With Buhler's steady campaign management, Bangerter, working hard, started gaining on Ted Wilson — percentage point by percentage point.

Ted Wilson could feel the campaign slipping away — and the GOP surge was just too much. On Election Day, Bangerter beat the former mayor by 2 percentage points, with Cook finishing third.

"Both those races — my dad's U.S. Senate race and the 1988 governor's race — were really tough losses for us," remembers Jenny Wilson. "They were one of the main reasons that before I decided to run (both for mayor and for her countywide council seat), I took some surveys and studied on whether I had a real chance to win."

In other words, Jenny Wilson was not going to get into a race where she was a decided underdog and probable loser.

Buhler, meanwhile, learned that in a statewide race, if you keep pounding home that your candidate is the true Republican in the race, the odds are with you.

Ironically, Buhler now finds himself in his second Salt Lake City mayor's race, where if you prove you are the true Democrat in the race, the odds are with you.

Starting in 1990, Ted Wilson, an adjunct professor of politics at the University of Utah through his directorship of the Hinckley Institute of Politics, decided to teach a class on practical campaign politics, taught by one Democrat (himself) and one Republican.

In considering which Republican to ask, Wilson fell on a "nice guy" who had helped defeat him in two statewide races — Buhler.

"I knew Dave fairly well," Ted Wilson remembers now. And he had a few hard feelings against the guy who had drubbed him so well in the 1988 governor's race. "I was put out a bit with him, that's true. Hey, he'd helped kick my butt."

Still, Buhler agreed to help teach the class, and over the next decade, "we became good friends, quite good friends," recalls Ted Wilson. "I like him very much."

The family and political connections have stayed on — with Jenny Wilson and Buhler becoming friends as well.

"He's an open guy," Wilson says of Buhler. Several Sundays ago, Jenny Wilson was checking her e-mail, and she saw a note from Buhler. He had misplaced the questionnaire some special-interest group had sent to the leading mayoral candidates, and he asked if she had hers and could send it along to him. She obliged.

This is the first time that Buhler has actually run against a Wilson. In the past, he had only managed campaigns against the family.

"And no matter what anyone tells you, it is a lot tougher to be a candidate than to be the guy running the candidate's campaign," Buhler says.