Taylor believes that many national candidates will still visit Utah and will buy TV and radio ad time here. "Why would (candidates) skip us? We are a great bargain — it is so much cheaper to buy time here" than in big-state media markets. "And you get (TV ads) into other states." That's because local stations' signals go into surrounding states as far away as Montana, he said.

With a Utah Feb. 5 primary "we are at least guaranteed to participate in some way. Without it we couldn't be participating even symbolically," said Taylor.

A mega-primary does affect the playing field, however, says Utah GOP executive director Jeff Hartley.

"It certainly changes the dynamics for the smaller states like Utah," said Hartley.

But Hartley hopes that Mountain West states can still work together to provide "some synergy around our interests, a voting bloc that can still be relative and important to presidential candidates."

Huntsman and legislative leaders believed holding Utah's presidential primary on Feb. 5, and having neighboring states do likewise, would lead to a number of candidates coming into the region, learning about our issues and concerns.

That could still happen, says Hartley, while admitting that leading candidates probably wouldn't be visiting near the Feb. 5 across-the-nation vote. "A number (of candidates) have already come in to raise money. Maybe they won't be here in the days just before Feb. 5. But perhaps a week or two out" from the mega-primary date, Utah may host some candidates.

The Utah GOP has 39 voting delegates to the 2008 National Republican Convention, to be held in early September in St. Paul, Minn.

Both major parties allocate their convention delegates to some extent on how Republican or Democratic each state is. So, says Hartley, because Utah is a very red state, Republicans here get more voting clout in the national convention than just its population would account for.

The national GOP has about 2,500 voting delegates, so Utah makes up 1.5 percent of that nominating vote.

Utah is an especially a small-time player in national Democratic politics, with leading Democratic presidential candidates not visiting the state at all in the run up to elections. Utah has 29 voting delegates in the 2008 National Democratic Convention in Denver. With 3,000 delegates, that's 0.96 percent of all delegates' votes.

But Huntsman is undeterred by the shifting politics of a national primary. When some legislators suggested the local parties themselves put on a Feb. 5 primary, using the $850,000 already put aside for such a Utah primary, the governor stepped in and pressured GOP leaders to fully fund a state-run $3.5 million primary next year.