LAYTON — Longtime state politico Dave Hansen swept into the top seat of the Utah Republican Party Saturday amid a call from state and national GOP leaders to get back to core values at the party's off-year organizing convention at the Davis Conference Center.

Hansen has served twice as executive director of the state party, run a number of local and national elections and works for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, as a state political issues consultant. After his victory Saturday, he said it was time for the party to return to the tenets that define it.

"The thing that we're going to have to do is make sure we have our message right," Hansen said. "When we have our message right and focus on the things we believe in as Republicans, we do well."

Doing well is an issue on the minds of many party faithful following a general election year in which the Utah GOP gained a Senate seat in southeastern Utah and a House seat in Ogden, but lost a Senate seat and three House seats in Salt Lake County. The party also lost its majority on the nine-member Salt Lake County Council in 2008 and could only watch as the popular vote in the state's most populous county went to the then-junior senator from Illinois, Democrat Barack Obama.

Hansen said that victory, along with the federal congressional majority now held by Democrats, will ultimately work in favor of the GOP gaining lost ground in Utah.

"If you look historically, we as a party tend to do better when Washington is controlled by Democrats," Hansen said. "And that's because the actions they take remind us of why we're Republicans."

Convention keynote speaker Ken Blackwell, former Cincinnati mayor and one-time undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under President George H.W. Bush, reminded convention attendees why they were Republicans and characterized the current political environment as a time of crisis with the country "rapidly becoming a European-like Socialist state."

"At this moment of change and darkness and uncertainty, it is the enduring principles of our party, the light our party has been to American democracy, that we must challenge," Blackwell said. "Let us waste no time in cursing the darkness, let us take a stand for fidelity of faith, fidelity of principle, and let us light the light of freedom and individual liberty."

Salt Lake County delegate Richard Armstrong, Taylorsville, said it was time for party candidates to adhere to traditional GOP principles, not just in sloganeering, but through the actions they take while in office.