As Republicans in Utah have turned more moderate since 2010, veteran US Sen. Orrin Hatch has turned more conservative. Taken together, this could help Hatch survive a tea party challenge at today’s Republican nominating convention. Six-term Senator Orrin Hatch entered today’s Republican nominating convention in Sandy, Utah, with the polling winds at his back, suggesting that an aggressive and historically costly campaign to beat back a tea party revolt has worked.
Several polls relesed Saturday give Hatch the support of about 60 percent of Utah Republicans – 4,000 of whom are convention delegates chosen, in a unique system, by neighborhood caucuses throughout the state. Under Utah law, 60 percent support among delegates allows the winner to skip a scheduled June primary and head straight for the general election in November. In conservative Utah, it’s largely understood that the GOP nominee becomes the winner of the race.
If Hatch can’t reach the 60 percent threshold, he will go into a two-way primary race against his challengers, most prominently former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist and state Rep. Chris Herrod.
IN PICTURES: Tea party politics
After Utah’s longest-serving senator spent a near record $5 million on the run-up to the convention, he still has $3 million in the campaign chest to spend if the race goes to a primary.
At the same time, national tea party-affiliated groups have been outspent by groups that have backed Hatch, including the National Rifle Association. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has also backed Hatch, an important endorsement in heavily-Mormon Utah.
Hatch has done several things right, says Keith Poole, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, including recognizing early on that he would be challenged, focusing on the nominating process and, in essence, going back to Utah and “punching noses.” The backdrop for Hatch’s vigilance has been the plight of former US Sen. Bob Bennett, the Utah Republican who lost to a tea party candidate in 2010, and Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, who is in the campaign of his life against tea party-backed candidate Richard Mourdock.
In both Utah and Indiana, national tea party groups have tried to replicate their numerous successful attacks against more moderate incumbents in 2010, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars from national donors to air attack ads against two senators whom they see as having lost some of their conservative values and have thus damaged efforts to fight the more progressive agenda of Democrats and the White House.
“[Hatch] has a history of reaching across the aisle to work with Democrats, which obviously does not sit well with many tea party activists and other conservatives,” write CNN reporters Ashley Killough and Paul Steinhauser. “But Hatch has taken steps since the mid-term elections to fight that criticism by highlighting his conservative chops.”
Continued at www.csmonitor.com/USA/Ele...party-revolt/%28page%29/2
