GOP candidate says he was encouraged

A Utah House GOP candidate says he was encouraged by a county party officeholder to get out of his race but declined to do so.

Rob Alexander is one of two Republicans who filed against Democratic incumbent Rep. Mark Wheatley, D-Murray. Rick Taylor also filed for the House District 35 seat.

In a comment post to a Deseret News article on Monday, Alexander says that after he filed at the request of Salt Lake County Chairman James Evans, he got a telephone call from Carrie Towner, a Senate District chairwoman. Even though Towner was from a different Senate district than is Alexander, she asked him to get out of the race, since Taylor, a candidate she supports and asked to run, was already in the race, Alexander said.

Alexander's complaint comes on the heels of other allegations that GOP insiders were trying to get other GOP candidates they didn't support out of races, or clearly favored Republican incumbents.

But Towner says Alexander misinterpreted her telephone call. While she did recruit Taylor, she said she called both candidates after the filing deadline to suggest that they get together and decide if one or the other "really didn't want to run" — and thus a party convention, and perhaps a primary, could be avoided.

"I didn't pressure (Alexander) to get out any more than I did (Taylor)," she said.

But Alexander said he found Towner's call odd — especially since she was not from his Senate district. "She was passing herself off as my district chair, a person who supposedly had some kind of authority over me. She is not from my district. She made it clear that (Taylor) was not going to get out (of the race) and asked if I wanted to. It was all kind of fishy. Both she and (Taylor) were at the same meeting where James announced that I would run for this seat and they didn't say anything," Alexander said in an interview.

While it is against party rules for a party officer to take sides in an intra-party challenge, Evans said that rule only applies to the current chairman, vice chairman, treasurer and secretary of individual county parties and the state party, not to other party officeholders, like a Senate district chair, as is Towner.

"So no rule was violated" by the telephone call, said Evans.

Towner and her husband, Mark, have been active for years in the Utah Republican Party. Carrie Towner ran for the 2nd Congressional District in 2002, being eliminated in the state convention. She ran for state party vice chair in 2007, losing that race as well. In the early 2000s she served for a while as the Salt Lake County GOP treasurer.