OREM, Utah, Sept. 27, 2022 (Gephardt Daily) — Locked in a neck-and-neck race with independent candidate Evan McMullin, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, is bolstering his re-election bid with a high-profile endorsement.
Lee’s campaign released a video endorsement Tuesday from former Vice President Mike Pence, who calls Lee a “principled” leader and “the only conservative in this race.”
“I’m here for one reason and one reason only, and that is that Utah and America need six more years of Sen. Mike Lee in a Republican majority in the United States Senate,” Pence says in the endorsement video. “Our nation, in so many ways, is in crisis. And now more than ever we need strong, principled, conservative leadership in the United States Senate.”
Lee and Pence filmed the endorsement while the former vice president was in Utah to speak Sept. 20 at Utah Valley University, where Lee and McMullin are scheduled to debate Oct. 17.
“My hope and my prayer is that when we re-elect Sen. Mike Lee here in Utah, he’ll be part of a new Republican majority in the United States Senate to begin to steer our nation back to the policies that made our country strong and secure and prosperous during the Trump-Pence administration,” Pence says.
Lee, who first took office in January 2011, is locked in a tight race with McMullin in his bid for a third term in the Senate.
McMullin, who once had Lee’s support as an independent candidate for president against Donald Trump in 2016, again has allies across party lines in his bid to unseat the pro-Trump incumbent.
A recent Deseret News poll indicates the race is neck and neck with Election Day now just six weeks away.
The Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics survey published Sept. 22 indicates 36% of Utahns would vote for Lee, while 34% would choose McMullin if the election were held today. Dan Jones & Associates surveyed 815 registered Utah voters for the poll, which has a 3.4% margin of error.
Polling for the Utah Debate Commission released Sept. 19 showed Lee with an 11-point lead over McMullin. Of the roughly 500 Utah voters polled, 48.1 percent said they would vote for Lee, while 37.3% favored McMullin. The poll has a 4.3% margin of error.
Pence calls Lee “a man whose faith, whose dedication to his family and whose commitment to conservative principles is unparalleled in the United States Senate. And so I say to all the good people here in Utah, join me and my family and people all across this country in supporting the re-election of the only conservative in this race.”
Lee referred to Pence as his “good friend” in the video, saying, “He and I both overlapped a little bit in Congress before he was governor of Indiana, and then I interacted with him constantly while he was the president of the Senate.”
Pence was invited to UVU as a guest of the Gary R. Herbert Institute for Public Policy and spoke at a forum designed to promote civil dialogue and diversity of thought, according to a news release from the university.
Speaking to a crowd of nearly 700 at UVU’s Noorda Center for the Performing Arts, Pence covered several topics, including including American culture, liberty, the economy, education, immigration, anti-abortion politics and political divisiveness, the release states.
