Ed Kociela, local news editor at The Spectrum, has the soulful face of a poet, and the good humor to match. Utah, he says, is a 3.2 state—3.2 beer, 3.2 wives per husband, and 3.2 Republicans for every one Democrat.
Kociela moved here from Los Angeles 13 years ago to escape the SoCal congestion. Much of the landscape along Interstate 15 was barren then. Now, car dealerships and hotels dot the landscape and Kociela finds himself in a town that is fast becoming a small city—at one point St. George was posting 12 percent growth for several years straight.
To a Las Vegan’s St. George still looks small and peaceful. On a red-rocked bluff overlooking town, the heart of the city is a square patch of thick trees; at the center stands the baroque St. George Temple, the oldest operating temple of the Mormon Church.
From way up here, St. George doesn’t look like a consolidated block of development (at least not yet). Instead, this city of 75,000 looks more like a series of village-like developments connected by the Interstate, which snakes through the area like a concrete river.
But it’s going through many of the same growing pains as Vegas—such as water and crushed housing values. (The town’s Starbucks are still open for business, though.)
As Kociela makes clear, more than the LDS members, more than the Jazz fans, Utah is home to conservatives. This is the reddest of the red states. An effort to start a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce was, he says, discouraged by the main Chamber of Commerce.
Utah hasn’t gone Democratic since LBJ in 1964. And it’s probably not going to go Democratic this year, either. But the talk around here is how Barack Obama is leading John McCain in fundraising throughout the state. “That’s gotta tell you something,” he says, perhaps a sign of changing times.
Kociela liked Bill Richardson, but has responded to the enthusiasm Obama has generated among the young. Kociela is a child of the Sixties. He remembers his passion for Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern, and he “remembers what we got stuck with.”
Even if matters in this red state are foregone, the energy surrounding the November election is decidedly not. “People are engaged this time around.”
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