Now, six years later, Matheson is far ahead in the polls. Top Utah Republicans are quietly hoping he'll stay "independent" and help them with some of their issues in what appears may be a new Democratic House majority; and until they get another shot at redrawing his district, GOP leaders appear to accept Matheson as an embarrassing "blue" district in very "red" Utah.

Matheson has grown politically over the past six years — always careful to downplay that he's a Democrat in a very Republican state. His ads don't say that he's a Democrat and don't display the donkey, symbol of the Democratic Party. He usually doesn't have any national Democrats come into Utah during an election year to campaign for him. You won't see Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., making an appearance here.

Tall, like his dad, wearing cowboy boots and carrying an aw-shucks kind of posture, Matheson is a smart cookie who tries not to lord it over those he's talking to.

Raised in a close-knit family, Jim Matheson says his father's death in 1990 from a rare form of cancer changed his life. Scott Sr., wife Norma and baby Scott Jr. were living in southern Utah in the early 1950s when a number of open-air nuclear bomb tests went off in Nevada. The pink radioactive clouds drifted overhead.

And 40 years later, the former governor died of a type of cancer officially recognized as bomb-test-caused.

"Dad was never bitter about what happened to him. He believed in the process of politics. At the end of the day, I got in this business because my family emphasized you have to be involved in public service somehow, and you ought to try to make this world a better place for your children and grandchildren."

Still, one of the first causes newly elected Congressman Matheson took up was radioactive/nuclear storage. Later, he fought against his GOP delegation colleagues, who were siding with President Bush's plans to reconstruct the Nevada Test Site to be ready to test a new generation of smaller, "bunker-busting" nuclear warheads.

"I've gotten funding (for test preparedness and bunker-busting nuclear bombs) stripped from the budget two years in a row," he says. "It is an issue that has been very close to my family but also close to my constituents. And everywhere I go we talk about it."

Blue Dog Democrat

Matheson says that another family trait — and a Scottish trait brought from the old country — is frugality. Or, as some would say of Matheson, he's cheap.

In college he bought a 6-year-old sports car and drove it for another 19 years. "You could see the road through the floor boards. But, hey, it still drove."

He joined a group of fiscally conservative Democrats in the House who call themselves the Blue Dog Coalition. Not greatly loved by the party leadership, the Blue Dogs fight for a balanced budget and fiscal restraint. With the federal government now running record deficits, they haven't been successful. Matheson is now co-chairman of the Blue Dogs.