Utah State Senator Nate Blouin is betting his congressional campaign on the argument that he's the only progressive in the Democratic CD1 primary built to actually win.
In our interview, Blouin talks about his campaign commissioning an independent poll of the three-way progressive split in the race between himself, Liban Mohamed, and Michael Farrell, and his pledge to drop out if the results show he's not the strongest candidate against Ben McAdams. Blouin argues with three progressives on the ballot, dividing the vote is a gift to the moderate wing of the party.
Blouin also pushed back on last month's convention results, where Mohamed narrowly edged McAdams for the top spot, suggesting the delegate process is too small a sample to settle the question of who can actually win a primary.
"Convention is a small swath of the electorate," he said, noting his campaign used grassroots organizing to collect the 7,000 petition signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Blouin frames the race less as a left-versus-center fight than a top-versus-bottom one and says that pitch will resonate with independent voters who make up the largest single bloc in the redrawn district. He pointed to the Stratos data center controversy in Box Elder County as the kind of issue that cuts across traditional ideological lines, calling for a national moratorium on data center development and attacking what he described as the corruption built into MIDA's ability to fast-track projects around local oversight.
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