- Rep. Celeste Maloy said her goal is to rebuild trust in Congress.
- Phil Lyman is pushing for more transparency at the federal level.
- 3rd Congressional District covers 18 counties, 60% of the state.
U.S. Rep. Celeste Maloy learned on the job how to balance a workhorse mentality in Washington, D.C., with the chaos of running for election three times in as many years.
Now — still without a single complete congressional term under her belt — the Republican is facing off with one of the state’s most well-known conservative disruptors.
Following a contentious bid for governor in 2024, and for party leadership in 2025, former state Rep. Phil Lyman is employing his anti-establishment playbook against Maloy.
“The issue there is whether or not those are the right things to go after Congresswoman Celeste Maloy about,” said Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics. “She has not been in Congress for long enough.”
Lyman has already taken aim at Maloy’s background as a congressional staffer, and he promises to continue his emphasis on transparency, which often veers into allegations of corruption.
The showdown comes as the candidates navigate a new congressional district that has been expanded by redistricting court battles to cover 60% of the state.
Tasked with connecting with new constituents, both Maloy and Lyman are leaning into personal interactions with party delegates ahead of the nominating convention on Saturday.
The optimist
On April 13, Maloy and Lyman stood in a Washington County basement for 2½ hours taking turns answering questions from a room full of party precinct members.
Their event had been rained out, but Maloy said it was a priority for her to demonstrate that she is ready to account for her brief track record in Washington, D.C.
“I take my job seriously at restoring trust in our representative system of government,” Maloy told the Deseret News.
Maloy’s accessible campaign style and pragmatic approach to policymaking may have given her a start in Utah politics but has also made her a target for ideological opponents.
In 2023, Maloy surprised the Utah political establishment with an upset among party delegates during a special election to replace her former boss, Chris Stewart.
Delegates nearly cost Maloy her seat a year later when nearly 60% of them backed her challenger, Colby Jenkins, who carried the powerful endorsement of Sen. Mike Lee.
Jenkins criticized Maloy’s party line votes on spending resolutions and surveillance programs and promised to join the House Freedom Caucus to advance more uncompromising positions.
Maloy barely eked out a primary win against Jenkins after a recount narrowed her margin to 176 votes and the Utah Supreme Court refused to accept late postmarked ballots.
As she faces another serious primary challenge, Maloy hopes the message that continues to resonate is that despite federal dysfunction, Congress is making progress on core issues.
“We’re moving things in the right direction,” Maloy said. “There’s a lot of cynicism online, and I think a lot of people are feeling it. ... But I am still an optimist.”
For the first time in years, House Republicans passed all 12 spending bills through committees in a partial return to “regular order,” which recently has been replaced by annual omnibus bills.
Maloy, who was elected to serve on the powerful appropriations committee one year after entering office, also pointed to progress on her priority of natural resources.
Last year, the House GOP passed the bipartisan SPEED Act, which would shorten permitting timelines and limit litigation for projects that require federal environmental reviews.
However, both the spending bills and the regulatory reforms stalled in the GOP-controlled Senate as party leadership struggle to move legislation forward.
In January, Maloy was unanimously elected as the chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, with authority to set the agenda on energy, water and public lands for the GOP caucus.
The skeptic
Instead of working within the system, Maloy’s opponent says he is set on spotlighting its flaws.
Lyman said this has been the common theme of his bids for governor and state party chair: To fix a problem you first have to understand how deep it goes.
In 2024, after coming within 9 percentage points of beating Gov. Spencer Cox in the primary, Lyman launched a multifront attack on Utah’s election system.
Lyman refused to accept the results saying he needed to verify the election returns through an independent, third-party audit first. He has yet to concede.
That summer Lyman asked the Utah Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the outcome of the primary and to place him on the general election ballot.
Lyman argued that the signature path to the primary was unconstitutional because the party opposed the 10-year-old law known as SB54. The courts denied his petitions.
Lyman pushed forward with an energetic write-in campaign, focused on his claim that since election officials would not allow him to check their work, they must be hiding something.
“If I want to come out and talk about the lack of transparency, the dirty voter rolls, the cheating in elections, the people who most want me to stop talking about that are the ones who could disclose and bring some transparency to the process and who refuse to do that,” Lyman told the Deseret News.
An October 2024 legislative audit added fuel to Lyman’s allegations after it found that the signature verification error rate created the possibility that Cox did not initially meet the threshold of valid signatures to qualify for the primary election ballot.
The audit affirmed that Cox had legally qualified for the ballot. But Lyman pointed to imperfections in the process, and refusals to disclose certain information, as proof that officials were engaged in what he called “systemic coordinated collusion.”
Lyman’s willingness to attribute bad intentions to the state’s top elected leaders has helped to earn him a loyal, and sometimes aggressive following around the state, especially on social media.
His write-in campaign ultimately received more than 200,000 votes, which is unheard of in Utah politics, pulling in around 20% of the vote in places like Utah and Washington counties.
As Lyman turns his focus to the 3rd District, he told the Deseret News that he recognizes his supporters, who he said are sometimes called “Lymanites” by his critics, have taken on “kind of a personality.”
“One thing I have tried to do a little bit more is to message to my key followers that we want to make friends not just beat people up,” Lyman said. “That’s been my position from the beginning so it’s really just trying to help the narrative take a productive course instead of destructive.”
If elected, Lyman said he will work to build relationships in Congress, and would like to be Utah’s first Freedom Caucus member to oppose anything he feels violates the U.S. Constitution.
Money and maps
Like Maloy, Lyman is navigating a conflicted history with GOP delegates ahead of the nominating convention.
In 2025, Lyman aimed to build on the grassroots momentum of his write-in campaign to become chair of the state Republican Party. Lyman narrowly lost to incumbent chair Rob Axson, 52% to 48%.
Departing from past campaigns, both Lyman and Maloy made an effort to gather signatures this year to guarantee a spot in the primary after they were handed losses by party precinct delegates in their most recent races.
Maloy, who has already qualified for the primary with more than 7,000 signatures verified on Tuesday, has spent $70,000 on paid signature gatherers, a minor expenditure compared to her total.
Since the start of the year, Maloy has raised nearly $326,000, and currently has $461,900 in cash on hand. So far, Lyman has raised just $4,200, according to his campaign.
Lyman emphasized his signature effort has been volunteer-driven. But his campaign said they did not expect to “cross the required threshold.” On Wednesday, county clerks had verified less than 1,500 signatures.
This means Lyman will likely depend on securing at least 40% at the nominating convention to qualify for the primary election among delegates, some of whom will have seen him as a candidate three years in a row.
Also shaping the 3rd District race are new electoral boundaries that could play to Lyman’s favor.
Following an extended court battle, a state district judge rejected lawmakers’ attempt to comply with Utah’s Proposition 4 redistricting law and selected a congressional map submitted by advocacy groups.
Maloy joined Rep. Burgess Owens and local leaders to fight the map in a federal lawsuit that ultimately failed.
The map creates a new district in the urban core of Salt Lake County, and expands the 3rd District to cover all of eastern Utah and southern Utah — spanning 18 counties, Utah’s “Mighty 5″ national parks and 51,000 square miles.
Lyman won in 11 of these counties during the 2024 primary. But winning the 3rd District will be a challenge now that it covers such a diverse area, said former Roosevelt Mayor JR Bird, who ran for Congress in 2024.
“Having ran in CD3 when it was 11 counties, I can tell you how hard it was then. And then add another seven counties and it’s almost impossible,” Bird said. “That’s how it’s a disadvantage to us.”
The court-ordered map “watered down” representation in the 3rd District by violating Prop 4’s requirements to create compact and contiguous districts, Bird told the Deseret New.
Lyman and Maloy both have deep ties to the district.
Lyman as a former state lawmaker and local certified public accountant. Maloy as a soil conservationist, attorney for Washington County and legal counsel for Stewart when the 2nd District covered southern Utah.
Despite their disagreements on tone and how to work productively in Congress, the candidates highlighted the same top issues they hear from constituents: government overreach, water management and national debt.
Maloy has received endorsements from outgoing Rep. Owens, the entire state Senate and House majority leadership teams, lawmakers in the district and local county officials.
She also received the endorsement of President Donald Trump in November for the 2nd District race before the new map was established. Lyman has received an endorsement from America First Insight.
Who else is running in CD3?
The new 3rd District has shifted to become more red-leaning by more than 15 percentage points, according to Inside Elections. Here’s who else is running in the district, which favors Republicans by 47 percentage points:
Democrats
- Steven Merrill — Former candidate for state House, programmer
- Kent Udell — Former professor of engineering, worked in energy industry
Republicans
- David Harris — Retired two-star general
- Tyler Murset — Built VotingAct, an online platform for voter engagement
Constitution Party
- Cassie Easley — Community volunteer and student at Southern Utah University
Libertarian
- Michael Stoddard — Orem resident, former candidate