Hatch looked far and wide for cash-raising opportunities, even traveling to the American Virgin Islands for three days last spring in a fund-raising event.

Hansen said while Hatch will do some fund raising for the state party, the senator believes he's already given the party adequate sums of cash this year.

According to various Hatch reports, he gave the state party $252,360. That includes $180,000 for a statewide get-out-the-vote effort, as well as other lump sums intended to help individual GOP candidates — mostly legislators.

The $180,000 debt the state party finds itself in is larger than usual, Hartley said. But reasons for that are twofold.

First, the state party had to pay $50,000 to the national party as the local share of hosting President Bush in August. "We hadn't planned on that expense," said Hartley — although the party was glad to spend the money on Bush's visit. (The president held a fund-raiser for Hatch that brought in half a million dollars to the senator's campaign.)

And state party officials ran a greatly expanded legislative effort this year — spending twice what it usually did — hoping to take a number of seats away from Democrats.

In the end — perhaps in part due to U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, running a very strong campaign in his 2nd District and national Republicans being whipped — Republicans didn't gain any seats overall in the Utah Senate and lost one seat in the House.

"We did a lot more — more than we've ever done — in legislative races. We spent $600,000 on legislative races — active in 46 different contests — where two years ago we spent around $300,000, mainly on just helping legislative leadership and a few other targeted races," Hartley said.

Without the state party's efforts, Hartley said, it's likely that more state House Republicans would have lost their races.

Utah Democrats spent around $400,000 on legislative races and kept several Senate and House seats that Republicans believed they would take away from the minority party.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com