Politics

Gleich, 38, is known to her more than 220,000 Instagram followers for both her climate activism and her mountain-climbing adventures, which have taken her through ski slopes in Argentina to the summit of Mount Everest. Her campaign for Senate began after taking a training course by a state-level organization devoted to helping more Utah women run for office. From there, she met someone at a campaign management firm who reached out earlier this year to ask if she’d be willing to run for Romney’s seat. “Initially, when I got the email, I was a bit hesitant,” she told me in an interview. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the time is now, that we can’t wait for other people to step up and be the leaders that we want to see.”

“Sometimes even if they’re going to lose, having a candidate to demonstrate to the opposition party that they also have to listen to their preferences [is important],” explains Juliet Carlisle, a political science scholar at the University of Utah. “The influence of a young Democratic candidate can make [Curtis] aware of what the vibe in Utah politics is among the younger generation.”