Walker exits sky-high in state popularity poll

Former Gov. Olene Walker, who retired on Monday, leaves state government as one of the most popular governors in Utah history, a new poll shows.

A new Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV survey by Dan Jones & Associates shows that an impressive 87 percent of Utahns strongly or somewhat approve of the job Walker was doing. Only 6 percent disapproved of her job performance.

The high number exceeds the high job performance approval ratings given to former Gov. Mike Leavitt early in his 11 years in office.

Jones also found that newly installed Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. enters office well-liked. Huntsman has a 62 percent job approval rating. As might be expected, 32 percent didn't yet have an opinion of the new governor, Jones found.

And even the Utah Legislature, which routinely lags far behind individual officeholders in popularity, is doing well. Jones found that 65 percent of Utahns approve of the job lawmakers are doing, a fine rating for the amorphous body.

However, that approval rating will likely drop over the next two months. The 104 part-time legislators go into their 45-day general session Jan. 17. And previous polls conducted for the newspaper and TV station show that citizens' approval of lawmakers' actions usually drops as the legislators pass or kill controversial bills and adjust fees and taxes.

As Leavitt, now head of the Environmental Protection Agency, prepares for another round of U.S. Senate confirmation hearings — this time as President Bush's nominee to head the huge federal Health and Human Services Department — he may take a bit of solace in the fact that 67 percent of Utahns like the job he's doing as head of the EPA.

Unfortunately, that 67 percent approval rating is far below the numbers Leavitt received as governor. After Leavitt ran for and won a third four-year term in 2000, his job approval ratings didn't reach above 80 percent, ratings he regularly saw early in his gubernatorial tenure.

Walker, 74, was Utah's first female governor. And some Utahns may like her in part because of her grandmotherly, caring attitude.

Articulate, smart (she holds a doctorate in education) and personable, Walker was Leavitt's lieutenant governor for 11 years, taking over when Leavitt resigned in November 2003 to join the Bush Cabinet.

Walker surprised many politicos when just after the 2004 Legislature, and with several well-known and well-funded Republicans already in the governor's race, she announced she'd seek another four years herself in the 2004 elections.

But Walker was seen as a moderate Republican, a term historically not well-liked in the conservative-dominated State Republican Convention.