John Curtis started walking each morning at 4:30. He slept in an RV, ate constantly, and by his own accounting finished 250 miles with zero blisters. The route ran from Dingle, Idaho, his mother's birthplace, to the Stadium of Fire in Provo, where he arrived on the Fourth of July. Along the way, he handed out red, white, and blue socks with his own face stitched into them. Before he left Dingle, a cousin gave him a marble that had turned up inside the wall of an old family home during a remodel. Nobody knows how old it is. Curtis carried it the whole way as a token of the pioneer era.
His office billed the walk as a celebration of the country's 250th birthday, and Curtis insisted it had nothing to do with his political future. The insistence was necessary because of what happened in May. Politico reported that Curtis's inner circle was canvassing Utah donors to gauge support for a 2028 run for governor and asking those donors to hold their money until Curtis decides. A longtime friend described the senator's standard answer on the subject: "Have I said hell no lately?"
Curtis told the Deseret News the next day that "that race is so far out there" and that his focus is on the Senate. His chief of staff, Corey Norman, appeared on ABC4's Inside Utah Politics and declined to close the door, instead saying that Curtis "would make an exceptional governor."
2007
To understand how Curtis wins, start with the last time he lost.
In 2007, a state House seat opened up in Provo. Curtis, a few years back, from a detour through the Democratic Party, competed for the appointment. Among the delegates, he won. He got one more vote than Chris Herrod. Under the rules, the governor made the final call and picked Herrod.
That detour deserves a sentence because his opponents never let it go. In 2000, Curtis ran for the Utah State Senate as a Democrat against Curt Bramble and lost by 33 points, then chaired the Utah County Democratic Party before returning to the GOP. The delegate class filed it all away.
So Curtis quit asking insiders for permission. He won the nonpartisan Provo mayor's office in 2009, won again in 2013 with 86 percent of the vote, and left with approval ratings in the nineties. When Jason Chaffetz quit Congress six months into his fifth term in 2017, Curtis ran for the seat. Convention delegates eliminated him in the early rounds and nominated Herrod. It didn't matter. Curtis had gathered signatures under SB54, the 2014 law that created a second path to the primary ballot, and he beat Herrod 43-32 in August. Herrod refused to concede for three days while Utah County counted mail ballots, hoping late votes would break his way, and finally reached Curtis, who was on vacation, to give up the race. Tanner Ainge, who finished third, spent part of election night standing alone outside his Orem headquarters, looking at the Wasatch.
The next seven years ran on repeat. Curtis beat Herrod again in the 2018 primary with more than 73 percent, beat him a third time in 2022, and won four general elections in a district where that part was never in doubt. Then Mitt Romney retired. At the April 2024 state convention, delegates chose Trump-endorsed Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs over Curtis by nearly 70 to 30. Curtis took the signature path to the primary and won it with 48.7 percent to Staggs's 32.7, per the state's official canvass, carrying all four congressional districts against a candidate endorsed by a sitting president. In November, he took 62.6 percent statewide.
Curtis has lost twice in his life: as a Democrat in Utah County and in a room where party insiders held the pen. He has never won a contested Republican convention for federal office. He has never lost a primary or general election as a Republican. Every one of those wins ran through the signature path, and he knows it. Without SB54, he told the Deseret News in 2017, he "wouldn't still be in the race."
Chaffetz
Curtis has never run against anyone like Jason Chaffetz.
His general election opponents were a physician, a sociology professor, a podcaster who lived outside the district, and a ski mountaineer. His primary opponents were known to delegates and nobody else: Herrod, or credentialed and invisible, Brad Wilson. Wilson came into 2024 as a former Speaker of the Utah House with millions in the bank and the governor's endorsement, and a pre-primary poll found 58 percent of Republican voters had never heard of him or had no opinion. For Staggs, the figure was nearly 70 percent. Some of Curtis's margin in every one of these races was simply that voters recognized him.
Chaffetz erases that. He chaired the House Oversight Committee, has spent nearly a decade on Fox News, and keeps a podcast running between hits. He told delegates at this spring's convention he was considering the race, and he has already moved his federal PAC balance into a state-level Utah Victory PAC. If the president engages in the primary, and he engaged in Utah's last Senate primary, the likeliest landing spot for his endorsement is the man defending his administration on television several nights a week. Curtis beat a Trump endorsement once. Staggs had the blessing without the fame. Chaffetz would have both, and that combination has not been tested against Curtis or anyone else in a Utah statewide race.
What Curtis brings is everything short of fame. He doesn't face Senate reelection until 2030, so a loss costs him nothing but time. The signature path exists in gubernatorial races, and Spencer Cox lost his own convention to Phil Lyman in 2024 but won the primary and the state anyway. Curtis holds the broadest partisan appeal of Utah's top elected officials. And there is the money. Jay Faison, the North Carolina billionaire whose super PAC spent more than $5 million backing Curtis in 2024, faces no contribution limits in a state race because Utah imposes no limits on contributions to state candidates. Curtis can also move his federal war chest into a state account. The entire Republican field in Utah's last open governor's race spent about $8 million combined. Curtis could clear that number by himself.
The Cox rumor
For several weeks, sources have been telling Utahn that if Curtis wins the governorship, he intends to appoint Spencer Cox to fill his own Senate seat.
That is a rumor. No outlet has reported it. Neither the Curtis operation nor the governor's office has confirmed it, and Utahn has not independently verified that any such understanding exists. The reason to take it seriously is that the mechanics work, and the people repeating it have clearly done the math.
Utah law, at Section 20A-1-502 of the election code, fills a U.S. Senate vacancy by gubernatorial appointment from a list of three names. The list used to come from the departed senator's party central committee. After the mess of Chaffetz's resignation, the Legislature took that power for itself and now submits three nominees from the vacating senator's party to the governor. Some federal summaries, including the Congressional Research Service, still describe the old party-committee version. The legislative version is current law.
Now the calendar. Curtis's Senate term runs to January 2031. Cox leaves office in early January 2029, days before the new governor is sworn in. Utah has no resign-to-run law. Curtis could hold his Senate seat through the election and time his resignation to take effect after his inauguration, which would put the vacancy on Governor Curtis's watch. He would appoint his own successor to the United States Senate from three names supplied by a Legislature his party controls entirely. The appointee would serve until the seat's regular 2030 election.
If the name is Cox, the whole thing reads as a trade. Curtis takes the office Cox is leaving. Cox takes the office Curtis is leaving, within days, without facing a convention, a primary, or a voter. Cox is broadly popular with rank-and-file Republicans, about two-thirds of whom view him favorably, and despised by the convention class that booed him in 2024. Chaffetz would not have to prove a handshake. He would only have to describe the arrangement out loud at every stop between here and the primary, to an audience already convinced that both men represent a party establishment that takes care of its own.
There is also what Cox has said. In December 2024, he told reporters he was making his retirement public specifically so Utahns could hold him to it: "This will be my last term."
The attack Curtis can't make
The cleanest attack on Chaffetz has always been the resignation. He asked for a fifth term in the 3rd District in 2016, quit six months into it, and went to Fox. In a state that prizes steadiness, walking out on the voters is a durable charge, and Curtis owes his congressional career to the vacancy it created.
He cannot use it. A Governor Curtis would be a man who asked Utahns for six years in the Senate and left after four, having spent his second year exploring the exit. His May statement to the Deseret News, that he had spent no time at all on plans to leave the Senate for another office, will be read back to him in every debate. Chaffetz quit early, and the seat went to Curtis. Curtis would quit early, and if the rumor holds, the seat would go to Cox.
The race, if it happens, comes down to this. Curtis enters with a 51 percent statewide approval rating, plenty of money, a free shot, and a primary electorate that has chosen him over the movement candidate every time it has been asked. Whether his name still means more to Republican primary voters than a decade of Chaffetz on Fox News is a question no public poll has tested, and it may be the question the whole race turns on. Utah's Republican primary voters have never once picked the Fox News lane over the establishment lane in a contested statewide race. The Fox News lane has also never put up a candidate as well-known and well-funded as Chaffetz.
Curtis says the walk was about the country. He carried a marble across 250 miles that nobody can date, from a house his ancestors built, and he has eighteen months to decide whether the answer is still hell no.
