Utah Senate President Stuart Adams had never faced a primary. He represented Senate District 7, covering Davis and Morgan counties, for 16 years, and he has run the Senate for the last eight of them. On June 23, he drew two Republican challengers and finished second. Stephanie Hollist, an attorney from Fruit Heights, beat him by 1,645 votes, 7,933 to 6,288, with Braden Hess taking 4,173, combining the state's official counts for the district's two counties: 43% for Hollist, 34% for the sitting Senate president.
Adams conceded less than two hours after polls closed, calling his service "one of the greatest honors of my life."
Hollist ran on a single premise: that Adams had stopped listening to the people he represented, and she promised something specific in victory: "leading with collaboration, transparency, and real accountability," as she put it the night she won.
She still faces a Democrat, Garret Rushforth, and a Constitution Party candidate, Jeffrey Ostler, in November, in a district Adams held for 16 years. Winning it gets her a seat. It does not get her a vote on the next Senate president. Nobody outside the building gets one.
Utah's Senate president is elected by the majority caucus in a closed meeting, and the caucus will not vote until after the Nov. 3 general election. Republicans won a 23-6 majority in 2024, before Dan Thatcher left the party and resigned. Fifteen of the chamber's 29 seats are on the ballot this fall, and Utah Political Watch rates the map as barely competitive. So the room that chooses Adams's successor will hold the twenty-odd Republicans who survive November, most of whom already know each other's ambitions. Sen. Scott Sandall of Tremonton described it accurately: this is not a public race.
The job is arguably the most powerful in state government, and the case for that claim is mostly arithmetic. Republicans hold two-thirds of both chambers, enough to override any veto without a Democratic vote, which they did in 2022 after Gov. Spencer Cox rejected a ban on transgender girls in school sports. Since a constitutional amendment passed in 2018, the Legislature can convene itself without the governor's permission, a power Adams personally exercised when he and the House speaker proclaimed a special session during the pandemic, and one the Legislature used in 2024 to rush a constitutional amendment onto the ballot in answer to a court ruling it disliked.
The Senate adds a power the House lacks. Every judge, cabinet director, and board member the governor appoints requires its advice and consent, hundreds of appointments over a governor's term. In June, days before Adams lost his primary, senators confirmed two new justices to a Supreme Court the Legislature itself had voted to expand, two years after that court ruled against it on redistricting. Inside the chamber, the president assigns every committee seat and controls the Rules process that decides which bills ever reach a vote.
The governor has the statewide mandate, the executive branch, and a line-item veto on budgets. He also signs bills knowing that 20 senators and 50 representatives can erase his objection. Adams answered to two dozen colleagues, was never overridden by anyone, and held his office three years longer than Cox has held his. It took 18,394 Republican primary voters in one suburban district to do what no institution in state government could.
Katie McKellar published a two-part exit package in Utah News Dispatch on July 22, an interview with Adams and a survey of the caucus he leaves behind. Much of what is knowable about the succession comes from that reporting, and from the Salt Lake Tribune's earlier canvass of the field.
So far the race has two names. Sen. Evan Vickers of Cedar City, a pharmacist with 18 years in the Legislature who spent six as Adams's majority leader, wants the job and says so. He is also making a regional argument that senators from off the Wasatch Front want more representation in leadership.
Sen. Kirk Cullimore of Sandy holds the majority leader post now, having taken it from Vickers in a caucus vote in 2025, and declined to comment when McKellar asked. Vickers is running against Adams's style as much as against Cullimore. He calls himself a delegator and his former boss controlling, which is close to what Hollist spent the spring telling the voters of District 7, and the voters agreed. Adams answered that he could not have survived eight years without collaborating, and that if enforcing decorum makes a man controlling, fine.
The presidency is not the only opening. Sen. Jerry Stevenson is retiring, which vacates the chair of Executive Appropriations, the committee that writes the budget. Sandall is vice chair, wants budget work, and says he is not running for president. Committee chairs are appointed by the president. Every senator weighing a vote in that caucus room is also weighing what the winner might hand them in January.
Adams has endorsed no one. His predecessor, Wayne Niederhauser, said the office disciplines its occupant and predicted continuity. Sen. Brady Brammer of Pleasant Grove said the same thing in fewer words, a difference in degrees.
Underneath the personalities, the caucus is choosing between two readings of the Adams years. Vickers has planted himself on one of them. Cullimore, the man the caucus already promoted once under Adams, sits closer to the other.
Adams's own legacy rests on the state he leaves. Utah has ranked first in the nation for economic outlook for 19 consecutive years in the American Legislative Exchange Council's index. The Gardner Policy Institute puts the state's price-adjusted median household income highest in the country. Starting teacher pay ranks near the top nationally. The Legislature cut income taxes six years running under Adams, funded FrontRunner and highway expansion, and moved money toward the Great Salt Lake.
In 2015 he sponsored SB 296, which paired LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections with religious liberty exemptions. The country called it the Utah Compromise. Adams still refuses the name, on the grounds that his religious beliefs are not compromisable, though he defends the law itself. In 2023 he joined the first state-led delegation to wartime Ukraine.
The other reading of the Adams years starts with Proposition 4. Voters passed the independent redistricting initiative in 2018. Lawmakers repealed and replaced it in 2021, arguing the Legislature alone draws political boundaries. The Utah Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2024 that the Legislature's power to rewrite voter-approved government reforms has limits. Adams attacked the ruling, and the Legislature kept trying to unwind the initiative anyway.
Matthew Burbank, a University of Utah political scientist, told McKellar that Adams was a stronger president than the state has historically had, capable and heavy-handed at once, and that ballot initiatives exist because people felt unheard. His judgment of Adams on that count: "He didn't see that message at all."
There were personal controversies too. The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2025 that Adams had set in motion a change to state law that later helped his granddaughter, then 18, obtain a plea deal after she was charged in a case involving sex with a 13-year-old. The Utah Investigative Journalism Project reported that UDOT bought land from him for roughly $3.9 million.
What put the second reading on the ballot was Stratos. Kevin O'Leary's proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County, a project this journal has written about, broke into public view weeks before the primary, and Adams chairs the Military Installation Development Authority, the board that gave it initial approval.
Burbank said the controversy crystallized the case for change in District 7. Dark money groups flooded the race with attack ads, some built with AI-generated imagery, and Adams answered with attack ads of his own. He does not accept that he lost on substance. "I found very little policy debate in my election," he said in the exit interview, blaming false attacks and outside money.
The testimony of the people who served with him does not resolve into a verdict. Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, who fought Adams on redistricting and much else, said he held a standing weekly meeting with her every session and included her in daily press availabilities he had no obligation to share.
Sen. Jen Plumb recalled opposing a 2023 drug-induced homicide bill as a freshman Democrat; Adams heard her out, and the bill died. Sen. Kathleen Riebe, another Democrat, said her bills stalled in Rules and her committee assignments disappeared after she fought the voucher program and the collective bargaining ban. Thatcher, the caucus's loudest defector, told the Tribune that he served under five presidents and none ran the Senate the way Adams did, overriding the caucus and punishing dissent. Adams's reply to his critics was that their complaints reflect how they treated their colleagues.
The people who worked inside Adams's process, including Democrats, found him generous. The people who worked against it found out what it cost. The caucus knows both versions firsthand, and in November, choosing between a delegator's pitch and a continuity candidate, it will decide which version was the point.
One question survives his exit. Adams told McKellar he does not know whether he will stay on the MIDA board. Stratos ran through that board, and the backlash to Stratos ran through his primary. The choice may not stay his to make: a lawsuit filed in June by the Alliance for a Better Utah and five Box Elder County residents challenges MIDA's authority outright, and argues that a sitting legislator cannot lawfully hold a seat on its board at all. Leaving the Senate answers the second claim. It does nothing about the first. Whether the outgoing Senate president keeps the seat that helped cost him the other one is the last open question of the Adams era.
Article edited by Clint Betts. What are we missing? What did this piece get wrong? Email the editor at clint@utahn.com.
