Greene and many delegates believed it would take several ballots to finally elect a new chairman and were surprised by Lockhart's win on the first ballot.

A straw poll in the GOP presidential race was put off being counted, awaiting the other ballots. Greene adjourned the 5 1/2-hour convention without a count in the presidential race. Results will be put on the GOP Web site later, she said.

Lockhart told the delegates there are always reasons not to vote for the candidate with the most experience — as he had over Harmsen and Bludworth. But the party chairman's job is to win elections for Republicans, and he's been doing that through fund-raising and grassroots work for more than a decade, he said.

"I'm going to raise a lot of money. I'm pretty good at it," Lockhart said.

"Unless you want (Republicans) to be viewed as Democrats by the media, we have to have money" to put forth GOP ideals — which are shared by most Utahns, Lockhart said.

In fact, a number of speakers slammed the news media.

Bennett, who explained his stand on the immigration bill to the editorial boards of the Deseret Morning News and Salt Lake Tribune last week, said the media often don't get things right.

Both newspapers reported Bennett supports the compromise immigration bill, even though many conservative and liberal Americans do not. He then went on to explain why he supports the immigration bill — just as the newspapers reported.

As has been the case in recent GOP conventions, most delegates left the hall before debate and votes could be taken on several resolutions, one of which criticized the immigration and D.C. voting rights bills now before Congress. And so no action was taken on those matters.

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com