- Utah Senate President Stuart Adams experienced a stunning loss in Tuesday’s primary election.
- Establishment favorites, Ben McAdams, Blake Moore and Celeste Maloy, won by large margins.
- All three candidates carried with them huge fundraising advantages and name recognition.
Utah primary voters revealed their overwhelming preferences on Tuesday night, delivering landslide victories to moderate congressional candidates in both Republican and Democratic primaries, while ejecting some of the most well-known lawmakers in the state by equally large margins.
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The clear signals may seem mixed, with incumbents, or former incumbents, dominating in federal races, while powerful sitting legislators floundered at the state level. But these dramatic results might share some similar themes.
Many successful candidates — whether it was former Rep. Ben McAdams winning the Democratic nomination for the open 1st Congressional seat, or Republican Bob Stevenson upsetting state Rep. Trevor Lee in House District 16 — sold themselves as pragmatic problem-solvers, not ideological warriors.
Bridge-building may be the theme of the candidates chosen by Utah’s primary voters of all stripes on Tuesday.
Big money, in the form of fundraising and outside spending, also shaped the reach of establishment favorites for Congress, and primary challengers for the state Legislature, with the influence of artificial intelligence PACs — and AI ads — coming to the forefront.
But the races also appeared to hinge on the unique concerns of voters in each district, suggesting that Utah’s Republican and Democratic primary voters, representing roughly one-third of the electorate, are tuned into issues directly impacting communities.
The key elected officials who approved a Box Elder County data center proposal — Senate President Stuart Adams, and two county commissioners — were removed in a rare display of voter dissatisfaction with the state’s approach to economic development projects.
From a new Democratic district, to a dislodged Senate leader, here are the biggest lessons learned on Tuesday.
Who are Utah Democrats?
Ahead of Tuesday, the biggest question in Utah politics was what kind of Democrat 1st District voters — who gave Kamala Harris a 24-point win in 2024 — would send to Washington, D.C., with the first competitive Democratic primary in recent history.
The answer, it turned out, was the exact same Democrat voters chose in a red-leaning district eight years ago.
Facing a field of three self-described progressives and socialists, McAdams, who represented Utah in Congress from 2019 to 2021, got a resounding 56% Tuesday night, ending speculation of whether Utah would expand the Zohran Mamdani wing of the party.
“This reflected what long-term Democrats in Utah have said, which is they’re moderates,” political strategist Maura Carabello said. “This was a Democratic-leaning district for the first time in decades, if ever. So it was a true test of the spectrum of where voters fall on the Democratic scale.”
The results could also reflect the Utah Democratic Party’s open primary process, that allows voters, regardless of party affiliation to participate, Carabello told the Deseret News. The district did see a surge in non-Democrats seeking to influence the results.
GOP strengthens status quo
The happiest incumbents of the state might by U.S. Reps. Blake Moore and Celeste Maloy, who secured massive mandates from Republican voters, despite the candidates having to navigate serious political headwinds on redistricting, the economy and foreign wars.
A court-ordered congressional map provided ammunition for state Rep. Karianne Lisonbee to lambast Moore for his support of Utah’s Proposition 4 gerrymandering law and pushed former state Rep. Phil Lyman to launch a bid in an overhauled district that seemed to favor him.
Swapped House seats did little to impede the lawmakers: Moore advanced with 58% of the vote, and Maloy with 67%.
Cash certainly contributed to their victories, Tactical Campaigns co-founder Joe Debose told the Deseret News.
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Moore netted $2.25 million as the fifth-ranking member of the House GOP, while Maloy raised $1.1 million, in addition to $1 million in out-of-state PAC support. Compare that to Lisonbee’s $173,600 in donations and Lyman’s $30,800, plus $22,500 out of his own wallet.
But Utah’s biggest Republican races did not come down to metrics of dollars and ad space, according to Debose.
“They reinforced advantages that already existed,” he said. “Utahns want to know who a candidate is, what they stand for, and what they’ll actually do once elected. That’s a high bar to meet when many voters are being introduced to a candidate for the first time just weeks before ballots arrive.”
Local concerns matter
Maybe the most unifying, or divisive, political issue, depending on how you look at it, was AI infrastructure.
An enormous data center proposal, advertised by Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary as the largest such project in the world to be quickly approved by state officials, was arguably the top issue in Utah elections — and the undoing for its top legislative leader.
Adams, who oversees the entity that approved the project, became the focus of public outcry. This, combined with concern over potential conflicts of interest and an out-of-state campaign to end his career, proved too much, even for one of the state’s most experienced and respected public servants.
Former Utah Speaker Greg Hughes said Adams’ loss, which he blamed on unfair attacks, will reverberate through Utah.
“Stuart Adams’ public service is hard to put into words in terms of his institutional knowledge,” Hughes told the Deseret News. “And so you lose that, you lose that very quickly. … You have good leaders that are in our legislative body, but that will be felt.”
It wasn’t just Adams. Box Elder County commissioners who went along with the data center were ousted.
So was the state’s senior tax-cutting committee chair, Sen. Dan McCay, who lost by 39 points to anti-Big Tech Rep. Doug Fiefia. And so was the state’s foremost immigration hardliner Rep. Trevor Lee, who lost by 33 points to Stevenson, a former Layton Mayor.
The through line isn’t anti-incumbency, according to Hughes. It’s anti-conservative.
An ad campaign against Box Elder commissioners Boyd Bingham and Lee Perry was funded by a Democratic firm.
But an attempt to pin upset losses on ideological gamesmanship, or broader anti-incumbent sentiment, also misses the mark, said Jason Perry, who serves as the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah.
Embattled conservatives, like state Sen. Brady Brammer and state Rep. Jordan Teuscher, withstood coordinated efforts to unseat them.
“Utah Republicans weren’t simply voting for or against incumbents,” Perry told the Deseret News. “They were looking at candidates individually and sticking with the ones they felt were doing the job well.”