Half the Ledger, Six PACs

Luke Searle has represented Wasatch County Council Seat A (At-Large) since 2023. Rather than seek reelection, he's running for Utah House District 59 — the seat Rep. Mike Kohler is vacating. HD59 covers Summit and Wasatch counties, including Park City. Searle won the June 2026 Republican primary against Jeffery Pierce and now faces Democrat Celeste Johnson in the Nov. 3 general election. With no incumbent on the ballot, in a district that came within about 200 votes of flipping in the last comparable wave year (2018), both sides describe this as a genuinely competitive race.

Where the money comes from

Across his full 2026 campaign — Convention and Primary reports plus the itemized contributions that followed — Searle has raised roughly $56,800. Just under half of it traces to six political action committees.

The six PACs, together, account for about $28,200:

Two of the six — House Speaker Leadership PAC and UHREC — arrived on the same day, Aug. 10, 2026. Both sit inside the same donor and leadership network already documented funding dozens of other Utah legislative candidates.

All In For Utah PAC's money moves through Election Hive, the campaign-services firm run by Matthew Lusty that processes payments for a long list of Utah candidates and PACs. The PAC's own leadership sits close to the governor's office: Owen Fuller, its chair, also runs Gov. Cox's "Disagree Better" initiative and First Lady Abby Cox's personal foundation. Its treasurer and secretary, Dan Hemmert, is the Military Installation Development Authority's Executive Director.

The PAC's own filings show where a lot of its money actually comes from — and it's not always individual donors. In its 2026 Primary report, $50,000 of $50,000.12 total raised was a single transfer from an entity called "All In For Utah," registered at nearly the same address as the PAC itself. That entity isn't a PAC and doesn't appear to disclose its own donors. A later filing shows a second, $11,000 transfer from the same source — the pass-through is a recurring channel, not a one-time event. The same later period also shows a real, named contributor: A. Scott Anderson, the retired Zions Bank CEO, gave $10,000 directly.

"All In For Utah" itself is not a mystery entity — it was incorporated by Matthew T. Sanderson, a nationally prominent Republican campaign-finance attorney at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, D.C. (past General Counsel to Rand Paul's 2016 campaign, Finance Counsel to McCain 2008, counsel to Mitt Romney's Commonwealth PACs). Sanderson has incorporated at least eight Utah political entities using the same Midvale-based registered-agent service, including both "All In For Utah Foundation" and "All In For Utah PAC" — and, separately, Utah Doers Network, a similarly "grassroots"-branded vehicle that has funded dozens of sitting Utah legislators. Same legal architecture, two differently branded funding operations, the same election cycle.

Utah Chamber PAC is a different kind of relationship — the Salt Lake Chamber's own vehicle, funded largely by the Chamber itself and major Utah construction and development firms, giving identical $5,000 checks to a broad, bipartisan slate of candidates the same day, including a Democrat. That's standard business-community hedging across many races, not a targeted relationship the way the leadership PACs are.

The Karen Peterson pattern

Peterson personally gave Searle $250 on June 3, 2026. Her PAC, Elevating Local Leaders — where she's the registered Primary Officer — gave him $1,000 the very next day. It's the same personal-then-PAC, back-to-back pattern she used with another candidate, Chris McConnehey, earlier the same cycle.

What the filings themselves look like

All 35 deletions are zeroed-out contribution records with no dates, sitting inside the normal transaction sequence — the same pattern documented across several other Utah campaign committees. Not unusual for this dataset, but on the higher end of what's been found elsewhere.

Where this stands

Searle was not asked for comment, consistent with this publication's practice of reporting from public records and documents in hand. HD59 remains a genuinely contested race, and campaign filings will continue through the November election.

Sources