Stuart Adams has not faced a contested Republican primary since he won his Utah House seat in 2002. On June 23, he faces one.
The challenge to the Senate president comes from three directions. A conservative super PAC out of Virginia is spending six figures to embarrass him. A progressive nonprofit wants a judge to throw him off a state board. And a local Indivisible chapter has been mailing handwritten postcards to his neighbors. All three lead back to a data center in Box Elder County.
The triple tap
Make Liberty Win is funded by Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian student organization. It has put $100,000 into defeating Adams. The PAC calls its method a "triple tap." A voter gets a mailer, then a phone call, then a text, until the message sticks.
The mailers are the part people remember. They use artificial intelligence to render Adams as a pickpocket and a clown. One casts him as a magician. Another shows him holding what appears to be a cocktail in the Middle East.
That image points to a real trip. In 2022, the government of Qatar paid for Adams and two grandchildren to attend a World Cup match, a few months after he traveled to the country on a state trade mission. Sean Reyes, then the attorney general, went too. No Utah law barred the gift or required Adams to disclose it.
His campaign manager, Greg Powers, waved off the liquor image. He told the Deseret News that "Diet Coke is the closest thing to hard liquor that Stuart Adams drinks."
Barrett Young runs the PAC, and he is plain about the goal. Even a narrow Adams win, he told the Deseret News, would be "an absolute humiliation." A loss is not required.
Wyoming, West Virginia, Idaho
Make Liberty Win has spent this way before, and 2024 was a banner year. It put more than $107,000 into beating the leader of the Idaho Senate. It spent around $371,000 across more than forty Wyoming races. In West Virginia, it got the scalp it wanted. Senate President Craig Blair lost his primary in a three-way race, 44 percent to 32, with a third candidate pulling 23 off the top.
That West Virginia math is the case for Utah. Young expects Stephanie Hollist and Braden Hess to split the vote against Adams the way Blair's challengers split his.
The opening was the April convention. Adams walked out with 55 percent of delegates. Hess took 45. For a sitting Senate president running among his own party's faithful, 55 is thin.
The data center
Adams chairs the Military Installation Development Authority, a state agency that can rezone land, issue bonds, and route public money to private builders. On April 24 the MIDA board approved the Stratos Project, a data center campus in Box Elder County backed by the investor Kevin O'Leary. The campus would draw 9 gigawatts from its own on-site power, which one report put at more than double the state's yearly consumption.
Box Elder County had to agree, because state law requires local consent for a MIDA project. On May 4 the county commission signed off before a packed and rowdy crowd. Residents feared for the water and the Great Salt Lake.
Then Adams went to O'Leary directly. He sent a letter. In early June O'Leary agreed to cut the project area from roughly 40,000 acres to about 20,000 and to send water to the Great Salt Lake. Adams claimed the result as proof that public pressure works. He had chaired the vote that approved the project six weeks earlier.
May 1
Seven days after the MIDA vote, five donors with business before MIDA wrote checks to the Adams Leadership PAC. Utah Political Watch first reported the contributions, which totaled $135,000 and were dated May 1. They were the largest the PAC had taken in its six years. They roughly doubled its bank balance.
The donors:
- Jacobsen Construction, $40,000. It has built MIDA flagship work, including the Grand Hyatt at Deer Valley.
- Clawson General Contracting, $25,000, a regular on MIDA infrastructure jobs.
- Tyler and Jennifer Aldous, $25,000. Tyler Aldous sits on the board of a MIDA infrastructure district.
- Gary and Ayala Barnett, $25,000. Barnett's firm is the private partner on a MIDA recreation area at Deer Valley.
- Copper Key Electrical Solutions, $20,000, another Clawson company.
Back in January, when a primary first looked likely, the same PAC had moved $45,000 to Adams's campaign. That was the biggest check it had ever cut for any candidate.
Adams says the timing means nothing. The contributions are "entirely separate from any policy decisions," he told KUTV, and none is tied to the data center. The station noted a fact that helps him. The checks were logged on May 1, but Utah lets a PAC record a donation up to 31 days after it arrives, so the money may have come in earlier. The received dates are not in the public record. Anyone can read the filed entries at disclosures.utah.gov.
Disclosures
The conflict-of-interest line predates the data center. In December 2024 the Alliance for a Better Utah accused Adams of reporting about $428,000 in spending to banks and credit card companies since 2010 without saying where the money finally went. State law requires naming the real payee, not the card company in between.
The Lieutenant Governor's office did not act. Emails surfaced later showing Adams got three messages: two telling him the credit card reporting was not allowed and giving him a week to fix it, and one telling him there was no problem. He called the complaint false and blamed the conflicting guidance.
The postcards
Adams has opposition on the left, too. In May, Salt Lake Indivisible mailed about 6,000 postcards to District 7, each one handwritten by a volunteer, urging a vote against Adams and for Hollist. The cards carried no notice of who paid for them. Adams's campaign filed a complaint with the Lieutenant Governor's office, citing the state's political-advertising disclosure law.
The data center is also in court. The Alliance for a Better Utah and five Box Elder residents sued MIDA, naming Adams and Senator Jerry Stevenson as defendants. The suit argues that MIDA's structure is unconstitutional, that a county's consent can never be reversed once given, and that this strips residents of the right to a referendum. It also claims Adams and Stevenson were seated on the board illegally, since the Utah Constitution bars a legislator from holding a second office. It asks a judge to order Adams to return the $135,000. A separate group, Box Elder Accountability Referendum, is suing in Brigham City to force the project onto a ballot.
Hollist and Hess
The two Republicans hoping to replace Adams are running on almost nothing. Stephanie Hollist was general counsel at Weber State University for eighteen years. She made the ballot by collecting signatures and has raised close to $90,000, though her father, Kayden Bell, supplied more than $75,000 of it. Braden Hess is an estate lawyer who once worked for the Legislature's own counsel office. He finished second at the convention. He has raised under $2,000.
Whether any of it lands is the open question. Taylor Morgan, a Utah consultant, told the Deseret News that Adams is "vulnerable in a way that he has never been before," less for anything he has done than because his seat has become a place to register anger at legislative leadership. Morgan also thinks the out-of-state attacks could backfire, since Utah voters tend to bristle at national groups telling them how to vote.
The AI images may outlast the race. Dan Hemmert, a Utah operative, told the paper they unsettle people in a way cartoons do not. "It feels more personal because they don't look like cartoons," he said.
Ballots are due June 23. To win another term, Adams has to get past two challengers who can barely afford to campaign and spend a hundred thousand dollars to convince his neighbors he is a pickpocket.
