Bryan Schott - Utah Politics

10/02/2026

More than $1 million was spent on the Republican primary that ended Senate President Stuart Adams' time in the Legislature, making it one of the most expensive legislative primaries in recent history.

Adams spent $719,143 and lost to Stephanie Hollist, who spent $297,000 and won by 1,613 votes.

Our analysis of campaign finance disclosures looks at who paid for the race, who got paid, and what the filings leave unclear.

Senate President Stuart Adams outspent Stephanie Hollist by more than 2 to 1 but still lost.

09/30/2026

Utah finally has a competitive congressional race, and Tuesday night the two candidates met on the debate stage. Democrat Ben McAdams and Republican Riley Owen faced off at Salt Lake Community College in the Utah Debate Commission's 1st Congressional District debate. It was the first debate for the....

09/29/2026

Watch the 1st Congressional District debate between Democrat Ben McAdams and Republican Riley Owen. Host Bryan Schott will offer live commentary.

Pre-debate show begins at 5:30 followed by the debate at 6 pm.

09/25/2026

Utah House Republicans are stepping up spending to protect a handful of seats in November.

Over the past two weeks, the House GOP PAC and Speaker Mike Schultz's leadership PAC sent five-figure checks to incumbents in close races.

Full breakdown at the link:

Utah House Republicans gave five-figure donations to to a handful of incumbents to defend seats in the 2026 legislative election.

09/23/2026

In this episode: New Utah polling from Noble Predictive Insights Is a Democratic wave brewing ahead of November? How would a blue wave election impact Utah's legislative elections? Sen. John Curtis asks the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate Donald Trump Jr.'s ties to a Russian oligarch Trump...

09/19/2026

Democrats are having a strong year nationally — leading the generic congressional ballot by 7 points and flipping roughly 30 state legislative seats since President Trump returned to office.

So what would that kind of wave mean for the Utah Legislature, one of the most gerrymandered in the country?

We built a model testing three wave scenarios against every Utah House and Senate seat on the 2026 ballot. The short version: a modest wave barely moves the needle. Breaking Republicans' two-thirds supermajority would take a shift roughly twice the size of what national polling shows today.

Read the full breakdown, including which specific seats are most exposed:

Utah's 2021 maps were built to absorb a Democratic wave. Our modeling shows just how large that wave would need to get before the math changes.

09/19/2026

🎧 New Podcast:

Drew Ballard spent 15 years playing piano bars and fielding audience requests. His repertoire is 6,500 songs and counting.

Lately, he's been using that same skill to produce viral parody songs skewering Utah political figures and calling out government and corporate targets.

We talk about the data center fight that pushed him into activism, why parody works better than original protest music, and what it's like being a leftist vegan atheist from a Mormon farm family in central Utah.

Full conversation is at the link 🔗

Pianist Drew Ballard (.tunes) turned 6,500 bar songs into viral political parodies. Hear how a Utah data center fight sparked it all.

09/17/2026

Drew Ballard is a classically trained pianist with a 6,500-song repertoire who spent over a decade performing in piano bars and has recently turned that same instinct for what makes a crowd sing along toward political parody. Known online as Druby.tunes, Drew produces biting takes on well-known song...

09/14/2026

A planned Friday appearance at the University of Utah by Texas GOP congressional candidate Brandon Herrera has been postponed.

Herrera, a YouTuber with millions of followers, has produced videos featuring N**i imagery and made sexually explicit, derogatory comments about women and children.

The group that invited him — the Utah Federation of College Republicans — hasn't said why it postponed the event or why it invited Herrera in the first place.

Full story:

The Utah Federation of College Republicans gave no reason for postponing Brandon Herrera's appearance at the University of Utah, and its chairman didn't respond to questions about why he was invited.

09/12/2026

Utah Republicans hold supermajorities in both legislative chambers. That's not changing in November.

What IS in play: a handful of competitive seats where both parties are spending real money to defend incumbents or flip districts.

See where the money is going:

Campaign finance filings reveal where House and Senate leadership PACs, including Speaker Mike Schultz's, are placing their biggest bets.