Starting in the Clinton years, republicans made big efforts to take over local and state governments from the ground up. Once they have control of the state houses, they can then be in charge of redistricting in census years, and thence the U.S. House of Representatives.
Occasionally an outsider will burst onto the scene, but most politicians start small, on school boards, utility commissions, etc. The more of these low-level folks a party has, the more chance they have to push their brand, and they have a bigger pool from which to find the stars…the ones the voters and donors really like.
Democrats have been slow to catch on, but it is starting. Dog catcher is not an elected position where I live, but I was part of getting the most progressive (and pro-science) candidate elected to the district slot on the school board a few days ago.
Utah is a lot of fun to live in… if you’re a Republican.
The state is divided into thirds, like a pie, with the center of the pie being Salt Lake City- so all those Republican rural voters outnumber the big city liberals. There’s one other district- right in the center of the valley, which occasionally goes blue. The other districts? Not a chance that they’ll ever go anything other than red. It’s a pretty textbook example of gerrymandering to ensure Republican votes.
For being a textbook example, we Republicans sure managed to screw it up: Matheson managed to win in 2012 (by a few hundred votes). Furthermore, Mia Love only managed a narrow win over Doug Owens in 2014. She did a bit better in 2016 (fun random fact: I know Collin Simonsen, the Constitution party candidate, personally), but if Utah Republicans were any good at gerrymandering, they’d have shaved off a few tens of thousands of Republican voters from the other three districts where they win by an average of 100,000+ and made the UT-4 district safe Republican territory.