Helper » Brooke Elizabeth Shaw marched up the steps and to the stage microphone at the Rio Theater and said what many Utah Democrats have been growling since their party's congressman voted against health care reform.

She's tired of "cowardly, capricious" politicians.

"We don't have to accept a Blue Dog who votes like a Republican," she told Carbon County Democrats at their convention last weekend. It was a jab at Rep. Jim Matheson and his fellow fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats, and Shaw was there to introduce voters in her home county to a more progressive alternative: Claudia Wright.

The polite applause that followed might help explain why Matheson, even in the face of liberal disgust, says he's confident of his delegate count heading into the Utah Democratic Convention on Saturday in Salt Lake City. The capital city's liberal core is just one pocket of a big, rural and urban district that Republican legislators drew with designs on Matheson's job after the 2000 census.

Carbon County, a Democratic base in the 2nd Congressional District, is coal country. One by one the candidates for local and state offices spent the county convention assuring fellow Democrats they would fight Washington's assault on fossil fuels and thirst for wilderness preservation.

Republicans make the same promises throughout Utah.

Wright, a retired high school teacher who now supervises student teachers and teaches a college course on gender studies, followed Shaw's introduction with pitches for campaign finance reform and mine safety enforcement.

Then Matheson, the five-term congressman, bounded on stage in a leather jacket and listed the things he's gotten for the working-class county: Money for safety improvements on U.S. Highway 6. Money for a coal carbon-sequestration trial. An extension on unemployment benefits.

The crowd erupted, and in an interview moments later, their local party chairman promised that all of the county's delegates would back Matheson at the state convention. It may have been hyperbole -- Shaw herself is a state delegate and committed to Wright -- but the chairman, Ed Chavez, said he understands the threat to Matheson and has worked the phones to make sure Carbon County helps return him to Washington.

Usually only about a dozen of Carbon's Democratic delegates bother with the state convention, Chavez said. This year, "We've got 38 delegates going up."

The health-care vote just isn't an issue for rural Democrats, said David Palacios, a former miner and current coal trucker from Helper.

"I haven't really heard any other [party] members talk about health care," Palacios said. "We're land-use and coal."

Utah State University political scientist Michael Lyons said he'll be "very surprised" if Wright can force a primary by winning 40 percent of delegates at convention. It's no secret that the district stretching from Salt Lake City to the Arizona line has broad conservative swaths -- Matheson estimates the party split at 60 percent Republican, 20 percent Democrat and 20 percent unaffiliated -- and Lyons said most Democrats will realize that taking a liberal stand is not an option.

"He has a district that is largely conservative that the Republicans appear to have drawn just to oust him from office," Lyons said. "Frankly, it's been remarkable that he's done as well as he has."

Matheson's stalling on taking a position leading up this year's health care vote suggests he might have voted with most Democrats if they had needed him for victory, Lyons said. And as a fiscal conservative, he said, Matheson can make a case that he voted his conscience but would have supported a reform package that attacked medical costs.

Matheson himself made that case in an interview Thursday, and said he'll work to improve the new law with better cost containment.

"I would not support any efforts to repeal," he said.

This year's congressional elections will be challenging for Democrats, he said, and it would be hard for another to win his district.

"We'll have a headwind," he predicted. "I have a proven track record. It's not just politics [that wins], it's familiarity."

Wright conceded that it's necessary to work with Republicans to win in Utah, but said that doesn't mean sacrificing ideals.

"I think [Matheson] has to have the ability to reach across the aisle and find issues that are common with independents and Republicans," she said. "I think he's gone way beyond that."

Wright is a lesbian but said her sexuality is a "non-issue" in her campaign and in a state that is embracing local anti-discrimination ordinances. "It will probably be an issue for a few folks," she said.

She calls herself a progressive but says she uses the term in its historic sense, meaning she favors the public good over corporations, in the mold of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. She wants to hold banks accountable for their role in the credit meltdown and she wants to reform campaign finance to wean politicians from corporate influence.

"It's not just anti-Matheson, but empowering people," she said of the progressive backlash that led like-minded Democrats to a Salt Lake City Library meeting to seek an alternative to Matheson. "Health care was kind of the galvanizing vote for discontent with him."

Delegates to Saturday's state convention also will choose a Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from candidates Sam Granato and Chris Stout.