns, many of whom were heartbroken at the death of a powerful figure within the conservative movement.

"I think Utah thinks we do things better," said Leah Murray, the director of Weber State University's Walker Institute of Politics and Public Service. "I think that rocked Utah a bit. ... To a certain extent, I think it shook the way we think about political violence. Maybe we still have some work to do in this state to make sure that political violence doesn't find a place here or it's not seen as acceptable here."

It was a sentiment shared by Gov. Spencer Cox, who said he had hoped the suspect would turn out to be an outsider to Utah. Police eventually arrested Tyler James Robinson of Washington, Washington County, suspected of shooting and killing Kirk.

"I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say, 'Hey, we don't do that here.' And indeed, Utah is a special place," the governor said the day following Robinson's arrest. "But it did happen here, and it was one of us."

The shooting, which occurred at Utah's largest university, unsettled thousands who witnessed it live and has threatened to cast a pall over future political gatherings. A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll conducted in the days after Kirk's death showed nearly two-thirds of Utahns said they did not feel safe attending political events, and more than half said they were less likely to do so in the future.

"I think the students, staff and faculty were going through that trauma of losing the feeling of safety in a place that was safe and kind and loving for them, and I could relate to all of that deeply and viscerally and in real time," UVU President Astrid Tuminez told the "Deseret Voices" podcast in November, recounting the day of Kirk's killing and how she felt after the unexpected death of her husband earlier in the year.

"When your context is totally blasted apart in that manner or you see a murder in front of you, I think it changes the nature. You think about, can I still work there? Can I still study there?" she said.

Thousands of supporters still turned out for a Turning Point USA rally at Utah State University at the end of September. The event was held with a high level of security, something that could become more normal at political events following Kirk's death.

Between Kirk's shooting, the assassinations in Minnesota and the killing of Arthur Folasa Ah Loo during a "No Kings" protest in June, 2025 felt like a "particularly violent" year to Holly Richardson, a former Utah state lawmaker and co-host of KSL NewsRadio's "Inside Sources."

"There are people who have been shot and killed because of their politics," she said. "So I think that as we go into the next year — we'll have a legislative session here in Utah, but we'll have national conversations because we have a federal election in 2026 — so I really think the key takeaway is we have to be really careful in our words and how we paint people who disagree with us."

Redistricting fight heats up

Redistricting, the process of redrawing congressional district boundaries that typically occurs after each decennial census, took an unexpected turn in the national spotlight in 2025, after Trump urged lawmakers in Texas' Republican-controlled Legislature to redraw their districts to give the GOP a leg up in the 2026 midterm elections.

At the same time, Utah has been moving in the opposite direction thanks to a court-ordered redistricting plan that would flip one of the state's four congressional districts into the Democratic column. Judge Dianna Gibson's August ruling throwing out the maps adopted by lawmakers in 2021 and a follow-up decision in November selecting the map with a strong Democratic district have infuriated GOP lawmakers who have pledged to appeal to the Supreme Court, meaning the issue will remain unresolved at year's end and stretch into 2026 as the midterms approach.

"The redistricting story is one that's really interesting, because it felt like it was a done deal, but it wasn't a done deal," Richardson said. "All fall, what we have seen is a back-and-forth between the Utah Legislature and the Utah courts, and we have some really interesting splits between what's the proper role of each branch of government, and how do you interpret the Utah Constitution."

Lawmakers argue the Constitution gives them sole authority to draw political boundaries, while plaintiffs who sued the Legislature said lawmakers violated the people's right to alter or reform their government, which was expressed in the anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative Proposition 4 in 2018.

"What it's done is really introduced a lot of uncertainty for the 2026 election cycle," Richardson added, "because it's not actually settled (whether) the maps that the judge said, 'These are the ones that apply for 2026,' will actually hold for the entire cycle."

If the map does hold, it could have consequences for the types of representation Utahns see in Congress going forward, according to Murray. Although all four seats currently lean Republican, the new map creates a Democratic district by essentially packing more liberal voters into one district and diluting their vote share across the other three that favor the GOP.

"To a certain extent, every Democrat in the state now lives in that district, which means there are not as many Democrats in the other three," Murray said.

The same could be said of Republicans, who are more concentrated in the other three districts.

"All four of our districts now have an incentive to have the most right-leaning or left-leaning candidate," Murray said. "So, these candidates running in a primary are going to move as far to the left or to the right as possible, and I think none of that helps with our political discourse."

Public unions push back

The fight over redistricting wasn't the only conflict that embroiled the Legislature in 2025 — and it wasn't the only fight that pitted the Legislature against the people's power to pass or repeal laws on their own. After the passage of a bill that would have restricted the rights of public unions to collectively bargain on behalf of their members, a coalition of labor groups, both public and private, launched a referendum to have the law overturned.

The groups ultimately submitted more than 320,000 signatures to have the referendum placed on the ballot, more than double the required amount. Lawmakers ultimately agreed to repeal the law in a special session in December and promised to work with unions on a solution going forward.

By repealing HB267, lawmakers also avoided having the referendum on the ballot in November, when they are also expected to propose a constitutional amendment that could limit the effectiveness of citizen-led initiatives in light of the rulings on redistricting. In that way, the issues are largely tied together, according to Murray.

"I read those closely together," she said. "I read the redistricting and the organizing as part of the same conversation happening institutionally in our state, and that is: 'What is the role of direct democracy?'"

Murray said the midterms are shaping up to look similar to the 2018 elections, when Trump was in his first term in office and multiple ballot initiatives passed in Utah.

"I would not want to be on that ballot with any kind of initiative that was going against a 'people are in control, people have power' kind of grain," she added.

Lawmakers have argued the bill was intended to make it so that all employees have representation, because not all public employees are represented by unions. It's a valid discussion to have about ways to better give public employees a voice, according to Richardson, but she said the signatures sent a strong message to lawmakers.

"If you have that many people willing to do signatures that quickly, that's a really clear message to the Legislature that this was not popular and that if it were to be on the ballot in November of 2026, it would have passed," she said.

Spencer Cox in the spotlight

It would be hard to talk about the assassination of Kirk and its aftermath without mentioning Cox, who has spent the past several years as governor promoting civility and used his platform in the days after the assassination to urge the nation to find an alternative to violence.

"This is certainly about the tragic death, assassination, political assassination of Charlie Kirk. But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us," Cox said when he took the microphone at a press conference announcing the arrest of a suspect. "It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been and who we could be in better times."

"This is our moment," he added. "Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp? And again, it's a choice. It's a choice, and every one of us gets to make that choice."

Cox has since spoken out against political violence alongside Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, at the Washington National Cathedral and raised his national profile in interviews with outlets such as NPR and the Atlantic.

He's even writing a book, something prospective presidential candidates often do to test the waters. But Cox insists: "Not running for president. Have no interest in running for president."

"I absolutely think he's running for president," Murray said, with the caveat that she has no inside information, just a hunch. "I think he is positioning himself to be a national leader for the Republican Party as it comes out of a Trump administration.

Cox's stance on civility could be a potent antidote to Trump's pugnacity, but it's his stance on social media and technology that caused a top columnist for Politico to urge the governor to run for president in 2028.

Jonathan Martin said Cox is one of the most passionate tech skeptics in the country and quotes the governor during his speech at the National Cathedral, when he said: "If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at the social media companies. These are the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the history of the world, and they're profiting off of destroying our kids and destroying our country."

Martin and others admit Cox may be a long shot but think his candidacy would center the conversation around technology just as artificial intelligence is poised to have a dramatic impact on modern life. Cox was an early adopter of social media, but has since soured on the technology, a path likely mirrored by many Americans.

And after a decade of living with social media, some Americans may be more skeptical of the next big thing promised by Silicon Valley.

Murray said her son came home from basketball practice recently with a T-shirt made by his coach but said he couldn't wear it because it featured an image generated by AI.

"I was like, 'This is your basketball coach giving you a T-shirt. Who cares if it's AI?'" she said. "But it's the point where we say, 'Man, we were burned on social media, the next big tech gadget is not helpful.' ... My son is saying to me, 'I'm not wearing this T-shirt.' He never said, 'I'm not turning on Instagram,' the skepticism came in with Big Tech. And AI is probably going to get hurt by that in a way that Instagram was not hurt by it."

Whether Cox changes his mind about running or not, 2025 put him — and Utah — in the national spotlight in a big way.

"The fact that there's a conversation around it, that's not bad for Utah. That's good for Utah," Richardson said.

Trump's second first year

How to describe the first year of Trump's second term in office?

"It's chaotic, and I think there's a lot of uncertainty," Richardson said. "I like to think that I can't be surprised, but I'm surprised almost every day at something new from the federal government. I did not see that one coming. ... It's been a year of disruption."

Murray added: "It's just loud."

Many Utah Republicans have celebrated Trump's relentless approach to ramping up deportations, slashing government agencies and enacting broad tariffs. But some Utahns have pushed back in large protests throughout the year, and even some Republicans in the Legislature have criticized Trump's recent order seeking to block state regulation of AI.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, is resigning her seat in Congress next week after a split with the president, and more departures could come in the next year as Trump's status as a lame-duck president sets in with the GOP.

"People running for president are really cautious that they don't want to run against Donald Trump, and I think we've got maybe five minutes left of that," Murray said. "The Trump-MAGA coalition doesn't seem as powerful as it once did. There's absolutely daylight between some of those people."

Richardson agreed, saying the number of Republicans willing to push back on the White House will likely increase.

"We're making the assumption that Donald Trump is a lame-duck president, that he will not run again in 2028," she said. "It's an assumption. I'm not saying it's a guarantee. Can't predict anything, but it is interesting."

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