Peter Ashdown says U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch has sold out to big media companies and he believes that is just one of the senator's shortcomings in representing workaday Utahns.

So Ashdown, founder and president of Utah's own XMission, an Internet service provider, is working to replace Hatch in next year's elections.

The 38-year-old Democrat is running for the U.S. Senate. And he's starting his campaign early, hoping to "capture the Democratic field" and keep other would-be challengers away.

"I'm serious about this race and don't plan to step aside" for any other Democratic challengers, says Ashdown, who founded XMission in 1993 while a computer science student at the University of Utah.

XMission, the official Internet host for the Utah Democratic Party and 25,000 other subscribers, took off, and Ashdown left the U. before getting his degree. But his office doesn't look bare without the sheepskin hanging on the wall; the cluttered space is covered with five separate computers, hundreds of computer parts and related stuff, and a lone picture of Abraham Lincoln — a Republican.

And in the corner sits a nearly ancient 5-foot-high lime green arcade video game machine, one of the first ones in mass production and one of several scattered throughout the company's downtown Salt Lake City offices.

"I collect these old video machines," says Ashdown, a married father of two. "They're great,"

Anything can happen in politics. But if any GOP U.S. senator is safe next year, one would think it would be Hatch, 71, who seeks his sixth six-year term. Should Hatch win in 2006, he'll be 78 at the end of his next term.

Utah is overwhelmingly Republican. Hatch's re-elections have not been closely contested since then-Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson challenged him in 1982. Hatch still beat Wilson with 57 percent of the vote. And Hatch has defeated every other Democratic challenger with more than 65 percent of the vote since.

But a new generation of Utahns is voting now, a generation that understands the importance of the free flow of technology and business growth, says Ashdown, who added he's a free-market conservative on economic and fiscal matters.

Ashdown is part of that new generation. He was a 9-year-old fourth-grader in Leo J. Muir Elementary School in Bountiful when Hatch upset longtime Democratic U.S. Sen. Frank Moss to win his first term in 1976.

Ashdown doesn't see Hatch's age or tenure in office getting much political traction next year; other Democrats have faced Hatch shouting "in office too long" and come away defeated.