Ben McAdams On Getting Things Done As A Democrat In A Republican Majority Legislature

Ben McAdams is a Democratic former advisor to Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon (2007-2009), former Utah State Senator (2009-2012), the former Mayor of Salt Lake County (2013-2019), and a former Member of the United States House of Representatives (2019-2021).

By Aiden Singh, January x, 2025

Aiden Singh: Are there things that, legislatively, you got done as a Utah State Senator that you're particularly proud of? And how did you navigate being a Democrat in one of the nation’s most Republican states?

Ben McAdams: Yeah. So I knew that being a voice for big ideas which may not get immediately adopted was an important part of my job. But I also wanted to be effective and to see legislation passed; I wanted to get stuff done. 

And I knew that, in a Republican state where we Democrats are a super minority, I wasn't going to affect tax policy and budget. So those were areas where I'd have a voice for my positions but I wasn't going to have an impact on the outcome - those decisions were going to be made in the Republican caucus.

So I picked a niche that I felt could transcend Republican vs. Democrat.

The niche that I picked was financial fraud. Utah had been seen as a capital of financial fraud. And I knew that it took a toll on business and on individuals. This was an area where I had a professional expertise: I leaned on my background as a securities attorney and I engaged closely with the Utah Division of Securities. And people would look to me because of my professional expertise, not because of my partisan affiliation. So I was able to pass a lot of legislation in this area: I rolled out a series of bills focused on preventing financial fraud. 

We saw people who were in a position of trust in the LDS community leveraging that position to gain the trust of somebody and then abusing that. And I felt that was analogous to child abuse or abuse in general. If you are an abuser, that's a crime, obviously. But if you perpetrate an abuse in, violation of a relationship of trust, such as a therapist or a teacher, then we have enhanced penalties for that under the law; there’s an enhancement of the penalty for people who commit abuse in violation of a position of trust that they've been placed in.

So I wanted to borrow that concept and move it into financial thought to say if, somebody perpetrated financial fraud from a position of trust, such as a recruiter for the army or a faith counselor, the penalties would be enhanced and the damages would be tripled. So that's part of Utah's law now. 

And we wanted to have a fraud reporting incentive to encourage whistleblowers to report fraud that they witnessed.

So we had had a package of bills that year focused on financial fraud. I was able to pass all of them. I think that was in my second year in the legislature, which was my first full year in the legislature - I passed I believe 18 or 19 pieces of legislation. I passed more bills as a state senator than the entire house Democrats passed that year. 

Aiden Singh: So perhaps some lessons there for how to get things done in a divided government.

Ben McAdams: Yeah.

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