⏰ Tick Tock
The court-mandated deadline for lawmakers to publish new congressional maps is tomorrow (9/25/2025)
Days until Election Day (11/4/2025) - 41
Days to the start of the 2026 Utah Legislature (1/20/2026) - 118
Days until the 2026 midterm elections (11/3/2026) - 405
Days until the 2028 presidential election (11/7/2028) - 1,140
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It's map day!
Utah’s redistricting committee meets later today to select congressional maps, which kicks off a 10-day comment period that will likely determine the state’s political boundaries for the 2026 midterms.
The committee released five proposed maps on Sunday, but there are two additional submissions that could emerge as alternatives.
The first comes from Sen. Luz Escamilla and Rep. Doug Owens, the two Democrats on the 10-person committee. Their proposal creates two smaller districts mostly centered around the population centers in Salt Lake and Utah Counties while dividing up the rest of the state across the other two.
Using precinct-level election data from Redistricter, had their map been in place for the 2024 election, Republican Donald Trump would have carried three of the four districts, while Democrat Kamala Harris would have prevailed in the seat centered around Salt Lake City.
Sen. Scott Sandall, the Senate chair from the 2021 and current redistricting efforts, has said that the "pizza slice" congressional map passed in 2021 initially came from a map submitted by a member of the public.
For that reason, it's worth paying attention to this map from Andrew Dugan, who hails from Frisco, Texas.
Dugan's map, which precisely fits the district-level population requirements, creates a single congressional seat that's mostly centered in the southern part of Salt Lake County but also pulls in parts of Alpine and Highland.
Curiously, the map offsets any electoral impact from heavily Democratic Salt Lake City by pairing it with the Republican stronghold in the southern part of the state.
Had this map been in place in 2024, Trump would have carried all four seats, but two of them would have been by 10.5 percent or less.
The knock against this map is that there's one district that does not achieve the urban/rural mix that the Republican majority in the legislature says is one of their guiding principles.
