(From left above) Incumbent members of the state House of Representatives Casey Snider, Dan Johnson and Mike Petersen cruised to victory in midtern balloting on Tuesday.
CACHE COUNTY — The climax of midterm mail-in balloting on Nov. 8 turned out to be a good night for local Republicans in the state House of Representatives.
Scoring decisive victories were Mike Peterson in House District 2, Dan Johnson in House District 3 and Casey Snider in House District 5.
Petersen defeated Democrat Holly Gunther of North Logan in their race by a margin of nearly 45 percent.
As expected, Petersen played the solidly conservative card, repeating the strategy that was successful with local voters in 2020 when he also defeated former incumbent Val Potter in the primary and Gunther in the general election.
The final count of ballots in the House District 2 race was 6,738 for Petersen and 2,607 for Gunther.
In District 3, Johnson edged Belmont in the only really competitive local House race by nearly 15 percent.
Belmont is a hydrologist in the S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources at Utah State University, or as he put it simply “a water scientist.”
During the campaign, Belmont made much of the fact that there was no one with practical water knowledge in the Legislature at a time when Utah is trying to cope with the effect of an historic drought.
But local voters still elected to go with the tried and true Johnson.
The final count in House District 3 was 4,137 votes for Johnson versus 3,094 for Belmont.
Finally, Snider claimed victory over the largely unknown write-in candidate Cary J. Youmans in District 5.
The Paradise native captured a stunning 96 percent of about 8,500 votes in District 5, compared to less than 1 percent for Youmans, an instructor in the USU music program.
Basically, the two candidates were talking different languages in the campaign.
Snider was dealing with real-world issues facing the Utah Legislature, especially the drought and inflation.
Meanwhile, the admitted protest candidate was talking about ideological issues like gay rights and de-militarizing the police that never really caught on with voters.
The local incumbents will now return to the Legislature where Republicans will once again have a super-majority.