According to recent campaign disclosure reports, the Senate race between Mike Lee (right above) and independent challenger Evan McMullin (left) in November 2022 did not set a record for the most expensive Utah political campaign ever.
WASHINGTON D.C. – As it turned out, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and independent challenger Evan McMullin did not set a new record for campaign spending in their competing bids for Utah’s seat in the U.S. Senate last year.
That dubious honor still belongs to the congressional campaign between former Rep. Ben McAdams (D-4th Dist.) and Republican challenger Burgess Owens in 2020.
In that hotly-contested race, those rival candidates spent a combined total of $23 million, with Owens emerging as the victor.
Lee and McMillin only spent a combined total of nearly $19 million in their 2022 race, according to financial disclosures filed by their campaigns with the federal government on Dec. 8.
Of course, the price tag for the McAdam-Burgess slugfest includes estimated spending by political action committees for their respective candidates, while the disclosures filed by the Lee and McMullin campaigns do not.
To win re-election in November of 2022, the Lee campaign out-spent McMullin by more than $4 million.
After raising a grand total of more than $12 million for his campaign, Lee spent about $11.5 million, leaving his campaign staff with more than a $1 million in cash on-hand.
McMullin’s persistent appeals for individual donations produced more than $7.7 million in contributions. Of that, his campaign spent more than $7.3 million, leaving about $400,000 in cash on-hand.
The Lee campaign summarized their fundraising efforts as having produced nearly 25 percent of contributions of less than $200 from small individual donors (more than $3 million); 48 percent from large individual contributors (nearly $6 million); and another 17 percent from PAC contributions (about $2 million).
The McMillan campaign meanwhile declined to accept donations from political action committees.
Their financial disclosure report listed McMullin’s sources of funds as 27 percent from small individual donations (about $2 million) and about 73 percent from large individual contributors (about $5.7 million).
Lee’s campaign was bolstered by an ad blitz attacking McMullin by the conservative Washington-based Club for Growth and its allied Crypto-Freedom PAC. Their efforts supporting Lee were estimated at a cost of more than $8 million.
The independent candidate’s campaign was similarly supported by Put Utah First, a left-leaning Salt Lake City based PAC that ran up anti-Lee ad buys to the tune of nearly $5 million.
But those estimates are unofficial, leaving the Lee-McMullin match-up out of the running for the record books as the most expensive Utah political campaign ever.