The end of an era is coming for the Utah Senate — and it’s up to the Republican supermajority caucus to decide what direction they go next.
After eight years of being one of Utah’s most powerful state leaders as the top Republican in the Legislature’s upper chamber, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, unexpectedly lost his primary election last month, starting a countdown until he will vacate his District 7 seat at the end of the year.
Now there’s a leadership void that Senate Republicans will need to fill, and it’s likely to result in some shuffling in the caucus’ existing leadership team.
The decision of who will be the Senate’s next president won’t come for months, since the Senate GOP won’t hold its closed-door leadership elections until after the Nov. 3 general election.
But Adams’ loss has sent shockwaves through Utah’s Capitol Hill, stirring some uncertainty of what could come next for the state’s upper chamber, how the Senate’s next leader will operate, and what that could mean for not just the Senate but the GOP-controlled Legislature as a whole.
Already, at least one senator has thrown his hat in the race to become the Senate’s next president: Sen. Evan Vickers, who served as majority leader, Adams’ second for years until he lost the position to the current majority leader, Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Sandy, last year. Cullimore, who is also considered a likely contender for the position, declined to comment for this story.
As senators look ahead to the looming change of leadership, they’re also reflecting on Adams’ lengthy term as president. He has bipartisan respect, especially among current members of minority and majority leadership who applauded him as an effective leader, as well as a collaborator who was willing to allow Democrats a voice and listen to opposing view points.
But he also had some critics among lawmakers, especially those who felt they didn’t “toe the line.”
Adams, a 'strong' Senate president
To Matthew Burbank, a longtime political science professor at the University of Utah, Adams was what he described as a “strong” Senate president — both in the sense of effectiveness and capability, but also in the sense that he wielded a heavy hand.
“My impression was that Adams was much more of a strong Senate president than we have historically had,” Burbank said.
Adams actively stepped into the role of being the “face” of both the Senate and the Legislature, Burbank said, but he was also a “driving force” in “pushing back” against the other branches of government — in some cases the governor, and more recently the judiciary — while asserting the power of the Legislature.
“He was a leading figure in this kind of sense that, the Legislature is always right. If it’s the courts or it’s the governor or bureaucrats or higher ed or whoever that’s opposing the state Legislature, then they need to be dealt with,” Burbank said.
One of Adams’ supporters, Sen. Scott Sandall, R-Tremonton, sees it differently. He said he views Adams as “defender” of the constitutional powers granted to the Legislature.
“I never felt like President Adams tried to cross those lines,” Sandall said. “But at times, there have been moments where I think the executive branch and the judiciary have tried to step into the lane of the Legislature, and at that point in time President Adams was certainly a champion to push back to make sure that those lines were bright and clear, and that the other two (branches) did not overshadow what the Legislature felt like was their constitutional duty.”
Adams reflected about his accomplishments and his primary loss in an interview with Utah News Dispatch on Friday, in which he agreed with Sandall’s characterization — that he worked to be a “defender” of the Legislature’s constitutional powers while also holding great “respect” for the other branches of government.
“Judges should not legislate from the bench, and the governor should not do executive orders. It’s our role to set policy,” Adams said. “I think I’ve defended the executive branch role and the (judiciary’s) role, but I’ve also defended the legislative role. And I think we’ve got a good balance in Utah because we seem to generally get along.”
Some hallmarks of Adams’ presidency include six straight years of income tax cuts, and investments in major transportation projects including highways and FrontRunner. He also played a major part in leading Utah through the COVID-19 pandemic, and he was passionate about international relations. In 2023, Adams joined the first state-led delegation to war-torn Ukraine to foster humanitarian and trade opportunities.
Adams also repeatedly pointed to Utah’s nearly two-decade streak of ranking No. 1 in the nation for economic outlook, according to metrics tracked by the pro “limited government” think tank, the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as other rankings he said shows he’s leaving Utah at a high point.
'Missteps'
Adams was an effective leader, Burbank said, but there were also times when he “overstepped” in ways that were “problematic” for the Legislature.
He pointed to the failed tax reform effort in 2020, when the House and Senate repealed the controversial legislation amid public backlash. And he pointed to the Legislature’s handling of ballot initiatives including the anti-gerrymandering measure Proposition 4, which voters passed in 2018.
Lawmakers in 2021 repealed and replaced Proposition 4, turning its independent redistricting commission into an advisory body that the Legislature could ignore. GOP leaders including Adams argued that voter-approved law was unconstitutional because the Legislature alone has the sole authority to draw political boundaries.
But an ensuing lawsuit over Proposition 4 resulted in several court rulings that angered Republicans, especially the Utah Supreme Court’s unanimous 2024 opinion that made clear the Legislature’s power to change “government reform” laws enacted through ballot initiatives has its limits. Adams was a loud critic of that ruling, saying at the time that it effectively made a “new law about the initiative power, creating chaos and striking at the very heart of our Republic.”
Burbank pointed to multiple unsuccessful attempts to again undo Proposition 4 now that the courts have restored it as law as another example of “missteps” that could have contributed, in part, to Adams’ downfall.
“Ballot initiatives really came out of the fact that the Legislature wasn’t listening to people,” Burbank said. “He didn’t see that message at all.”
Adams’ successful Republican challenger, Stephanie Hollist, focused her entire campaign around frustrations that Adams wasn’t listening to his constituents anymore — and that resonated at the ballot box. But that wasn’t the only reason she won.
One of the biggest controversies to hit the state of Utah in recent memory exploded when Utahns got word of “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary’s proposal to build a massive data center in Box Elder County. Backlash was swift and widespread, and it came right ahead of primary season. Adams had direct ties to the project as chair of the Military Installation Development Authority, which gave an initial green light to the hyperscale data center.
“The data center controversy really sort of crystallized this sense of perhaps it’s worth a change,” Burbank said.
To Adams, however, failed legislative efforts or lawmakers responding to public outcry is “part of the process, and the process works well.”
As for his loss, he didn’t see it as a matter of losing touch with voters — but rather he attributed it to “false attacks.”
A flood of attack ads came from “dark money” groups in his District 7 race, he said. Those attack ads, some of which were created with inflammatory artificial intelligence imagery, came from both the left and the right, and Adams’ campaign tried to fight back with his own attack ads targeting Hollist.
“I’ve never experienced such a broad effort of false attacks in my life,” he said. “I found very little policy debate in my election. I found a lot of personality attacks. And I was really disappointed in that. … We should have been more focused on policy than personalities, and I’m not sure why that happened.”
During his time in power, Adams was also involved in other controversies that made headlines, including The Salt Lake Tribune’s reporting that he initiated consideration of a law that, after it passed, later helped his 18-year-old granddaughter reach a plea deal in a criminal case involving sex with a 13-year-old, and the Utah Investigative Journalism Project’s reporting that the Utah Department of Transportation bought land from Adams for about $3.9 million.
Criticisms and praise
Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, said even though she and Adams would disagree on a wide variety of issues — with Proposition 4 and redistricting a recent example — she said Adams would always listen to opposing views. And whether it was prioritization of bills, committee assignments or other issues, Escamilla said Adams was not alone in his decision making, and he didn’t operate “in a vacuum.”
Escamilla said Adams would also go out of his way to allow the Democratic minority’s leadership opportunities to express their voices. She said he would consistently hold weekly meetings with her during the 45-day session and always invite her to daily media availability — things she said he didn’t have to do, but did anyway to ensure the minority had a voice in the debate.
Asked if she was disappointed in Adams’ defeat given their good working relationship, Escamilla said “anyone that loses a race, my heart goes out” to them.
“I’ve been there,” she said. “It really destroys a little bit of your soul.”
But she said no matter who becomes the next Senate president, regardless of whether she’s invited or not, she’ll be knocking on their door to continue that same type of working relationship.
Another Democrat, however, was a critic of Adams: Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, who unsuccessfully ran to be the Democratic nominee for Utah’s new 1st Congressional District earlier this year.
Riebe said Adams would “stifle the process” by keeping her bills stalled in the powerful Senate Rules Committee. She also said she was taken off some committees, including the Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee, which, as an educator, she said was especially “unfortunate” because the entire reason she ran to be a legislator was to be an advocate for public schools.
“It seemed like a snub,” she said, because she was a critic against a school voucher program and “how aggressively I fought” the ban on collective bargaining. “So there was definitely a feeling of, if you don’t tow the line you will be treated in such a way.”
However, Riebe also said, “to his credit, I always had an ability to explain my vote. … He never gavelled me down. … I tried to remain respectful.”
One of the loudest critics of Adams has been former Sen. Dan Thatcher — who resigned last year shortly after announcing he had unaffiliated from the GOP after becoming increasingly frustrated with the party and the way Adams ran the Senate. Before he resigned, he affiliated with the Utah Forward Party.
Thatcher recently told The Salt Lake Tribune he “served with five different Senate presidents and none of them would have done the things Stuart Adams did as president.”
“He unilaterally overrode the caucus on a regular basis. He treated anyone who disagreed with him, no matter how respectfully, with absolute utter contempt and cruelty,” Thatcher told the Tribune. “He conducted business in the dark like he was growing mushrooms.”
Adams, when asked about Riebe’s and Thatcher’s comments, said “their criticisms of me are reflective of how they treated their colleagues.”
“I would never move somebody out of their committee assignment because of how they voted. If I did that, no one would have a committee assignment,” Adams said, while also noting that at times he’d act based on recommendations from Democratic leadership or the caucus. “If they’ve had any issues with me, it is because I’ve been trying to get them to focus on issues and not on criticizing others, or me.”
As for overriding the caucus, Adams said “those comments are impossible to make, because if I did that, I would not still be Senate president.”
Adams said he didn’t see himself as “controlling” — a word Vickers used to describe his style — but rather “collaborative.”
“I couldn’t be Senate president if I weren’t collaborative,” he said. “Now if controlling means that I try to maintain decorum, or I try to maintain civility, or I try to make sure that people don’t attack one another. Then, yes, probably that is true, but my efforts have been trying to maintain decorum and keep people from attacking each other.”
Other lawmakers expressed admiration and respect for Adams, including Sen. Brady Brammer, R-Pleasant Grove, Sandall, and Senate Minority Assistant Whip Jen Plumb, D-Salt Lake City.
Brammer didn’t agree that Adams wielded a heavy hand — but rather he was forceful when it came to driving forward the Republican caucus’ priorities.
“He would support things that the body as a whole had voted to support, and that’s when he would get more involved,” Brammer said. “Sometimes you’re on the losing end of that and it doesn’t feel so great, but that’s part of the process. … He would let the members drive it and he would work hard to effectuate those decisions.”
Sandall described Adams’ style as “very thoughtful” and “collaborative.” While some may have had a different experience, “I never felt like things were operated in the dark or without input sufficient to make the decisions.”
To criticisms about stripping committee assignments or actions that might appear to some as vindictive, Sandall said he’s “never known President Adams to be vindictive.”
“Yes, he would be forceful, and quite honestly you’d see that on the floor sometimes in decorum, those public moments where he wants to make sure that the integrity of the Senate is preserved, where it behooves a leader to have to do those things,” Sandall said. “President Adams wants and is very concerned about maintaining the integrity of the Senate, and I appreciate that.”
Another Democrat, Plumb, was complimentary of Adams for the same reasons as Escamilla. Even though they would disagree on many issues, she said he would allow opportunities for her to “use my voice and pass successful legislation.” She also noted her perspective is framed by the reality that Democrats in Utah’s Republican supermajority Legislature have to face: they’re working in a “system that is not necessarily” set up for them to succeed.
Plumb teared up as she recalled when Adams took the time to listen to her as a freshman senator when she expressed concern about a 2023 bill that would have enabled drug providers to be found guilty of homicide if a person they supplied drugs to died from an overdose.
“He listened to me. He truly listened,” she said of Adams, noting that, ultimately, the bill failed. “It makes me tear up a little bit honestly, when that bill failed, because he did hear me. Because I know that he would have been in support of that bill, it would have passed. … That will always stick with me.”
Adams also had his critics, Plumb acknowledged, and “I do know that there are folks, I think from both parties, who would probably say that their voice has been limited.”
“I think that’s not a secret,” she said. “When I have my moments of reflection, I wonder if some of that is related to delivery. Because you can say very critical things … but my delivery is not personal, it’s not an attack on individuals.”
There are times when legislation passes — especially bills she views as attacks on transgender people — that Plumb said “it’s been heartbreaking and crushing.”
“But that’s not necessarily a reflection of President Adams,” she said. “That’s the state.”
What's next?
Adams said his parting message to the Senate GOP is to maintain Utah’s high economic performance, pointing to the state’s high-ranking household income, starting teacher pay, among other metrics he said shows the state has been managed well.
“Utah is on an upward trajectory, and just keep us going,” Adams said. “I have confidence that we’ll continue to lead the nation in making sure that the citizens of Utah have as much policy driven opportunities, freedoms, economic ability, economic opportunities and socially maintain an environment where our children can thrive. … Let’s make sure Utah stays the best spot to raise a family.”
Adams declined to say whether he has a preference for who takes his place as Senate president, whether it’s Vickers or Cullimore or someone else.
“I’m going to let the process work,” he said, leaving it up to the caucus to decide. “I have confidence in our caucus that they’ll pick the very, very best person. … Whoever the Senate president is going to be, it’s going to be a very, very capable person.”
Adams’ predecessor, former Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, said leadership styles and personalities will vary with turnover in Senate leadership — but he argued the system is set up to bring more “consistency” than anything, so he doesn’t expect a dramatic change after Adams is gone.
To any criticisms of Adams, Niederhauser said, “You’re not going to be able to make everybody happy. The system, by its nature, there will be people that disagree. There will be people who are unhappy.”
But no matter who the Senate GOP caucus picks as its next leader, Niederhauser said he thinks the change “won’t be that drastic.”
“If all of the sudden the Democrats became the majority, yeah that would be a watershed change,” Niederhauser said with a chuckle. “But because there is a process, the president … they have a responsibility to lead a caucus and bring that caucus along. And that creates consistency.”
Both Brammer and Sandall declined to weigh in on who they would prefer to take Adams’ place, saying it’s too soon to say given the nearly five-month timeline before the November election.
Sandall — who currently serves as vice chair of the powerful budget body called the Executive Appropriations Committee — has the fiscal experience to be well-positioned to take on the role of chair of that committee, which is being vacated by retiring Sen. Jerry Stevenson. But whether he becomes EAC chair or not is a decision that’s “up to the future Senate president,” he said. And Sandall said he’s not interested in running to be the Senate’s next leader.
“I would be most content to continue to do something in the budget,” Sandall said.
Brammer echoed Niederhauser’s take — that no matter who will serve next, he doesn’t see a drastic change coming, predicting “a difference in degrees, not a total new direction.”
“This isn’t an existential crisis of leadership,” Brammer said. “We have a lot of great people. We have a deep bench. You know, Stuart served for eight years … there’s been a lot of people building up experience and that are prepared to lead.”
Additionally, Sandall noted this isn’t necessarily a public race. “It’s amongst 20-plus senators who will be duly elected,” he said.
That caucus, he said, will ultimately decide.
Katie McKellar's story was originally published at www.utahnewsdispatch.com. Read more, including her interview with Adams, here.
