Unlike the rest of Utah, Salt Lake City is a tough place for a Republican to win an election.

City residents haven't elected a GOP mayor since Jake Garn won in 1971, 36 years ago. Democrats hold all the state House and Senate seats in the city.

There hasn't even been a Republican candidate in the mayoral finals since Dave Buhler, now a city councilman, slipped into a mismatched final election by 102 votes against former Democratic Mayor DeeDee Corradini in 1991.

With current Mayor Rocky Anderson, also a Democrat, retiring this year, a healthy, large candidate field has already announced. Since the candidate filing period doesn't even open until July 1, more could still get in. (There are new, earlier municipal-election dates in a bill awaiting Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s signature. The old filing deadline was Aug. 15.)

Two prominent Republicans are in the large mayoral field this year — Buhler, a former GOP state senator, and Keith Christensen, a former city councilman who, oddly enough, is endorsed by Anderson.

Officially, the Salt Lake City mayor's race — the premier local election every four years — is nonpartisan. That means a candidate's political party preference is not listed next to his or her name on the ballot, and local parties have no official part in picking candidates.

But mayoral candidates in the state's capital city always are associated with a political party — and the two finalists were identifiable Democrats in 1995, 1999 and 2003.

Likewise, city residents have not elected an LDS mayor since Ted Wilson's last election in 1983, 24 years ago.

Traditional political strategy would say that Buhler and Christensen will split the already-meek GOP vote in the primary election and thus lose handily to the two leading Democrats, whomever they may turn out to be.

However, despite that political history, Buhler and Christensen will have none of that thinking. They both downplay their Republican Party roots and say they will draw support from across political, economic and religious spectrum. (Buhler is a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Christensen says while he was raised as a Mormon, he has not been active as an adult.)

In exit polls conducted in the mayoral race in 2003, pollster Dan Jones & Associates found that 32 percent of voters said they are Democrats, 30 percent said they are independents (who often vote Democratic, says Jones), while only 25 percent said they are Republicans. Other surveys show that within the city, 54 percent of residents say they are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while 46 percent say they are Latter-day Saints.