Romney, New Primary Date Put Utah on the Political Map

Still, Obama is something of a blank slate here, Monson notes. Clinton, by contrast, incites strongly negative reactions among conservatives, as any conversation with voters quickly uncovers. "I don't agree with any of her policies, or basically anything," said Randy Wood, a University of Utah student in the back of the room at the Chelsea Clinton event.

One factor may be that many Utahns have traditional views about the role of women. People here don't like a woman who is "outspoken and brash," said Jill Baker, 22, a University of Utah political science major. She'll go for Obama: "I love Hillary, but one thing about her is she's very polarizing."

Exit polls in 2006 showed that 59 percent of Utah voters identified with the Republican Party, and only 26 percent with the Democratic Party. Outside Salt Lake County, the ratio is even more skewed. Of the state's Republicans, Monson said, 90 percent are Mormons. About 40 percent of Democrats are members of the church.

"We need more Democrats here," said Republican John Carr, a Romney supporter who knew Romney when both were doing missionary work in France in the 1960s. "It's so lopsided. . . . It's not a two-party system here. They do what they want to do."

Eric Harker, webmaster for the BYU College Democrats, said he hopes that being a Democrat will increasingly be seen as normal in Utah: "People here are realizing that the Democrats aren't these leftist, baby-hating, tree-hugging people."

Rep. Jim Matheson, the only Democrat in the state's congressional delegation, said: "Being a Utah Democrat, obviously it's a little bit of a lonely existence." He won office in 2000 when his congressional district was confined to the Salt Lake County area, which has more liberal and more secular voters. But the next year the state legislature redrew the boundaries to include all of eastern and southern Utah. Matheson, a "Blue Dog" Democrat, has to appeal to Republicans if he has any chance of winning a majority: "If I get all the Democrats and all the independents, I'm at a solid 40 percent," he said.

The practical result is that Utah will almost surely go for the Republican nominee again this fall. Monson said the only chance the Democrats could have of carrying Utah -- and it's still a slim possibility -- would be if Obama ran against Republican Mike Huckabee, who has angered many people here by what they see as his reluctance to accept that Mormons are Christians.

Romney's popularity translates into abundant volunteer work on his behalf. Republican students from BYU are wandering into the Romney campaign office in Provo to make calls for their candidate -- coincidentally directly across the street from where the Democrats held their party.

"When was the last time there was a presidential campaign office in Provo?" asked Eli Eyre, 24, a full-time paid Romney staffer overseeing the volunteers at the phone bank. A couple of feet away, a young man on the phone with a Florida voter said, "Doggone it, I apologize that I had to be the 10th."

That would be the 10th person from the Romney campaign to call the voter.

The night of the Florida primary, nine Romney supporters gathered in the campaign office in the Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy, having braved the latest winter storm to buffet the valley. They had no TV in the office -- Romney's operation is too efficient to allow unnecessary frills -- but managed to follow the results on Web sites, projecting streaming online video on the wall. They ate cold pizza and nibbled from a 96-ounce jumbo bag of mini-pretzels. A cheer went up when Romney briefly appeared to take the lead from Sen. John McCain.

But the numbers began going in the wrong direction. They began clicking on individual counties. Where was Romney leading? Where might he find more votes?