Utahns are big on Romney

State and top political party leaders will go ahead with a Feb. 5 "presidential poll" next year even though a new poll shows that Mitt Romney is way ahead of any other contender and could easily pick up Utah's Republican Party's nomination.

Romney is set to announce his formal candidacy today in Michigan, his home state.

Romney, whose one term as Massachusetts's GOP governor ended in January, is well known to Utahns. He is credited with saving Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Olympic Games after national and international scandal wracked the Olympics, and he has a vacation home in Deer Valley.

Romney is also known as a member of the state's dominate religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And while Romney is not the first Mormon to run for the presidency, he is considered a top contender for his party's nomination next year.

A new Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll conducted by Dan Jones & Associates finds that 45 percent of Utahns favor Romney now.

More importantly, in the GOP nomination race, Romney is favored by 63 percent of those who told Jones they are Republicans and by 69 percent of those who said they routinely "strongly" vote Republican.

So in any GOP primary, Romney is way, way ahead.

Jones found that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani gets only 9 percent of the GOP vote, while Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., gets just 12 percent of the Republican vote to Romney's 63 percent in a GOP primary.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., like former GOP Gov. Mike Leavitt before him, is pushing for a western states primary early next year. The 2006 Legislature put $850,000 aside for such a vote.

But state leaders now say it would cost $3.2 million to pay for a statewide primary using the new electronic voting machines, with official polling places staffed by judges. Huntsman and GOP legislative leaders refuse to spend any more money on the vote.

So, Rep. Doug Aagard, R-Kaysville, has a bill this session to turn the primary election into a "party primary poll," where the individual political parties will conduct a vote next year.

"We are very confident we can run a primary poll for much less money" than it would cost the state to conduct a regular statewide vote, said Jeff Hartley, state GOP executive director. Under Aagard's legislation, each officially sanctioned political party (as of now there are only three) will get a cash down payment, and then each party will bill the state for out-of-pocket expenses in conducting their own primary poll — with $850,000 being the collective limit.

Hartley says Republicans and Democrats alike will organize the Feb. 5 vote using local high schools across the state.