With Utah’s caucus night on March 5, 2024 resolved, the results for Kane County’s presidential preference are in, along with the selected delegates and precinct officials. While official numbers are still being confirmed, the preliminary count put the Republican preference for their presidential candidate overwhelmingly in Donald Trump’s favor. While there were a few Nikki Haley supporters on site, they were in the minority compared to those putting forward the former president for a second term.
The Republican caucus was well attended, with party chair Boyd Corry conservatively estimating attendance at over 250 registered voters from the four local precincts being hosted in that location - in fact, the Republican caucuses were so well attended statewide that the new online voter registration service crashed due to overwhelming bandwidth demands. Corry offered credit and praise to the on-site IT and registration processing volunteers, who spent the first few hours of the evening improvising workarounds for the crashed system, up to and including manually combing through the lieutenant governor’s registered voter base for names. Registered Republicans who had preregistered for the caucus had fewer problems, providing a QR code scan that worked more consistently than the online registration reference system.
While most of the attention and debate at the caucus was focused on the presidential primary this year, most of the official proceedings were dedicated to the selection process for state and county delegates from each precinct. Final results here are still pending with confirmation and data on the way, but according to local Republican party leaders, Kane County’s 11 state delegates and around 72 county delegates were successfully selected and are generally prepared for their responsibilities in the upcoming County Convention (23 March) and State Convention (27 April).
One of the decisions of consequence set forth for these county delegates will be the decision between Wade Heaton and Gwen Brown for Heaton’s incumbent Kane County Commission seat - while there was much talk on the topic, few of the provincial delegates the Southern Utah News spoke to were willing to predict the convention result either way. The general expectation from the delegates was that neither candidate would be outright chosen in the convention and that the race would be decided at the primary.
For more in-depth schedules and voter information, as well as access to exact numbers once they have been confirmed and reported, readers can visit vote.utah.gov.
