(Seed said Anderson fired her after they disagreed on policy issues, including how to handle the news media. He said she was "almost a complete disaster as an employee and I had no choice but to fire her.")

Supporters say Anderson has made Utah more interesting, at the very least, by highlighting the political diversity that exists at the state's heart, in the state's capital and largest city. He first won office in 1999, and re-election in 2003, essentially by winning the votes of non-Mormons, who constitute about 55 percent of the city's population. (Statewide, Mormons constitute about two-thirds of the population.) In his last election, he got 54 percent of the vote, even though about 80 percent of Mormons voted against him, he said.

Those election patterns — non-Mormons mostly for Anderson, Mormons mostly against — set the rhythm for a mayoral administration that many people say has isolated Salt Lake City even more by emphasizing that the city's political and cultural distinctiveness is also about religion and that being non-Mormon is synonymous with being liberal and urban and different.

"It's embarrassing for the rest of us; Mayor Anderson is so over the top, nobody wants to be associated with him," said Matthew R. Godfrey, mayor of the nearby city of Ogden. Godfrey said Anderson had not worked well with other mayors across the state and that his views were out of step with those of fellow Utahns.

Anderson, who has been married and divorced twice, with a son in college, said he believed that divisiveness could be a virtue. For too long, he said, Democrats have run toward the center, away from confrontation, trying more to be like Republicans than to offer a real alternative. And in a place like Utah, he said, he just has to push harder because the dominant conservative culture is so strong.

"If you take a principled point of view and people fall down on one side or the other, you can either be characterized as being principled or being tough," he said. "Or you can be dismissed as being divisive, and I think if that's the definition of divisive, we need more people in politics who are divisive."