Celeste Maloy went to federal court to throw out the map she is now running to win.
In February, Maloy and fellow Republican Burgess Owens asked a three-judge panel to reinstate Utah's old congressional boundaries and discard the ones a state court had imposed. The panel refused. The court-ordered map stood, and with it the new 3rd Congressional District. Third District Judge Dianna Gibson chose it in November, months after ruling the Legislature's 2021 lines the product of an unconstitutional process. The seat is redder than the one Maloy holds today. That is the reason her primary against Phil Lyman is a contest and not a coronation.
The district runs from Morgan and Summit counties in the north to the full length of the Arizona border. It takes in Park City, Provo, and all five of Utah's national parks. It is deeply Republican. It is not simply rural. Provo is among the largest cities in the state.
The plainest measure of the race is money, and the money is lopsided. Maloy raised about $287,000 in the first quarter of 2026 and holds more than $461,000 in cash, according to her Federal Election Commission filings. Lyman has filed nothing. He has not crossed the $5,000 reporting threshold, and his campaign says the silence is deliberate. "He hasn't asked anyone for money," a spokesman told the Moab Times, describing a campaign built for delegates rather than donors. That is the whole race in miniature. One candidate runs the inside game. The other refuses to play it.
Lyman has been the more combustible figure in Utah politics for a decade. In 2014, as a San Juan County commissioner, he led an illegal ATV ride through Recapture Canyon to protest a Bureau of Land Management closure. A jury convicted him in 2015, and a federal judge sentenced him to 10 days in jail and roughly $96,000 in restitution. The conviction did not stick. President Trump granted him a full pardon in December 2020, backed by Sen. Mike Lee and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, and the misdemeanor was removed from his record.
Then came the governor's race. Lyman won 67% of the delegates at the 2024 Republican convention, lost the primary to Spencer Cox, and refused to concede. He mounted a write-in campaign. He claimed, without evidence, that Cox reached the ballot fraudulently, and he filed suit after suit to undo the result. The Utah Supreme Court dismissed his petition to remove Cox from office, holding that a party's internal rules do not override state election law. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. He carried the doubts into this campaign. At the April convention, his speech ranged across election fraud, government surveillance, vaccine skepticism, and chemtrails, according to Utahpolitics.news.
Maloy is the candidate Lyman wants to run against, and she knows it. She came up through the institution he attacks. A former staffer to Rep. Chris Stewart, she took his seat in a 2023 special election, and she now chairs the Congressional Western Caucus, which steers the Republican agenda on energy, water, and public lands. She sits on the Appropriations and Natural Resources committees. She points to results. She expanded motorized access at Lake Powell. She is co-sponsoring a measure with Lee to undo a Biden-era plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante. Her record is the argument, and the argument is that the system still works for people who know how to use it.
Delegates could not separate them. Neither cleared the 60% needed to win the nomination outright, so both advanced to the primary. Maloy finished ahead, 50.95% to 49.04%, by the party's official tally of 482 votes to 464. The count followed a correction. The party's Elections Committee found three ballots had been double-counted, two for Maloy and one for Lyman, and the reported figures reflect the fix. They reached the ballot by opposite routes. Maloy gathered signatures. Lyman, a longtime opponent of signature gathering, said he would collect them too, then turned in 2,689 of the roughly 7,000 required and leaned on delegates instead.
On policy, the gap is narrower than the temperament suggests. Both have hammered federal land managers. Both call the permitting process for energy projects too slow. Both want more transparency and more deference to local objections in data center planning, positions they aired in their June 1 debate. The breaks come on detention and on land. Maloy supports adding space in Utah to hold immigration detainees. Lyman opposes the detention center planned for Salt Lake City and says people in the country illegally should be deported at once. Lyman wants Utah to hold "nearly complete jurisdiction" over federal land within its borders and wants families to be able to buy parcels for a homestead rather than watch them go to the highest bidder. Maloy answers that she has already moved the bills.
The outside money tells its own story, and most of it flows from one place. Defending Our Values, an independent-expenditure-only super PAC chaired by Stewart, has reported about $879,000 to support Maloy, by Utah Political Watch's tally of its filings with the Federal Election Commission. The committee had raised more than $5.3 million and held $3.7 million in cash at its last report. The pro-Maloy figure already exceeds the $722,734 in all outside money spent in her 2024 primary, the race she won by 176 votes. Stewart's group sits in a network tied to Public First Action, an AI-policy nonprofit he co-founded, which reported a $20 million contribution from the AI company Anthropic this year.
A smaller PAC carries a sharper history. Defending Utah Values, run by Cox ally Owen Fuller, has spent $30,000 to boost Maloy and $20,000 to attack Lyman. The man Lyman spent a year trying to drive from the governor's office now has allies spending to keep him out of Congress. Lyman has folded the money into his case against her. Members of Congress should protect their constituents rather than sell them to the highest bidder, he said in a statement, and Utah "is run by pirates."
Political consultant Taylor Morgan of Morgan & May calls it the race to watch and predicts Maloy wins by 7% to 9%. Two facts keep the margin alive. Maloy won her last primary in 2024 by 176 votes, after a recount. Lyman, in the governor's race that same cycle, carried 11 of the 18 counties that fall inside this district. The winner faces Democrat Kent Udell and three minor-party candidates in November, in a seat where the Republican primary is the only election that has ever been in doubt.
