Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox addressed the impact of last week’s election results during a news conference broadcast by PBS Utah on Monday, Nov. 9, 2026. Cox stated that Republicans ‘suffered a historic defeat’ across the country, noting the extent of the blue wave’s impact in Utah, particularly in state legislative races.
The massive blue wave that swept the country on Election Day installed not just a majority of Democrats in Congress, but also flipped many gubernatorial offices and state legislatures blue across the country. In Utah, the House’s Republican supermajority has been broken for the first time in more than 30 years, with about 16 Republican seats on track to be lost to 14 Democrats and two unaffiliated candidates as of Monday morning.
Cox acknowledged to reporters that he now has more power behind his pen, but he stopped short of saying he’ll wield it more often. He said he plans to continue having a collaborative relationship with lawmakers. ‘It depends on the issues,’ Cox said when asked if he’ll veto more bills now. ‘Look, in the conversations I’ve had with legislative leadership, I think this is going to be a different kind of session than we’ve seen in the past. I suspect that some bills that I maybe would have vetoed before but knew that they would get overridden, probably don’t get run in the first place this time around because of the significant changes. But time will tell.’
Cox said there’s an ‘aphorism that goes around’ at the National Governor’s Association that ‘the only thing worse than having the Legislature be a majority of the opposing party is to have a supermajority of your own party because your veto is completely meaningless.’ ‘Now that’s not true for me because I have such a great working relationship with the Legislature,’ he said. ‘We’ve always worked closely on issues.’
He said having a ‘non-veto-proof majority doesn’t allow you to get more stuff done.’ Rather, he said it acts as ‘more of a brake than a gas pedal.’ ‘It means I can stop some things from happening that maybe I couldn’t before,’ he said. ‘But I have such a great working relationship with the Legislature that they’ve always been willing to engage, regardless of whether they could override my veto or not. But certainly, it means that we’ll be having more collaboration going forward than maybe we have.’
Cox called it a ‘repudiation election’ with ‘crazy’ margins that reflected a swing in Utah that he’s never seen in his lifetime. He said it’s a moment that Republicans – both nationally and in Utah – need to seriously reflect on. ‘First,’ he said, ‘I think this election is a powerful reminder of something we must never forget. Article I of the Utah Constitution is ‘all power is inherent in the people.’ Not in the governor. Not in the Legislature. Not in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. In the people.’ He said elected officials only hold power ‘bec
