One of Utah's most competitive House seats — Biden carried it by 0.08 points in 2020 — has an incumbent with a decade-long PAC pipeline and a first-time challenger largely funding herself. Here's what the filings actually show.
UPDATED THROUGH 2026 PRIMARY REPORTSSOURCE: DISCLOSURES.UTAH.GOV
Clint Okerlund (R) is seeking his second term in House District 42, a Salt Lake County seat that was the closest-margin Republican-held district in the state as recently as 2020. His challenger, Iva Williams (D), is a first-time candidate — and, notably, gave $25 to Okerlund's own 2024 campaign before deciding to run against him in 2026. We pulled every itemized contribution and expenditure filed by both campaigns to see how each is actually funding this race.
$111.6KOkerlund raised, 2024–26
$12.9KWilliams raised, 2026
51%Okerlund's PAC share
14%Williams' self-funded share
Who's Funding Each Campaign
$111.6KTotal Raised
PAC / association money — 51% (~$57K)
Individual donors — 40% (~$45K)
Self-funded — 9% ($9,500)
Top institutional donors
Donor
Amount
Utah House Republican Election Committee PAC tracked
$27,500
House Speaker Leadership PAC tracked
$12,500
Utah Association of Realtors PAC tracked
$3,500
Fresh Air PAC tracked
$3,000
Rick Callister (individual, one check)
$5,000
A. Scott Anderson (Zions Bank) tracked
$1,500
PAC pipeline dominates. Okerlund's fundraising leans heavily on Utah's institutional Republican leadership apparatus — UHREC and the House Speaker's own leadership PAC alone account for $40,000, more than a third of everything he's raised since 2024. The 2026 cycle so far is thin: only about $5,100 raised in the Convention reporting period, with no major fundraising push yet visible for this specific race.
One PAC, a national small-dollar list, and Apollo Political. A single $5,000 check from Utah Women and Politics PAC — a "150 Women for $150,000" recruitment fund aimed at competitive races — is more than a third of everything Williams has raised. Most of her remaining small-dollar donors ($1–$100 range) are out of state: Chicago, LA, Portland, Sacramento, DC, Boston area. Two-thirds of her spending, $4,977 of $7,553, went to a single vendor: Apollo Political, a Cottonwood Heights consulting firm founded in January 2026 that also works Anna Graff's campaign against Speaker Mike Schultz in HD-12.
Common ground: the Gondola and the Lake. Both candidates oppose the LCC Gondola project and both name Great Salt Lake restoration a top priority — a genuine area of stated agreement despite the party split. Okerlund has a legislative record to check on the lake (see above); Williams, not currently in office, only has a stated position.
Data centers: named vs. unmentioned. Williams' platform names the Box Elder County data center directly — likely the Stratos Project — and calls for an immediate statewide data-center moratorium. Okerlund's platform doesn't mention data centers at all, despite co-sponsoring HB 76, a data-center water-transparency bill.
Labor: addressed vs. unaddressed. Williams pledges to oppose any legislative effort to weaken public-sector collective bargaining and cites labor union endorsements — backed up by Teamsters Local 222 and Operating Engineers 3 contributions in her own filings. Okerlund's platform doesn't address unions or collective bargaining.
Abortion: addressed vs. unaddressed. Okerlund pledges to "always vote Pro-Life." Williams' platform doesn't mention the issue.
The Business Question
Okerlund's own Conflict of Interest disclosure lists him as contract/fractional CFO for three linked bioscience and ag-data entities — FIOR LLC, Altair Bioscience, and Ag Genius LLC. Ag Genius, a Delaware-registered LLC, lists Doug Haymore as its second manager alongside Okerlund. Haymore is separately Chief Legal Officer at FIOR Bioscience — the same FIOR where Okerlund is contract CFO — and also appears as a $96.80 donor to Okerlund's own campaign.
A business partner across two of a candidate's own companies also being a campaign donor isn't illegal or even unusual — but it's a documented financial relationship voters don't otherwise see, and worth having on the record.
Did His Great Salt Lake Bills Actually Help the Lake?
Restoring the Great Salt Lake is one of nine stated priorities on Okerlund's own campaign platform, and his legislative record shows five bills touching the issue this session — one as chief sponsor, four as co-sponsor. But sponsorship isn't impact. Here's what each bill actually does.
HB 328 (his own bill) — delivered nothing. Would have restricted wasteful sprinkler irrigation of purely decorative turf in the Great Salt Lake watershed. The introduced version required cities to withhold permit approval until developers complied; after sod-farming industry testimony, the House-passed version stripped that down to a notice-only requirement. The bill then died entirely in the Senate.
HB 125 & HB 76 (co-sponsored) — no direct water benefit. HB 125 gives DNR legal authority to fund water-rights litigation, but the appropriation meant to pay for it was added then removed before passage. HB 76 only requires data centers to report their water use — a transparency measure, not a cap.
HB 247 & HB 410 (co-sponsored, not chief-sponsored) — the two bills with real conservation mechanisms weren't his. HB 247 restructures mineral-extraction severance taxes to incentivize voluntary water-conservation deals; HB 410 creates a $2.75M fund for farmers to lease water to the state for the lake. Both are chief-sponsored by other representatives (Ward and Koford), with Okerlund one of roughly two dozen co-sponsors on each.
The one Great Salt Lake bill Okerlund actually led on didn't survive the session. The two bills in this cluster that could plausibly put water back in the lake belonged to someone else.
What the filings show, plainly
Okerlund is running a conventional incumbent's campaign: modest 2026 fundraising so far, backed by a well-established institutional PAC pipeline built over his first term. Williams is running a first-time challenger's campaign: heavy on small out-of-state donations and one large targeted PAC check, spending most of what she's raised on a single consulting vendor. Neither campaign's 2026 fundraising, so far, looks like a race either side is treating as a top priority yet — worth watching whether that changes as November approaches. And on his central campaign promise — restoring the Great Salt Lake — the bill count looks better than the substance: his own bill died, and the two bills in his legislative package with real conservation mechanisms belonged to other lawmakers.