But even in the reddest state in the United States, residents are feeling dour about progress in Iraq.

A new Salt Lake Tribune poll shows just one in five Utahns feels more optimistic now than a year ago about the chances for success in the place President Bush calls "the central front in the war of terror."

And perhaps not coincidentally, overall support from residents of the state that gave Bush his biggest margins of support in both the 2000 and 2004 elections has fallen dramatically. Half of Utahns now rate Bush's performance as "only fair" or "poor" - which experts say has a lot to do with the president's war management. Overall support for the president has fallen from 56 percent in January to 47 percent now. But a healthy majority of Utah Republicans - 65 percent - still give Bush high ratings.

The poll, taken between Oct. 29 and Oct. 31, was conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. of Washington, D.C., and included 625 likely voters.

Even though the Bush administration and some military leaders say a surge of nearly 30,000 extra troops into Iraq has helped to quell the violence there, Utahns do not appear to be swayed. The poll shows that backing for Bush's handling of the war hasn't moved a single point in Utah since January, just before the surge began. Then and now, only 41 percent of Utahns said they supported Bush's war leadership.

"It's been one or two months of good news against a backdrop of bad," said pollster Brad Coker, who oversaw the Tribune survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. "The successes just don't seem to register."

Indeed, Americans - perhaps wary of past declarations that things in Iraq were improving - seem to be taking the recently reported successes with a grain of salt, said Jason Campbell, co-author of the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index, a monthly compilation of hundreds of pieces of security and economic data.

"We've been hearing for a while, to varying degrees, that even if things aren't going well, then at least there is reason for optimism," Campbell said. But since those prognostications didn't prove to be true in the past, Campbell said, many may view the surge as just "another in a long line of new plans and changes in strategy."

In fact, Campbell said, the security situation in Iraq does seem to be improving. But he also noted that progress on the political front has been stagnant and that the security situation could change abruptly.

"What's there to say that another Samarra-like event couldn't happen and undo some of these positive things?" Campbell asked.

The Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, is widely considered to have ignited the sectarian violence that has terrorized Iraq over the past year and a half, leading to tens of thousands of deaths, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the killings of hundreds of U.S. service members.

A Tribune poll taken a month prior to the bombing showed about 60 percent of Utahns supported Bush's handling of the war - the highest rate in the nation at the time. And although the news from Iraq was bleak in the following months, the president still was riding high approval ratings among Utahns when he visited the state in August 2006 to speak at the national convention of the American Legion.

"Nothing seems to put a dent in Utah's support for President Bush," Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics, marveled at the time of the president's visit.

But Jowers also noted that he had found "even in talking to strong supporters of the president, people are almost in despair over the war."

Indeed, by January, support for Bush's handling of the war in Iraq among Utahns fell below 50 percent for the first time, even as general support held at 56 percent.

Though it happened slowly, Jowers said, Utahns now seem to have come around to the idea that the quality of Bush's leadership is at least in part to blame for the dire situation in Iraq. Jowers said Iraq was "the biggest chunk" guiding Bush's overall approval ratings down below the 50-percent mark, but noted that the president has also gotten sideways of many constituents on health care, immigration and other issues. But Jowers said he was particularly struck that so many Utahns remain unwilling to say they have grown more optimistic about the chances for success, even when statistical evidence seems to indicate things in Iraq are getting better.

"That's a striking number," Jowers said of the 21 percent of Utahns who said they're feeling better about the situation in Iraq this year than they were last year. "Especially because I think people have adjusted their expectations - and their definition of success - significantly downward at this point."

mlaplante@sltrib.com