By Taylor Knuth: “That One Guy Who Lost the Race for Mayor of Ogden Last Year, But Won Back His Life and Found His Courage This Year.”

OP-ED

This year’s elections in Ogden City are perhaps the most consequential—yes, even more important than the 2023 election for Ogden City Mayor. I want to tell you about my perspective on what I believe to be the most essential items you may be voting for based on where you live in our city. I want to encourage you to research by visiting websites, sending questions in an email, or even calling the candidates. (More on this year’s election in the second half of this op-ed below, Now, to the Good Part of the Story - the PRESENT).

In the last year, I have had much time to reflect, and I mean A LOT. I have written and spoken of stories I will never share publicly. I have sat in the discomfort of a lost voice and any semblance of a sense of self-worth, all the while holding a hot lump of coal in my chest as I suppressed caring for my mental health all these years. 

I Lost, but WE were Never Losers

On November 21, 2023, my husband Sean and I woke up around 4:30 a.m. to let an army of friends into our home. About fifty of us had spent the morning laughing, drinking too much caffeine, and peppering the city with reminders to vote. We drove around in the dark distributing as many flyers as possible. The team had crafted slick door hangers that contained everything a person could need to get their ballot cast. This was the final effort to get out the vote and let the chips fall where they may. 

We launched our campaign on January 9th, 2023, after preparing for the better part of the year leading up to the launch. By late November, I was accustomed to having every second of my day planned out with my incredible team and personal support system. My calendar, inboxes, physical mailbox, and brain were all full to bursting. I had just spent the last year doing the impossible with the most admirable group of people surrounding me.

In that time, we made over one hundred and thirty thousand individual contacts with voters, donors, and supporters of all kinds. I’m sorry in advance if you were one of the voters we contacted “too much.” That’s how elections are won and lost; we put everything into our direct voter contact efforts. Our campaign’s scale and impact exceeded any other campaign in the history of the race for Ogden City Mayor regarding individual donors, doors knocked, funds raised, and so many other measurables that I am proud to have executed alongside so many of our supporters. 

As that day wore on, we all knew that we’d done everything a campaign team could possibly do to win.

Not long before that day, I had decided not to have a big Election Night party. I wanted to be surrounded by those who helped me reach this point. The middle of the day was eerily quiet as everyone tended to their day jobs, families, and lives outside the race. When we gathered again, coffee gave way to cocktails, and we all braced ourselves for what came next.

When the first big drop of votes came in, it felt like everything came to a screeching halt. We always knew the odds were against us, but no matter how many times we talked about it, nothing can really prepare you for those big moments. By 9:30 p.m., I went to bed with at least thirty people lingering downstairs. Sean and the campaign team cleared things up, and we all tried to sleep, knowing that a win was now only a remote possibility. I went to sleep that night (or probably sometime the next morning), not knowing what the next day would hold–which was the first time I could say that in at least eighteen months of an entirely packed calendar. 

Within less than a day, we knew that it wasn’t going our way. 

I lost the election that night but never considered myself a loser. I also do not believe that the thousands of voters or the hundreds of volunteers, organizers, community leaders, and donors who supported our campaign at a scale Ogden City has never seen before were losers. 

Post-Election F*****g Sucked, Y’all

That said, after over 18 months of my life having every second of every day planned and strategized, plus a year since election night, time has given way to deep personal growth during a season of life of profound personal turmoil and chaos. My life, specifically my mental health, suffered in ways I never saw coming–and that essentially had very little to do with losing an election for mayor and everything to do with taking care of myself with more intensity, consistency, and, quite frankly, love.

Over those dark months that felt like years, I painfully grappled with a highly public defeat in front of the countless Ogdenites and the state, community leaders, and loved ones I hoped to honor and serve had I been elected. I thought back through innumerable conversations at the doors with our neighbors and community leaders I had hoped to engage with and side-by-side in leading our incredible city towards our widely-shared values of “building community, connecting our neighbors, and preserving the character of Ogden City,” a slogan for the Taylor for Mayor campaign.

I was sincerely disappointed that I wouldn’t get to do that from the Mayor’s seat. Still, I was euphorically heartened by the knowledge that all the good we did as a campaign and, for over a decade, as a community of Ogdenites dedicated to solving big problems with the best solutions still mattered. After the election, I sought help from trusted mentors, friends and family, and previous candidates who faced similar losses. Of course, I also received quality care from consistent and intensive therapies, varied professionals in the field of mental healthcare, and a tremendous amount of personal hard work and dedication to taking care of myself. 

Living Our Values, Courage to Act

In all of this time, I have learned a lot about myself and how I want to continue to engage in the values of “Community, Connection, and Character”—another campaign slogan that I spoke of every single day from the day we launched our campaign for Ogden City Mayor on January 9, 2023, to the night of November 22, 2023. We plastered our shared message across your social media feeds, in your home mailboxes, on the debate stage, in your coffee chats with friends, and in the news. I think it’s safe to say that we got our message out.

These values weren’t so different from Mayor Nadolski’s campaign messages. He also talked a lot about building this community up, honoring our past while building our future. However, one thing we should have discussed, together and separately, in the long list of values and beliefs we shared throughout the election is courage—more specifically, political courage. 

During the heat of the election, I spoke with many political figures, organizations, and community members in Ogden City and throughout the State in our nearly 24/7 sprint that Mayor Nadolski and I were both running. I learned a lot about myself and others. In a few examples, however, I lost individual people’s (and sometimes an entire organization’s) support because I refused to make an empty promise in exchange for their political courage to support someone like me: young, unapologetically gay, and Latino, to name a few. Others simply relied on the tried-and-true method of avoiding making an enemy. I stand firmly in my belief that choosing who to vote for solely on who you know better or who you’re arbitrarily more connected to personally is political apathy at best and cowardice at worst.

That and so much more is why I am adding “Courage” to our campaign’s shared values list of C’s at the top of the page today. I am going to act with that Courage in my own life. 

Now, to the Good Part of the Story - the PRESENT

Today, I am acting on our list of C’s: COURAGE, Community, Connection, and Character. 

Council Member Angela Choberka 
House District 9 Candidate 
*I GET TO VOTE FOR ANGELA! YAS!*

Before I officially decided to run, my first call was to Angela Choberka, a Council Member with a proven track record of getting things done, my neighbor for nearly a decade, and one of my closest and most trusted friends. 

In the call, I asked her for Angela’s courage. Specifically, I asked for her honest reaction to my desire to run for Mayor, even begging her to tell me why I’d be the worst mayor ever. During that lengthy conversation, she didn’t budge in her resolve to support “whatever” I decided to do. She had brilliant and profound questions, as she always does. She would have told me long ago if she had reservations about my qualifications, heart, or ability to lead. By the end of our chat, she said, "Let’s do it. Let’s go!” An echo of her constant outward expressions of optimism, charm, visionary ideals, and honest values. From the moment that call ended to now, years later, Angela’s persistent actions of bold leadership for all residents and visitors of Ogden City exemplify courage and much more.

On the Campaign trail, Angela goes beyond her words and into immediate action, passionately speaking in the pouring rain at our mayoral campaign launch in front of the Marshall N. White Community Center about why she supported our vision, shared values, and ultimately, my campaign to be the next Mayor of Ogden City. We stood in front of a building that was months away from demolition then and is now months away from being Northern Utah’s premiere recreation center. Together, we did that, arm-in-arm with countless community leaders who exemplified courage when it mattered most.

Angela was the only council member who demonstrated political courage in making a bold and immediate endorsement while exhibiting steadfast leadership regarding the core issues our community identified in a lengthy community engagement process to decide the fate of an iconic landmark to our city’s landscape and character. Angela never relented in ensuring the new and improved center would reflect the community's wishes. She fought to secure the historic location, keep Dr. Marshall N. White’s name on the building, expand access to aquatics, enhance the center’s size, and secure funding while working expeditiously and co-leading with authentic engagement and curiosity. 

Today, that building is well on its way to serving this community for decades. This is only one of the hundreds of examples I could give regarding the unyielding integrity and relentlessly competent leadership Angela Choberka stands for. Perhaps Choberka should be an honorary addition to our list of C’s, right?

Here is a link to donate to and volunteer with the Angela Choberka for House District 9 Campaign Team!

Utah House District 10 Representative Dr. Rosemary Lesser 
House District 10 Candidate

I would be remiss when discussing courage, competence, integrity, and authentic leadership if I didn’t discuss those qualities with the only elected Democrat outside Salt Lake County at the Utah State Capitol, current House District 10 Representative Dr. Rosemary Lesser.

I first heard Rosemary Lesser’s name when she officially secured the Democratic Party’s House District 10 Delegate votes to replace the late and honorable Representative Lou Shurtleff. I initially pushed hard for another candidate to take this seat during the internal party race following Representative Shurtliff’s passing. While I still maintain that the other candidate would have served us exceptionally well, something magical and remarkable happened when I first called Rosemary to congratulate her the days after she fairly won the special election.

She listened. 

She listened more actively than most people I’d met before or since, ESPECIALLY for a so-called “politician.” She asked sincere, clarifying questions about the problem I didn’t plan to discuss, but I did because she asked. She asked something to the effect of, “So, Taylor, what issues are important to you and your family?” I had never experienced a politician who would ask me, a stranger, what I cared about. When she asked about my family like that, I was floored. No partisan politician has ever asked me about my family in the context of how policy affects me. Sincerely. Most fail to recognize that even gay, childless dog dudes also have a home and a family that their decisions and leadership directly impact.

In our future encounters, I stood amazed at the amount of information she retained about me and my life in that first hour-plus-long conversation, and she still asks me follow-up questions to this day.

One thing she asks me about often is how my sisters are doing. 

At the time of our call, three of my sisters had recently given birth, one to her first child while on Medicaid. As the only boy in our family and the funniest family member, I regularly gossip with my sisters, especially nowadays. After the sprint of three new additions to our family, I noticed in my sisters a similar sadness that I now better understand. I learned about postpartum depression online, as my sisters all exhibited symptoms, both acute and severe. Rosemary, a storied and almost legendary OBGYN who delivered thousands of babies in Ogden, listened intently as I discussed vignettes of what my sisters were experiencing and how, in my online studies on the topic, one of my sisters was no longer eligible to receive care for her own postpartum because as a recent undergrad herself, and the wife of a student of medicine, she delivered her baby unburdened by the limits of our private insurance systems that leave behind people living similar experience to my young sister. She and her family survived because of Medicaid, but in the state of Utah, our Republican-controlled legislature rejected Medicaid and Medicaid expansion in the prior years. 

In subsequent conversations, Rosemary would remind me of our discussion and assure me that the lack of postpartum care was on the minds of countless parents throughout the state, especially in House District 10, which is home to McKay Dee Hospital, the very same place all of my sisters gave birth. My sister’s plight was deeply personal, but it was not uncommon. My sister permitted me to share this story, and in the years since the addition of her first, we recently welcomed baby number two. They thrived mainly thanks to private insurance and a company with remarkable maternity leave benefits. 

Rosemary identified a problem and got to work on solutions. She often says that her Republican colleagues engage in a strategy that is usually a “SOLUTION in search of a PROBLEM.” In her second year in office, Representative Lesser drafted legislation to expand postpartum care for eligible Medicaid recipients, a genuinely non-partisan issue of providing life-saving therapeutic interventions not unlike those I underwent in the last year. In the face of partisan politics, Rosemary kept advocating for the problem. 

As the saying goes, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Rosemary didn’t take no for an answer. With thousands of stories at her back, she carried on and fought for the families she represented. She took the fight for this bill out of the Capitol Building and into the Governor’s Mansion. Her tenacity and drive directly resulted in Governor Cox signing her Medicaid expansion into law. Before Rosemary got to work, women could apply for sixty days of postpartum care. After she fought for her constituents and women across the state creatively and effectively, that number soared to three hundred and sixty-five days. 

This is lifesaving work that all started and endured with courage. 

Here is a link to donate to and volunteer with the Dr. Rosemary Lesser for House District 10 Campaign Team!

Ogden School Board Member Stacy Bernal 
Senate District 3 Candidate

Stacy Bernal immediately comes to mind when I think of courage in politics. Like my call to Angela Choberka before my mayoral run, I reached out to Stacy as a long-time friend and a like-minded and values-driven leader on the Ogden City School Board. She was the only school board member to issue a public endorsement for the Ogden City mayor’s race. I didn’t need to ask for her courage—it was already evident in every aspect of her life, service, and professional work.

Stacy's journey embodies the very essence of courage. As a survivor of childhood abuse, a teenage birth mom, and later a single mother navigating her son's autism diagnosis while putting herself through college at Weber State (GREAT! GREAT! GREAT!) Stacy has faced and overcome any challenges that come her way. Her experiences have shaped her into a fierce advocate for those often overlooked by our political system.

Over the years, I watched Stacy fight for our community with unwavering determination. She didn't just talk about inclusion and support—she lived it. Her annual "Awesome Autistic Ogden" event, founded in 2018, is a testament to her commitment to making our corner of the world more accepting and inclusive. Stacy's courage shines through in her willingness to challenge the status quo. When she ran for the Ogden School Board in 2022, she didn't just aim to win –she aimed to make a difference. And win she did, with nearly 65% of the vote, becoming the first Filipina elected to what is now an all-female body. This victory wasn't just personal but a win for representation and diverse voices in our community.

Now, as Stacy runs for Utah Senate against the very lawmaker who proposed the elimination of DEI programs and has a very public record of voting against the interests of our state’s public education system and its success, she's once again demonstrating the kind of political courage our state desperately needs; especially in a Senate District currently devoid of such kindness and courage. She's not afraid to stand up for what's right, even when it means going against the grain of Utah's political establishment.

I’ve learned the hard way about empty promises and political apathy. Stacy, however, has consistently shown that she's willing to make tough decisions and stand by her principles, even when it might be politically inconvenient. Her recent decision to leave a once-in-a-lifetime role with the Utah Jazz to focus on her senate campaign is just one more example of her commitment to our community. As I do, Stacy understands that political courage isn't just about big, bold moves. It's about showing up, listening to constituents, and fighting for those who often go unheard. Her work on the Ogden School Board, her advocacy for families navigating disability services, and her commitment to preserving programs supporting marginalized communities all demonstrate this courage.

As we face dismantling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and even banning the words themselves from public education in Utah, we need leaders like Stacy who aren’t afraid to speak up and fight back. She knows firsthand the importance of these programs, not just for racial and cultural diversity but also for the 1 in 4 Utahns diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and countless others who rely on these support systems.

I've come to understand that courage in politics isn't about winning at all costs—it's about staying true to your values and fighting for what's right. Stacy Bernal embodies this courage, so I wholeheartedly endorse her for Utah Senate District 3.

Here is a link to donate to and volunteer with the Stacy Bernal for Utah Senate District 3 Campaign Team!

Why the “Weber County Wonder Women” are the Way

The "Weber County Wonder Women"—Angela Choberka, Rosemary Lesser, and Stacy Bernal—embody the values of courage, community, connection, character, and so much more that make Ogden and our surrounding communities thrive. Their unwavering commitment to authentic leadership and public service resonates deeply with my beliefs about our lists of C’s power. 

These remarkable women have consistently demonstrated the political courage to stand up for what's right, even when it’s the more challenging course of action. They will always lead to a stronger, more resilient, inclusive community.

Their approach to governance–listening intently to constituents, advocating fiercely for the often unheard and certainly underrepresented voices of hard-working people, and working tirelessly to implement positive change–aligns perfectly with the vision our campaign so loudly shared in those 11 months of 2023. As they campaign in Ogden's most crucial races, Angela, Rosemary, and Stacy continue to inspire me and countless others with their dedication to building a more inclusive, equitable, and vibrant community for all residents. Their collective impact on Ogden is a powerful reminder of what can be achieved when leaders lead with courage, integrity, and a genuine commitment to the people they serve.

The Surprise of Sincerity: Steve Van Wagoner
Weber County Commission Candidate

I first got to know Steven Van Wagoner as a fellow candidate during the 2023 election. While I ran for Mayor, he ran for Ogden City Council, District 4, against our now duly elected Council Member, Dave Graf. I had many long conversations with Steve and Dave in my quest to decide who I’d be casting my ballot for as a resident of District 4. We challenged each other where we disagreed, shared stories from knocking on doors as much as possible, and learned from each other throughout the year we spent running parallel races in a city we all loved. 

In Steve, I always saw someone who says what he means and means what he says. I respect that trait. He is also someone who is not afraid to learn. 

One morning, I woke up to Steve calling me. He wanted to talk about the Dave Graf sign in my front yard. He and I are both straightforward people, and I’ll admit that the conversation was somewhat contentious. Some would call this sort of exchange direct and offensive, but in our exchange, I felt that Steve was a sincere guy, a character trait I’ve seen in every exchange since. 

All the same, I listened to what Steve had to say, and he listened to me. We dared to talk in detail about the reasons for my choice to vote for his opponent. We also talked about our shared value of hitting the streets and talking to regular people every day that we could. We learned so much from the people around us. We took their tragedies, worries, and successes and carried them forward with us, guiding our decision-making as candidates and neighbors. 

In the year since 2023, I have marveled at Steve Van Wagoner’s ability to persist.

The fact that he picked up and ran again almost immediately says everything you need to know about his dedication. I have watched Steve learn from his previous campaign and implement feedback–without ego–from the people he wants to represent. Steve’s love for the community is evident, and I am confident he will always lead with the same dedication he shows daily on the campaign trail. Steve leads with the courage to lose a race, be wrong, fall, and then learn from it and try again. Steve’s fresh perspective and relentless courage will be a much-needed and refreshing addition to the Weber County Commission. 

Here is a link to donate to and volunteer with the Steve Van Wagoner for Weber County Commission Team!

Building Community, It’s Hard Work

The thing about elections is that they come around every year. While I was floundering and questioning my every decision, my friends and other people dedicated to the ideals of public service through elected office were ramping up campaigns of their own. I stayed in the house and thought long and hard about my next moves. From my career to my next home renovation project and everything in between. 

I have carefully reflected on, and even journaled in my list of regrets, about the moments of my life when my lack of courage, especially during the campaign, fell short or failed to exemplify a trait I have come to find so essential. I’m not doing any of that anymore. I’m doing what I think is most important to our community right now, living my days with an authentic voice that is my own, driven by courage in every crucial moment in my life, both personal and with and by our community, just as the candidates mentioned above and so many more Ogdenites have done for so long. 

Now, Don’t Leave this Too-Long Op-Ed without Remembering our List of C’s and Important Election Details

The List of C’s:

Courage. 

Community.

Connection.

Character. 

Pass it on. 

The Details are Important, too.

Join me in VOTING in what I have argued is the most critical election of our generation on or before November 5, 2024. 

Register to vote if you are not. 

Chat about politics on your coffee dates and with your friends.

Write an editorial about why and how you are voting. 

Make a plan to vote. 

Volunteer for one of these candidates - hell, even their opponents.

Donate to these candidates if you can.

And most importantly, act with courage. 

With love and appreciation, 

a whole lot of passion and courage, 

& dedication to the beautiful home we all call Ogden,

Taylor Knuth 

That One Guy Who Lost the Race for Mayor of Ogden Last Year, 

But Won Back His Life and Found His Courage This Year