Is Mike Lee Shitposting His Way Out of Congress?

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WHEN SEN. MIKE LEE (R-Utah) took to social media to spread wild, nakedly partisan theories about the Minnesota shootings that left a Democratic state representative and her husband dead, national Democrats were horrified.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) ran Lee down at a Republican caucus meeting to confront him about the posts. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told him it wasn’t funny. A senior Smith staffer sent a scathing email to Lee’s office, admonishing them about “how much additional pain you’ve caused.”

Back in Utah, a separate but similar reaction was taking place. The fact that Lee was spreading conspiracy theories and shitposting online (to put it gently) wasn’t unusual for him. But his posts on X stating that “[t]his is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way” and another post connecting the Minnesota killer to Gov. Tim Walz was a breaking point for some.

State Sen. Nate Blouin, a Democrat, told The Bulwark he started to get emails and calls from his constituents across the political spectrum asking for him to take action to hold Lee accountable. Other Utah Democratic leaders said they were flooded with emails from voters asking where they should donate money to support efforts to unseat Lee, who is not up for re-election until 2028. The Deseret News, the nearly 200-year-old paper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, published an editorial accusing Lee of casting Utah in a “poor light” and said that the posts “revealed a lack of compassion.”

What, in theory, could be done to hold Lee accountable for his posts is far from clear, and not just because the senator subsequently deleted some of the offending ones following his conversation with Klobuchar. Utah is a solidly Republican state, even if it is prone to electing Republicans of a less-than-pure MAGA stripe.

Blouin wasn’t even considering the idea that a Democrat could mount a serious challenge to Lee. Though he didn’t rule out that such a threat could materialize, he imagined it would have to come from someone not associated with his party.

“We’re not going to win with a Democrat right now in Utah at a statewide level. It is not going to happen. I love the optimism, but it is not a reality,” said Blouin, adding that he would support rallying behind an independent to take on Lee in 2028. “We’ve got a lot of work to do on the ground level to convince people that Democrats aren’t, you know, demons and eating babies trying to make everyone have an abortion.”

But that doesn’t mean that Lee, who was first elected to the Senate in 2010, is invulnerable or that he hasn’t hurt his standing back home. He has abandoned the more mild-mannered approach to politics that defined his early career (including when he opposed Donald Trump’s nomination in 2016 and refused to vote for him in the general election). And his embrace of MAGA and right-wing rhetoric has provided Democrats with opportunities to frame him as gripped by online conspiracism. They see the public response to his posts about the Minnesota shootings as another moment to galvanize opposition against him. And they don’t believe that Lee, a prolific tweeter—he posted to X nearly 1,400 times in the past month, or about 46 times a day, according to a Bulwark review of his account—will have the self-restraint to stop giving them more fodder.

“I think [Lee’s tweets about the shootings] really broke something open in Utah,” said Gabi Finlayson, a co-founder of Elevate Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm in Utah, which has been leading some of the strategy discussions related to Lee. “There certainly is a lot more urgency. The idea that we truly have to get him out of office is no longer a theoretical thing or just a liberal idea. It is a moral imperative.”

Within minutes of Lee’s posts on Sunday, Democratic officials in Utah told The Bulwark they were planning strategy sessions about how to sustain the outrage directed at him. One Utah party strategist started pulling some of Lee’s most offensive and extremist tweets in hopes to use them in an upcoming ad campaign. Another Utah Democratic strategist said they started expedited talks about which candidates would potentially be interested in running against Lee in four years.

Other ideas that Utah Democrats discussed included starting a new anti-Lee Super PAC as well as filing a formal complaint about Lee’s conduct with the Utah Bar Association. Some Democratic strategists have also suggested calling on Lee’s corporate donors to stop giving him money and ramping up pressure on senators from both parties to censure Lee and strip him of his committee assignments. A few lamented that Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill hadn’t already taken moves to hold Lee accountable, including censuring him.

“He’s making himself really vulnerable. It’s obvious this is not going to play well with Utahns who place a high value on civility,” said Brian King, the chair of the Utah Democratic Party, stressing that many Mormon voters in the state have taken particular offense to Lee’s behavior. “This kind of action—the lacking in empathy, the indecency and just nastiness—has really motivated people and caused them to say, ‘We’ve got to find something better.’”

Though Lee deleted the posts, his office did not offer an explanat