This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The Utah Republican Party seems to be in a battle for its political soul.
Fifteen Republican incumbents in the state House of Representatives are facing stiff challenges from within their own party. Of the nine Republican incumbents who are up for re-election in the State Senate, five are being challenged by fellow Republicans.
For the first time in memory, all 75 House seats are contested, while in the Senate, only President John Valentine, R-Provo, escaped with no challenger at all.
The obvious impetus behind the assault on the Republican establishment - from within and outside the GOP - is the voucher fight of 2007, when GOP legislative leaders crammed tuition tax credits for private schools down the throats of a reluctant public, then vigorously fought the successful populist movement to repeal that legislation.
But it goes deeper than that. The voucher debacle was a symptom of a greater problem: a Legislature in the grip of an ultraconservative clique that is intolerant of moderate points of view, especially within its own party, and excludes anyone who doesn't play along.
Another troubling symptom of GOP unrest on Capitol Hill is the absolute resistance from most of the Republican leadership to any ethics reform that would attempt to reign in the current culture of favoritism and cronyism between legislators and their gift-bearing lobbyist buddies.
What is intriguing about this counter-establishment uprising is that it's coming from other Republicans, not just the marginalized Democrats. The list of those entrenched conservatives who are facing challenges in their own party conventions includes Rep. Greg Hughes, the Conservative Caucus chair; House Majority Leader Dave Clark; Senate Majority Leader Curt Bramble; and such high-profile champions of the party's right wing as Reps. Aaron Tilton, Curt Oda and Glenn Donnelson, and Sens. Michael Waddoups and Allen Christensen.
In several other races, candidates with respectable Republican backgrounds are running as Democrats because they believe their own party has become too narrow, and that a healthy two-party system is needed to bring moderation and accessibility back to the Legislature.
In the conservative bastion of Utah County, where seven of the 12 House incumbents have intra-party challenges and the other five have Democratic opponents with strong ties to the community, the battle is intensely joined.
One argument making the rounds there is that since most of the Legislature's Democrats are from liberal Salt Lake City, and the ultra-conservatives are steadily tightening down on the Republican membership, the debate has been emanating from those two extremes. According to this view, the election of "reasonable" Democrats from the more conservative areas of the state would revive the voice of Utah's majority middle.
One telling feature of this year's political climate is that while many Republicans have GOP opponents, the most outspoken anti-voucher Republicans - Reps. Sheryl Allen, Kory Holdaway, Steve Mascaro, Mel Brown and Kay McIff - have no Republican opponent. That is a shift from past years when moderate Republicans were the ones being targeted in GOP conventions by the armies of the right.
The resistance to the Republican upstarts from the GOP power structure is stiff. Some Republican challengers have complained about neighborhood caucus locations being moved at the last minute, and their supporters having difficulty finding out where to go. There are party leaders who say that some challenges to incumbents have been pushed by Brown, the Coalville Republican and former House speaker, who wants his supporters to win seats so he can recapture the speaker's chair from Rep. Greg Curtis, R-Sandy.
Brown denies that, saying he is not seeking the top job, but merely allowing for the possibility if he is drafted by his colleagues to run for speaker.