The lineup for the gubernatorial debate ahead of the Nov. 5 election is set.

Three candidates — Republican incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox, Democrat Rep. Brian King, and Libertarian Robert Latham — have qualified to participate in a debate hosted by the Utah Debate Commission on Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Salt Lake Community College in Salt Lake City.

The Utah Debate Commission announced the qualifying candidates in a news release issued Saturday, which included the results of a poll conducted by the Salt Lake City polling firm Lighthouse Research to determine which candidates would qualify for the debate.

The poll — which the Utah Debate Commission emphasized shouldn’t be “misinterpreted as predictions of the outcomes of any race” — asked voters which candidate they would vote for if the election were to be held today.

Cox was a clear front-runner, with 48.1% of the vote, or 249 votes. King received 27% or 140 votes, and Latham received 6.8% or 35 votes.

It’s the first time a third-party candidate has qualified for a gubernatorial debate hosted by the Utah Debate Commission since it formed in 2014, according to Becky Edwards, the commission’s co-chair.

Latham qualified for the debate by just over a percentage point. The Utah Debate Commission set the qualification threshold at 10%, minus the poll’s margin of error, which was plus or minus 4.31 percentage points. So candidates who received at least a 5.69% support qualified for an invitation to participate, according to the commission.

The poll, conducted Aug. 29 through Sept. 4, surveyed 518 voters randomly drawn from Utah’s voter registration list obtained from the Utah Lieutenant Governor’s Office in August.

“Since its inception, the Utah Debate Commission has always had a goal and a mission to really elevate discussion of the important issues and policies that are confronting Utahns,” Edwards said.

The Utah gubernatorial debate will come just one day after the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris set for Tuesday in Philadelphia. Given how presidential debates have gone recently, Edwards said Utah has an opportunity to showcase a “stark contrast” in civility.

“We have candidates who really are hungry to take their messages to the people,” Edwards said. “We’ve had almost uniformly very civil, productive debates. … And that’s the model we expect and I think the participants have really leaned into that.”

Latham issued a prepared statement Monday expressing gratitude for his inclusion in the debate, adding that “liberty-minded Utahns are excited for this opportunity.”

“Making the debate stage is not something a person does on their own. It is not lost on me that I’m carrying the messages of fellow Utahns who are not satisfied with what the Uniparty candidates have to offer and want different voices to be heard,” Latham said. “My sense is that the organizers are also excited that more Utahns will be able to hear from an alternative on the ballot to the regime candidates, rather than just another boring conversation between representatives of the Uniparty’s Blue and Red Teams.”

King also issued a statement saying he looked forward to “taking the debate stage to share my vision for our state’s future with Utahns.”

“We’re building a coalition of pragmatists, and we’re inviting those who are tired of the divisiveness in politics, who feel like their party no longer represents them, and who are looking for something different to join us — for the better,” King said.

Cox’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

Two other candidates whose names will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot did not qualify for the debate: Independent American candidate Tommy Williams (who received 4.2% in the poll), and unaffiliated candidate Tom Tomeny (who received 2.3%).

Three other candidates have also thrown their name into the governor’s race with write-in candidacies (meaning they qualified as candidates, but their names will not appear on the ballot): Rep. Phil Lyman, Charlie Tautuaa, and Richard Kennedy Lyman.

Why didn’t Phil Lyman qualify?

Rep. Phil Lyman, who lost to incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox in the June 25 Republican primary by nearly 9 percentage points, is now continuing his bid for governor by running as an unaffiliated candidate with a long shot write-in campaign. In a Sunday post on X, Phil Lyman’s campaign criticized his ineligibility for the debate, incorrectly claiming that he would have qualified for the debate had all write-in responses “that were intended for me” been allotted to him.

According to the poll results, of those respondents who chose “other,” 22 specified “Phil Lyman,” while seven specified just “Lyman.”

That matters because of a strange, last-minute twist in the Utah governor’s race. Richard Kennedy Lyman filed to be a write-in candidate just before the deadline last week. Because he has the same last name as Phil Lyman, it complicates Lyman’s write-in campaign; now his supporters must specify which Lyman they intend to vote for — Phil Lyman or Richard Kennedy Lyman. Richard Kennedy Lyman’s running mate for lieutenant governor also shares the same last name, Carol Lyman.

With 22 votes or 4.2%, plus 4.31 percentage points for the margin of error, Lyman received about 8.5%, under the 10% qualification threshold for the debate. But even if the additional seven non-specified “Lyman” votes were allotted to Phil Lyman, he would not qualify for the debate. Hypothetically, if all 29 votes were counted toward Phil Lyman, totaling 5.59%, plus 4.31% for the margin of error, he would have received 9.9%. That’s still below the 10% threshold to qualify for the debate.

For candidates to qualify for the debate, they would need at least 30 poll respondents to give their support, Jay DeSart, chair of the Utah Debate Commission polling committee and a political science professor at Utah Valley University, told Utah News Dispatch in an email.

“This is not the first time we’ve had a candidate miss the threshold by just one or two responses, but strictly applying the rule as we have always done in the past is what is most important,” DeSart said.

Edwards told Utah News Dispatch in an interview Monday that the final-hour Richard Kennedy Lyman and Carol Lyman filings certainly complicated the commission’s efforts to decide which candidates did or didn’t qualify for the ballot.

“The reality, though,” she said, is some of the unspecified “Lyman” votes were polled before Richard Kennedy Lyman’s candidacy was declared, and some came after, so “we cannot accurately assume” whether those votes truly were intended for Phil Lyman or not.

But “even if” all of those “Lyman” and “Phil Lyman” votes were lumped together, “which we cannot do,” Edwards said, Phil Lyman would not have reached the 10% qualification threshold.

“It’s awfully close,” she said, “but it’s not 10.”

Edwards acknowledged “certainly things are complicated,” and it poses a “unique” situation for the Utah Debate Commission to have “probably the most high-profile write-in candidate that we’ve maybe ever seen in the state before.” Add in the last-minute Richard Kennedy Lyman and Carol Lyman filings, and the commission faced an unprecedented situation. Ultimately, however, the commission has to draw the qualification line, and Phil Lyman did not make the cut.

“We have a commitment to be exceptionally careful and have an overabundance of thoughtfulness and precedence here,” she said. “Every election matters. … But this has a lot of unique circumstances surrounding this particular year and the political milieu we’re in right now. So we’ve had an abundance of thought go into this. We have precedent, we have bylaws, we have a pattern of how we’ve conducted these debates and have simply followed what that is.”

Edwards said the Utah Debate Commission is following those rules “because we’re really not wanting to put our thumb on the scale for any candidate.”

Phil Lyman’s campaign and his supporters have cried foul play on social media — claiming Cox’s campaign paid Richard Kennedy Lyman $1,000 and offered him a “steak dinner” to jump into the race to hurt Phil Lyman’s chances at the ballot box.

Richard Kennedy Lyman has not responded to requests for comment, but Carol Lyman in a text to Deseret News denied the claims, saying she paid the fees for both herself and Richard Kennedy Lyman.

“We’re running to make a statement,” Carol Lyman told the outlet. “People keep asking if we’re related to Phil Lyman and last Sunday someone asked and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve always been proud of my name and the negativity of his campaign is causing me real embarrassment. Richard and I talked about it and decided to run so that we had a candidate we could feel good about voting for because we don’t feel good about voting for Cox or Phil Lyman.”

Matt Lusty, Cox’s campaign manager, dismissed Phil Lyman’s claims as untrue.

“Phil Lyman has a habit of making accusations that are blatantly false,” Lusty said in a prepared statement to Utah News Dispatch on Monday. “This is no exception. Phil should go back to filming ads to help his cousin and liberal Democrat Brian King.”

King is a distantly related third cousin to Phil Lyman, according to his campaign.

Lusty was referring to Lyman’s appearance in a campaign ad with King that mimicked Cox’s “Disagree Better” campaign. Though King’s campaign paid for the ad and Lyman’s appearance could have been interpreted as Lyman supporting King, Lyman has said it was intended to promote his write-in campaign.

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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