After months of signaling he was all-but-in the gubernatorial race, Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox became the first heavyweight to announce his 2020 campaign.
It was a slick, basically flawless launch, that occupied a prominent news slot statewide and bounced around social media all day long.
We don’t have much polling to go by, but back in January The Salt Lake Tribune and Hinckley Institute of Politics polled just Republicans and found that he was basically neck-and-neck with former Rep. Jason Chaffetz — 28% for Cox to 27% for Chaffetz — among the likeliest candidates at the time.