Credit: Deseret News

Riley Owen, 27, announced his campaign for Utah’s 1st District on Friday. A resident of Salt Lake City, Owen will be running on the Republican ticket.

His priorities are to “defend our kids, support our families and curb career politicians.” His campaign promises include zoning reforms, removing phones from classrooms, banning congressional stock trading and enacting term limits for members of Congress.

“I believe in the American dream, but I do think it’s dwindling right now,” Owen told the Deseret News. “And there are a lot of Americans trying to buy a home, trying to raise families, and they’re losing trust in institutions and hope in politics, because there’s all this anger and rage bait going on.”

Partway through his undergraduate studies at Princeton, Owen took two years to serve a mission in Denmark for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then he took another year to serve as a White House policy analyst.

During his time at the White House, Owen focused on trade and manufacturing but “ended up covering anything and everything from drones and critical minerals to shipbuilding and semiconductors,” he said.

“Every day, I got to go to work to defend American workers and strengthen our industrial base. It was one of the greatest privileges of my life,” he added.

After Princeton, Owen completed a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Oxford. Currently, he works as CEO of Doers Network and serves as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve.

In his conversation with the Deseret News, Owen stressed his love for the state of Utah. He learned how to ski at Brighton; he’s a descendant of six generations in the state.

But having lived in California, Washington, D.C., England and elsewhere, “there’s still in Utah a sense of hope, an expectation of results and a social contract between people and their leaders,” Owen said.

He continued, “I think a lot of Americans are struggling to see that, and I think Utah is still holding on to that and a belief that there should be good people leading our institutions and leading our communities.”