This story was first published by The Salt Lake Tribune.

In 2009, Stephanie Pitcher, then the director of the Utah State Women’s Chess Tournament, told The Salt Lake Tribune that she’d spent much of her chess career trying to avoid being boxed in.

Already a five-time chess champion at age 22, Pitcher said she’d taken a break from playing chess for three years during middle school because she “didn’t want to be seen as the nerd.” The game was full of stereotypes, she added, like “chess is nerdy” and “chess is a boys’ game.” She hoped that women would resist those labels.

Now, 16 years and three more chess championships later, Pitcher is a senator representing parts of Salt Lake County, and though she no longer plays much competitive chess, the game has informed her work as one of Utah’s few Democratic lawmakers — and the most successful Democrat during the 2025 legislative session.

This year, she passed 14 bills, more than any other Democrat in the Legislature, and more than all but four Republicans in either chamber. It was a remarkably successful run for a minority party member, which she attributes to her first-hand experience as a prosecutor and defense attorney and her openness to working across the aisle.

“It’s kind of funny,” said Ogden Republican Rep. Ryan Wilcox, who frequently cosponsors legislation with Pitcher. “She runs a lot of small bills, but she’s done her homework enough on them that I can see where she’s going. I can see the end game. It is several steps ahead. It’s exactly like chess with Stephanie.”

‘I don’t run legislation I can’t win’

A week after the 2025 legislative session ended, on a snowy March afternoon, Pitcher and I sat down in her office at the Capitol to play chess and discuss the recent session. The walls of her office were mostly bare — the decor limited largely to a giant chess pawn, a paper sculpture handcrafted by her daughter and a dying cactus — but she was quick to produce a big bag of chess gear.

Pitcher heads up the Capitol Chess Club with Rep. Nelson Abbott, R-Orem, who has the distinction of being the only lawmaker in the state to have beaten Pitcher in a game. He beat her online, she said, after she had gotten “a little cocky.”

“People like to challenge me, of course, so I told [my colleagues] that if they beat me, I would go to conservative caucus,” she said with a smile. Now, she owes them a visit.

“It’s actually worse that they meet at 7 a.m. than the fact that it’s the conservative caucus,” the Senate Democrat said. “That’s just a horrible time for me.”

Republicans make up the majority of Pitcher’s colleagues.

In both the Utah House and Senate, the GOP holds supermajorities and controls the powerful Rules Committees — meaning not only do Republicans not need a single vote from Democrats to pass any given piece of legislation during the 45-day session, but Republicans in each Rules Committee could, theoretically, also prevent any Democrat-sponsored bill from ever getting a vote.

“We all approach our job differently,” Pitcher said. “Generally speaking… I don’t run legislation that I can’t win. I’m never going to win on reproductive rights up here. I’m never going to win on gun control. And so I just decided I’m going to focus on areas where there’s actually an opportunity to improve policy in that space.”

‘My role is to pass good legislation‘

Pitcher attributes some of her success to a numbers game: “There’s definitely benefit to being in the Senate just from the standpoint of there’s fewer of us,” she said.

But a lot of it requires quick and constant strategic thinking. She plans, she explained, where she can compromise and where she can’t, considers how much her bills will — or, more importantly, won’t — cost and assesses how to most effectively present her ideas to her colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

And she hasn’t shied away from sponsoring bills with Republicans who also run legislation she votes against, including Rep. Jordan Teuscher, who sponsored what was likely the session’s most controversial bill — a ban on collective bargaining for public employees — and Reps. Nicholeen Peck and Stephanie Gricius, who have both been the subject of ire from LGBTQ+ groups. 

Teuscher, Peck and Gricius did not respond to interview requests for this story.

Part of her reasoning for building such unlikely coalitions, Pitcher said, is principled. “I see the opportunity to work on a bill with one of my colleagues as the opportunity to build a relationship with them and get to know them better and to invest in each other’s ideas,” she said.

And while she hopes colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support her policy work, Pitcher said she doesn’t see the collaborations as an effort to build the left wing in the state.

“Maybe this isn’t the popular thing to say, but I just don’t see it as my role to increase the Democratic makeup of the state of Utah,” she said. “I’m here to pass good legislation on behalf of the people that I represent, and I happen to be a Democrat, but I’m not the flag bearer for the Democratic Party. We have a party for that, and a party chair for that and elected party officials for that role. My role is to pass good legislation.”

Wilcox, who is among Pitcher’s frequent GOP collaborators, said in a recent interview that he was indeed initially skeptical of her. He originally served in the Legislature from 2009 through 2014, and then returned in 2021, when he became the chair of the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice committee. Wilcox took on the role a year after Pitcher successfully passed bail reform legislation aimed at focusing the state on risk, rather than ability to pay, when setting bail.

In his new role as chair, Wilcox said he had been hearing frequent complaints from law enforcement officials about bail reform. “My initial take on the whole thing,” he said, “was she was just a hard-left-wing person, and that’s why she was pushing this stuff.”

Pitcher’s bail reform law was repealed in 2021, and a compromise bill emerged from a special session later that year. Several months later, as lawmakers considered a DNA collection bill, Wilcox and Pitcher found themselves sharing similar concerns, Wilcox said.

“It was just fun,” he remembered. “It was fun to realize that, even as a prosecutor, she wasn’t locked into her in-the-box ideology.”

Wilcox began to see then, he said, that Pitcher was not as he first imagined.

“She’s crazy smart,” Wilcox said. “On the strategic side, on the legislative side — that’s why it’s fun. That’s why I enjoy working with Stephanie, because she understands it’s not about a temporary win.” 

Rep. Anthony Loubet, R-Kearns, with whom Pitcher has also cosponsored legislation, shared a similar assessment.

“She’s a great person to work with,” he said. “She obviously has Democrat political views and is able to represent those, but she also understands the legal and the political landscape, so she does a good job of building up relationships and finding common ground.”

And Juliette Osguthorpe, who worked as a staffer for Wilcox during the recent session, said Pitcher’s success made her a topic of conversation among one of the Capitol’s most observant and most frequently overlooked groups: the interns.

“We were talking about kind of the two Democratic strategies in a majority red state,” she said of the interns. “You can either go the route of, ‘My job is to kind of antagonize and make everyone else look bad and force Republicans to respond to all these issues,’ or you can take the route Senator Pitcher has adopted, work on policy and focus on policy and do what you can to make a difference.”

“I think obviously one of those is more effective on the legislative scale,” Osguthorpe added, “and I think you see that with Senator Pitcher.”

‘Knowing where you’re going is the first step’

Asked about Wilcox’s assessment that she makes policy the way she plays chess, Pitcher said she felt he was giving her too much credit. “I want to be part of making good policy, impactful policy,” she said. “I think everything I did run this year, none of it was system shifting… but it is really good policy.”

Her ultimate goal, she said, is to “be able to run hard things.”

Among a number of other bills, Pitcher sponsored and passed legislation this session that criminalized the release of non-public autopsy photos; established new criteria for how candidates’ names can appear on Utah ballots; set new standards for the use of AI in generating police reports; increased the pay for compensatory service done in lieu of criminal fines; and ensured that juveniles in Utah will have access to a state-funded attorney when considering whether to enter into nonjudicial agreements. 

Another favorite bill from the recent session, she said, was SB194, which she cosponsored with Republican Rep. Tyler Clancy, who serves as a Provo police officer when he’s not at the Capitol. The legislation allows for inmates in county jails to have better access to evidence in their own cases, an idea born between sessions when Pitcher was trying to visit a client in the Utah County Jail and ended up having to play a video from her laptop through a mail slot for her client.

It was the sort of legislation that has become her specialty: nonpartisan and inexpensive, with a practical fix. It passed both chambers without garnering a single vote against and was signed into law by the governor last month — as was every other bill Pitcher shepherded through the Legislature in 2025.

In her office, after we’d talked for an hour about the recent legislative session, Pitcher set up a board and taught me a lesson: how to checkmate an opponent with two rooks.

“The goal is to find the edge of the board that the king is closest to and where it makes sense for your pieces to start pushing him in that direction,” she explained. “Knowing where you’re going is the first step.”

But I never even had the chance to try using it against her. Later, when we played a game, I exposed my queen early, and she beat me immediately. She knew where she was going all along.