Candidates hope to pack Tuesday's caucuses with supporters

SALT LAKE CITY — Tuesday will be 2010's first election day, when Utahns will gather in neighborhood caucuses to elect delegates to party conventions.

It is a particularly important day for three-term Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and the seven conservatives who are challenging him from the right. They report frenetic efforts to ensure their supporters attend the caucuses and are elected. Democrats also have two candidates in that Senate race.

Other races where parties must use the caucus, convention and primary process to narrow the field include the 2nd District U.S. House race where Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, faces a challenge from the left in his party while multiple Republicans also are running; the GOP gubernatorial race; and numerous legislative and county races.

In the GOP Senate race, Bennett has consistently said the greatest threat to his re-election is at the state GOP convention, where delegates tend to be more conservative than the general public. He figures if he can survive the convention, he will do well with voters in primary or general elections.

For example, he had about $800,000 in cash at the end of 2009, or more than twice all his competitors had combined. That could help him more easily afford the TV ads and billboards needed for a primary.

But his challengers — entrepreneur Tim Bridgewater, former congressman Merrill Cook, businesswoman Cherilyn Eagar and attorney Mike Lee, plus just-filed candidates David Chiu, Leonard Fabiano and Jeremy Friedbaum — know it doesn't take much money to get friends and family to caucuses, nor much to campaign to relatively small numbers of delegates before the convention.

At the convention, if any candidate receives 60 percent of the vote they become the party's nominee and advance to the general election. Otherwise, the top two candidates face off in a primary election.

The first step comes Tuesday with the election of delegates at the caucuses.

"We have 5,000 people pledged to run as delegates of Bob Bennett," said Jim Bennett, the senator's son and campaign manager. To demonstrate how many that is, the state GOP convention two years ago had only 3,777 delegates.

Jim Bennett said most of those people signed up online, and many have attended meetings with the senator — and received information packets about how to run.

Lee and Eagar also are optimistically predicting they could earn 60 percent and take the nomination outright at the GOP convention if all the people they are expecting to run as delegates are actually elected.