Democratic congressional candidate Ben McAdams has held on to a slim lead in Utah’s 4th congressional district after another batch of votes were counted in Salt Lake County Tuesday night.

#UT04 update: Salt Lake County gives Ben McAdams (D) 5,059 new votes, Rep. Mia Love (R) 4,722. McAdams's overall lead stands at 1,357, but the latest batches have skewed slightly more R than the initial, making this a nail biter. — Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 13, 2018

McAdams, the current mayor of Salt Lake County, received 5,059 new votes from the group counted Tuesday, while incumbent Rep. Mia Love (R-UT) received 4,722, giving McAdams a 1,357 vote lead.


McAdams now leads with 50.3 percent of the vote, compared with 49.7 percent for Love. According to Utah law, a candidate can request a recount if the race is within .25 percent.

Both candidates expressed optimism in the wake of the newly tallied votes that cut into McAdams’ small lead.

“The numbers are moving in the right direction,” a spokesperson for Love told The Salt Lake Tribune, “and we are diligently watching for additional results.”

“The mayor’s lead continues to hold, and we remain optimistic about the final tally,” a spokesperson for McAdams told the Tribune. “We will continue watching results as they come in.”

McAdams was one of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)’s “Red to Blue” candidates and, in terms of the Democrats’ much-touted “blue wave,” he has long been considered one of the party’s bellwether candidates — especially since Love beat her Democratic opponent by 12 points two years ago.


This time out, Love has found herself in a race that is expected to drag out for several more days. Scott Hogensen, the Chief Deputy Clerk/Auditor of Utah County told local reporters on Tuesday that more vote totals are not expected to be released until week’s end.

In the week since the election, there has been continued good news for Democrats across the country. On Monday night, Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ) conceded the Arizona Senate race to Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), officially making Sinema the country’s first openly bisexual senator — as well as Arizona’s first woman senator and its first Democratic senator in more than two decades.

Additionally, after Democratic darling and Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum conceded on election night, he announced Saturday that he was recanting his concession and instead, he said, replacing it with “an unapologetic and uncompromised call to count every vote.”

I am replacing my earlier concession with an unapologetic and uncompromised call to count every vote. — Andrew Gillum (@AndrewGillum) November 10, 2018

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) also moved to sue the state of Florida Tuesday to extend the statewide recount of his re-election race against Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott.


A number of other Democratic candidates in tipping point districts are in similar positions as McAdams, with the potential to add to Democrats’ midterm successes, including Josh Harder in California, Andy Kim in New Jersey, and Anthony Brindisi in New York.