GOP is strong in Utah but at 25-year low in rest of nation

Republicans are down and out in most of America. But not in Utah, where carrying the GOP banner gives you a great chance of being elected.

Recent polling shows that across the nation the number of Americans saying they are Republicans has dropped to a 25-year low.

Only 23 percent identify with the Grand Old Party, a new Pew Research Center survey shows. Other national polls show the percent of Republicans has dropped to the high teens.

But a review by the Deseret News over the same quarter-century time frame finds that Utahns are not among the faint-GOP-hearted.

In fact, polling for the newspaper and KSL-TV since 1985 by Dan Jones & Associates shows little change locally in political party affiliation over the years.

Forty-four percent of adult Utahns said they were Republicans in March 1985; 44 percent in April 2009 said they were Republicans, Jones' surveys find.

GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who has increasingly been named as a leader in national Republican Party politics, says the party outside of Utah must rebuild and re-energize or become "like the Whig Party of 1856" — then a national party that was swept aside by drastically changing American politics.

Today finds "a (Republican) party struggling to redefine itself," said Huntsman. "The re-emergence of the party will be timed to the articulation of real ideas and the pre-eminence over partisanship."

The newspaper's study of Utah political demographics also finds that Democrats here have not made headway against the red tide, although there have been times when Republicans have dwindled a bit here, and political independents have grown.

Todd Taylor, by far the longest serving state Democratic Party executive director in the nation, says there are several factors at work in Utah: money, media and no real "authoritarian voice" of a statewide elected Democratic leader.

Huntsman says that Republicans have remained strong in Utah, and Democrats haven't made gains, because over the last 25 years "we've generally had good governance" by the majority Republican officeholders — "just a series of good administrations."

Don't equate GOP Utah politics with the LDS faith, said Huntsman. "We have a lot of independents in this state."

And Taylor also doesn't want to tie being a good Mormon with being a good Republican.