Bishop looking ahead to a possible new role

Rick Bowmer, AP

LOGAN – He’s a Lieutenant Governor candidate and an outgoing congressman for Utah’s 1st District. Rob Bishop will be retiring from the United States Congress at the end of this year and has signed on to the Thomas Wright for Governor ticket. On KVNU’s For the People program on Thursday, Bishop said campaigning has been an adjustment, especially during a pandemic.

“The virus has made everything very strange here; it’s one of those things where, for example, Thomas, I think, does extremely well when he’s able to look people in the eye and have them listen to him. That’s been limited. Everything up until now is really very much just pre-paid ads that you come up with. It makes it much more difficult, especially if someone is not well-known to begin,” he explained.

But Bishop said, hopefully, they’ll have a few weeks where they can break out and engage a lot of people on issues. He said you really can’t have the give-and-take on specific issues on prepaid campaign ads. Bishop says as he transitions from Congress to being a potential Lieutenant Governor, he didn’t need a lot of arm twisting to join the campaign.

“I told him very early, if he would run for governor, I would be supportive of him. And then when he asked me to run, the key element to me was he didn’t want me to be a traditional Lieutenant Governor, just covering the committees that the governor didn’t want to deal with. He had five specific areas he wanted me to concentrate on as Lieutenant Governor, and to lead out in those areas. And he didn’t seem like he was threatened by having someone else trying to take some kind of role.”

Bishop said he thinks Wright is a different kind of candidate and one who will think ‘outside the box’. Ballots will be going out in a couple weeks for the June 30th primary. To find out more about the Wright campaign, visit wrightutah.com.

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