Just before the 5 p.m. deadline on Sunday, the effort to repeal Utah’s Proposition 4 turned in well over 200,000 signatures—tens of thousands more than needed to qualify for the November ballot.
To get there, organizers needed signatures from 8% of eligible voters in at least 26 of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts—roughly 141,000 valid signatures total.[1] They cleared that threshold, but by all accounts, it came down to the wire.
I got hit with text messages all month encouraging me to sign. The outreach was relentless. And honestly, it felt like a relief that this wasn’t being treated like a full campaign yet. No attack ads. No heavy messaging wars. Just the signature drive.
But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like a missed opportunity.
Why I Know What This Takes
I’ve run two statewide campaigns in Utah. Both required gathering signatures from across the state—including the first campaign where that option became available in 2016. I know what a grind signature gathering is. It’s logistically brutal, expensive, and unpredictable.
So I wasn’t surprised by the volume of texts or the intensity of the ground game. What did surprise me was this: other than those text messages, neither side treated this like a campaign.
The Strategic Question No One Asked
Here’s what I kept coming back to: Why not run a paid messaging effort during the signature phase?
Especially for the pro-Prop 4 side.
Keeping the repeal off the ballot would have been a complete strategic victory for them. No November campaign. No uncertainty. No risk. Just win by making the signature drive fail.
So why not spend money now to make that happen? Run ads defending Prop 4. Explain why the repeal is wrong. Shape public sentiment so that when signature gatherers knock on doors, they’re greeted by people who refuse to sign.
Make the other side’s job harder while the public is already engaged and paying attention.
That’s basic defensive strategy. And yet—nothing. No counter-messaging. No persuasion campaign aimed at stopping signatures before they were gathered.
Maybe the Campaign Is Just Invisible
There is an alternative explanation.
This could be a sign that everything is targeted now. That campaigns have learned digital advertising and micro-targeting are superior to traditional paid media. Maybe the persuasion effort is happening—we just can’t see it the way we used to see TV ads and mailers.
It’s possible both sides are running sophisticated, data-driven efforts aimed at very specific audiences, and those efforts are invisible to anyone outside the target universe.
If that’s true, it would explain the silence. But it would also mean we’re in a fundamentally different campaign environment than we were even five years ago.
What Happens Next
For now, the signatures are going through a 21-day verification period. County clerks will check them against voter registration databases to determine how many are valid.
No doubt, the pro-Prop 4 team will be working to identify people they believe have signed—and trying to convince them to remove their names during the verification window.
In all likelihood, the repeal will qualify for the ballot. And when it does, it’ll be interesting to see which messages each side lands on—and how they spend their war chests to win the vote in November.
The Broader Lesson
But here’s what I keep thinking about: the signature phase isn’t just process. It’s a persuasion battle with real strategic consequences.
For defenders of the status quo, this was the best chance to win without ever facing a November campaign. For the repeal effort, this was the hurdle that determined whether the fight would even happen.
Either way, the outcome mattered enormously. And yet the default approach—on both sides—was to treat it like logistics instead of persuasion.
This dynamic isn’t unique to ballot measures. Organizations navigating regulatory processes, public comment periods, or procedural fights often make the same mistake. They treat the “process phase” as something to endure while saving persuasion for later.
But later might be too late.
Every Phase is a Campaign. The signature phase. The verification period. The procedural hearing. The comment window. All of them are opportunities to win—if you treat them that way.
So here’s the question worth asking: Are you treating your procedural fight like process—or like the campaign it actually is?
