Like he’s done after every election, state Sen. Dan McCay spent Wednesday morning driving around his district pulling up yard signs and loading them into his car.
But unlike every previous election, McCay pulled signs this year contemplating why Riverton Republican voters chose his primary opponent, state Rep. Doug Fiefia, over him.
Voters this year were upset nationwide about high gas prices, rising food prices, unaffordable housing and looking for a change, McCay said by phone as he pulled the last sign out of the ground.
That foul mood is evidenced, he said, by the dozens of incumbent lawmakers in red states who have lost their primaries in recent weeks.
Tuesday night, three prominent Utah Republican legislators joined the ranks — McCay, Senate President J. Stuart Adams and Rep. Trevor Lee.
“Gas prices are not everyone’s favorite now. Groceries are more expensive. And we elected a president who promised to lower gas prices and reduce the cost of living in the country, and we are currently seeing the opposite of that,” McCay said, which has resulted in “a whole lot of frustration at incumbents.”
The nonpartisan Utah Foundation has polled voters on their highest priorities for the last several years, and no matter partisan affiliation, affordability is always in the mix. But a second topic has consistently risen to the top: “ignoring voters.”
Shawn Teigen, the researcher who leads the organization, said anxiety over dwindling resources and the cost of living exacerbates voters’ frustration with politicians not seeking or heeding their input.
And the heated debate over greenlights given to a potential hyperscale data center in Box Elder County that has made international headlines and raised questions about the future of water availability and energy prices demonstrated how intimately that pair of concerns is linked.
Victorious challengers told The Salt Lake Tribune the perception that politicians are “ignoring voters” echoed along the campaign trail. Candidates said voters pointed to a Legislature that they felt was too insular, opaque and unwilling to listen to the needs and concerns of its constituents.
Fiefia, who beat McCay in the Senate District 18 GOP primary, said in an interview Wednesday morning that he felt his victory was a result of “listening.”
The issues he heard about most often, he said, were affordability, “smart growth” and protecting kids online. In the Legislature, Fiefia has focused much of his legislative portfolio on artificial intelligence guardrails, particularly for children. The work has attracted the ire of the Trump administration, but he says it has been engaging for voters on the ground.
“When it comes to protecting our children, that will always resonate with Utahns,” he said.
Fiefia said that Utahns he’s spoken with do want to foster innovation and encourage business to grow in Utah, but more important is ensuring “we don’t lose our children as we win this [AI arms] race.”
And it was not a particular dislike of McCay that led to his victory, Fiefia added, but “I heard from many residents who wanted a more accessible, community-focused senator.”
McCay said, despite the Legislature cutting taxes for six straight years, he heard from constituents that they weren’t feeling the benefits because they were too incremental. In the meantime, property taxes were rising.
He said he also suffered from his sponsorship of a bill that extended about $1 billion in subsidies to bring professional hockey to downtown Salt Lake City — although it had been proposed for the south end of the Salt Lake valley when he agreed to carry the bill.
“I feel like we did the right thing in investing in downtown and keeping the downtown vibrant,” McCay said, “but a lot of my constituents did not appreciate the fact I’m running a bill that benefits Salt Lake City and not my district.”
“Feeling like other interests are served”
Stephanie Hollist, a former attorney for Weber State University, said she believes her upset of Adams, perhaps the most powerful politician in the state, in Senate District 7, “was about connecting with people.”
“A lot of this was based on people not feeling like they’re being heard,” she told The Tribune the day after her win. “And for me to be able to go to every event I was invited to, I was accessible, I was available and really ready, not even to hear and talk, but to have hard conversations. I think that’s something people really respected.”
Late in the primary race, Adams began facing mounting criticism for his role as one of the key decision-makers advancing a proposal to build a controversial data center in Box Elder County. He chairs the Military Installation Development Authority, which voted to clear the way and limit taxes for the development of the Stratos data center project.
Prior to that decision, the main question Hollist’s campaign heard from voters was: “What kind of Republican is Stephanie? Is she a MAGA Republican? Is she a moderate Republican?” said Mason Hughes, whose consulting firm, Apollo Political, knocked doors on her behalf.
But after news of MIDA’s involvement in approving the Stratos data center broke, Hughes said, the conversation shifted.
“The number one question was, ‘Is Stephanie corrupt?’” Hughes recollected, adding, “After the data center went down, people really felt like Stuart just was corrupt, that he was enriching himself. There were obviously all these stories that were coming out about the donations he was getting to his PAC, and that really, really rankled voters.”
The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2023 and earlier this year that Adams and political action committees controlled by him have on numerous occasions accepted donations from companies and individuals with business before MIDA.
In a previous statement to The Tribune, Adams said, “The claims being circulated regarding political contributions and project approvals are inaccurate. No donations from [fundraising events], or any other donations, are connected to the data center and it is all publicly and properly disclosed. Campaign and PAC contributions are disclosed and are entirely separate from any policy decisions.”
Hollist said that the controversy over the data center was symptomatic of a long-standing attitude among voters.
“You get this over and over and over — a sense of feeling like other interests are served, and if we are served, we’re served leftovers, not real, focused results,” she said.
The theme of voters being concerned that their leaders aren’t hearing them extended beyond Adams’ district, Hughes noted, and emerged as a top issue in several districts up and down the Wasatch Front where his firm worked for both blue and red campaigns.
“Using these data centers as an example,” Hughes said, voters would tell candidates, “‘I just feel like everything’s so corrupt. I feel like I’m not being represented by the people that are elected to represent me.’ There’s just this disconnect, I guess. People feel like when you elect somebody, they’re supposed to do what you want.”
“We have to turn the tide”
The Utah Foundation’s research shows that whether or not elected leaders are listening to them has been on Utah voters’ minds for years. Anger over the approval of new data centers in the state, Teigen hypothesized, may have merely been the breaking point for voters.
The organization reported in the 2024 brief “Politicians Not Listening to Voters” as part of its Utah Priorities Project that most surveyed Utahns across the political and religious spectrum affirmed that they believed it was a problem in the state.
When presented with the statement, “Utah’s politicians are too beholden to business, religious, or other special interests and ignore the will of the people,” 47% responded that they “strongly agree,” and 24% said they “somewhat agree.”
After that report’s publication, Teigen said, “We got a little pushback from people, including some relatively high-ranking legislators, that were like, ‘This is kind of dumb. We hear our voters like us, and they elect us back in on a regular basis, and we think that maybe this pertains to other communities, or other statewide offices or something like that.’
“But then,” he added, “when you see that Adams loses in the primary to that extent, it doesn’t totally shock us.”
Veteran lobbyist and political consultant Spencer Stokes said he hears the claim that politicians don’t listen after every election.
But he believes the defeats are more issue-driven. In the case of each of the three who lost, the Republican lawmakers had taken on “lighting rod issues” that captured voters’ attention.
Lee had been outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues and cracking down on immigration. McCay, Stokes said, lost support of a conservative bloc when he pushed to change the state flag. And, for Adams, he was dragged down by the backlash to the data centers.
Although Adams took credit for scaling back the footprint of the Box Elder data center after he helped win its approval, Stokes said, “It was probably a little too late after the controversy had manifested itself.”
Bob Stevenson, the Davis County Commissioner and former Layton mayor who beat Lee on Tuesday, said he thinks people across the state have grown increasingly dissatisfied with lawmakers.
“I think the Legislature and their arguments with the courts has not been a healthy situation,” he said, adding that the fight over redistricting has left a bad taste in people’s mouths.
”I want all of our congressional seats to be Republican, but at the same time, did we create arguments on things that we should have never created?” he asked. “I think that we have to turn the tide and be able to show the public that the Legislature is there for them and is trying to work for them.”
Part of the incumbent losses, Stevenson said, comes simply from the fact that some of them have been in office for decades.
“Stuart [Adams] had been in office for a long time,” he said. “There’s just some things that maybe add up, and it’s hard to make people happy all the time.”
Lee believes his campaign never got to discuss policy issues because of constant attacks against him — a narrative he said The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a hand in perpetuating.
The two-term archconservative House member blamed the church for sinking his campaign because he sponsored legislation that aimed to revoke government-funded benefits for immigrants, a bill the church opposed, and because a church-owned media outlet covered allegations that Lee stole from a former employer and leveraged his role as a lawmaker for personal gain.
“It shows that in Utah, the character assassination and the attacks are working, because that’s what happened to President Adams, as well,” Lee said. “They didn’t talk a lot about policy. They talked a lot about, ‘Oh, he’s corrupt. He’s bought-and-paid-for.’”
But in his race, McCay said after finishing collecting signs Wednesday, he’s at peace with the outcome.
“I’m ending my legislative service and I have no regrets,” he said. “I’m really quite happy with where things are. In the long run, I believe in the legislative process, I believe in elections and I believe in the process working out to the betterment of the state and the people. And it’s hard to fault it if people feel I’m not the right guy.”
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