Big leads in 4 Utah races

Utah Sen. Bob Bennett and congressmen Jim Matheson, Rob Bishop and Chris Cannon all hold healthy leads over their challengers, a new Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll shows.

The new Dan Jones & Associates survey of 920 registered voters statewide (about 300 in each of the three congressional districts) shows Bennett, R-Utah, leads his Democratic challenger, former Utah Attorney General Paul Van Dam, 61-24 percent.

Matheson, D-Utah, leads Republican challenger John Swallow, 58-29 percent in the 2nd Congressional District.

Bishop, R-Utah, leads Logan City Councilman Steve Thompson, a Democrat, 55-24 percent, in the 1st Congressional District.

And Cannon, R-Utah, leads South Salt Lake City police captain Beau Babka, a Democrat, in the 3rd District, 56-22 percent, in the 3rd District.

Third-party candidates in all of the races trail badly, Jones found.

Cannon and Swallow won their June 22 GOP primaries and both are now fund-raising for their general election showdowns on Nov. 2.

Bennett, Matheson and Bishop had no intra-party challengers and have been working on their campaign war chests for at least two years.

The new poll's numbers "are good news for me," Matheson said from Washington, D.C., where Congress is still in session. "I think running this strong shows people know I put Utah first, my constituents first, that I'm not a rubber stamp for any party."

"This is about where we expected to be," Swallow said. "We haven't run any TV (commercials), so we expected to be between 25-to-35 percentage points behind."

Swallow said he'll start running TV ads in mid-to-late September, and predicted he'll also start closing on Matheson then.

And Matheson, despite his lead, is preparing for another close race against the same challenger. Two years ago, Matheson beat Swallow by less than 1 percentage point.

The 2nd District, which now includes counties east and south of Salt Lake County, is about 60 percent Republican, previous voting records show. But it did not vote that way in 2002, with Matheson getting 60 percent of the Salt Lake County vote, including many Republicans and independents.

To hold his seat this year, Matheson must get a healthy number of those non-Democratic voters again. Swallow's challenge is to keep his GOP base and capture enough independents to win.

Jones found, however, that as of now Matheson is favored by 28 percent of those who said they are Republicans and by 69 percent of independents.

"I feel very good about that," Matheson said.