SALT LAKE CITY — The pork chop in front of Jim Dabakis grew cold as he talked.
And talked.
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And talked.
“I have a passion to say stuff,” he explained.
There is, in his defense, a lot of stuff to say. Dabakis is a former Mormon who is gay and wealthy and also happens to be the chairman of the state Democratic Party in this reddest of red states. He believes that even meager gains among significant Mormon populations in swing mountain states such as Nevada and Colorado could have national ramifications in close elections. Utah is his laboratory.
Since becoming chairman in summer 2011, Dabakis has doubled his party’s budget and begun building bridges into Mormon congregations across the state. He credited some of those new Mormon Democrats with reelecting Jim Matheson to the House over the Republican future-star-who-fizzled Mia Love. He launched the group LDS Dems, a national chapter that Mormon Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) inaugurated at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.
The state Senate candidate in Saturday’s special election discussed his modest upbringing as a gangly Greek son of a depressed Massachusetts shut-in, his conversion at 11 to Mormonism and his coming out as gay to one of the top apostles in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After a description of his ill-fated missionary gambits at San Francisco Bay Area sporting events, the 58-year-old art dealer explained his decision decades ago to leave Brigham Young University and his adoptive faith for a life as a radio talk-show host, television personality, gay activist, gadfly, collector of Russian art and political player who made a temporary home and lasting fortune in St. Petersburg.
But what Dabakis really wants to talk about are his efforts to make the Democratic Party — and himself — viable in a state where liberals are a peculiar people, where more than 70 percent of voters are Mormon, and where the state legislature, governorship and both U.S. Senate seats are Republican sinecures.
“There is a pragmatic issue here,” Dabakis said, describing the traditional Democratic strategy of anti-Mormonism as wrongheaded. “As long as that continues, we’ll be the party that has no power,” he said.
Many Republicans dismiss Dabakis as a talk-show loudmouth. But others admire his approach.
“He doesn’t like me, but I kind of like him,” said Orrin G. Hatch, Utah’s senior Republican U.S. senator, who is also Mormon. “He has a tough job, but he has handled it better, in my opinion, than any Democratic chairman in my 36 years.”
A key to Dabakis’s recruitment of plausible candidates is his relationship with powerbrokers in a church that many gay-rights activists have written off.
In 2009, the Mormon Church aggressively and successfully supported Proposition 8, which called for banning gay marriage in California. The blowback was intense.
“Prop. 8 was a catastrophe for them,” he said. The church may have come to the same conclusion. Dabakis describes receiving an unexpected call from the church to “get together” even though the church had rebuffed such entreaties from him for more than a decade.
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