What Does It Take To Be "An Embarrassment To The State Of Utah"?

Utah's Mike Lee (R), Jim Matheson (D)-- it doesn't get any worse

Far right Utah Republican Mike Lee has been playing Tonto to Ted Cruz's Lone Ranger since the day he managed to get into the Senate. And plenty of Utah Republicans don't appreciate that-- nor the way he did get into the Senate, namely by smearing mainstream conservative 18-year Senate veteran Robert Bennett. The Utah GOP Establishment is actively considering taking on Lee in 2016 with a more mainstream conservative candidate. Many aren't happy seeing Utah's senator as a mere appendage of the ambitious, self-serving Texas radical, whose shut-down-the-government extremism isn't popular with the business community that dominates the Utah GOP. Lee is running around trying to placate Utah business leaders, but some just refuse to even see him.

[Jon] Huntsman, who founded the petrochemical giant that bears his name, refuses to meet with Lee because of his “extremely radical” positions and is considering putting his political and financial muscle behind a primary challenger.

Scott Anderson, a prominent bank president in Salt Lake City, has privately commissioned polls to assess Lee’s race while meeting with some of his prospective foes to gauge their interest.

And one former state GOP party chairman, Thomas Wright, is actively considering a bid against the Utah freshman, while others in the business world are keeping the door open about a prospective bid.

“All I can say is Mike Lee is an embarrassment to the state of Utah,” Huntsman said in an interview, calling Lee “an extremist” for his role in the government shutdown fight that he said cost his cancer research institute millions in federal dollars and hurt small businesses affected by the closure of national parks. “He’s been a tremendous embarrassment to our family, to our state, to our country to have him as a U.S. senator.”

Huntsman, who has longstanding ties to Lee’s family, added: “He’s tried to come in and see me several times. … I have no interest whatsoever in chatting with him.”

Asked if he had a response to Huntsman, Lee simply said: “I don’t.”

What is happening in Utah marks a new chapter in the tea-party-vs.-establishment wars that have defined Republican politics since 2010. At that time, Lee seized on conservatives’ frustration with a veteran GOP senator, Bob Bennett, to win the party’s nomination and emerge as one of the country’s most prominent tea party senators. But after four years in Washington, where he’s aligned himself with the most conservative wing of the party, some Republicans are weighing whether there’s an opening to challenge Lee now as an insurgent bankrolled by the establishment-- or whether they should wait until 2018, if veteran Sen. Orrin Hatch carries through on his pledge to retire.

...“Business leaders who are successful learn to compromise and move forward as necessary,” said Lane Beattie, the president and CEO of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, who said he has had “strong encouragement” from the business world to run against Lee. “Strictly speaking on behalf of businesses, the frustration is when you have people who refuse … to work together to come up with solutions that can move us forward.”

A former state Senate president, Beattie said he’s not taking any steps toward running against Lee and would evaluate what happens in the new Congress before making any decisions. As part of his outreach, Lee has met regularly with Beattie and local Chamber officials, with Beattie saying he’s “confident” the senator is trying to do what’s best for the country.

...As part of his pitch to party elders, Lee has quietly wooed Harris Simmons, chairman of the board of Zions Bank, to back his bid, several sources said. (Simmons did not return phone calls.) But Anderson, who serves as president of that bank, appears to be still weighing his options. Anderson, one of the most influential forces in Utah GOP politics, has enlisted a prominent pollster in the state, Dan Jones, to assess Lee’s strengths and weaknesses.

In the aftermath of the shutdown, Anderson met with prospective foes to the Utah senator, including Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who declined to run, and others like Wright, the former state GOP chairman, who is considering a primary challenge. Sources said he has spoken with Josh Romney, the son of former Gov. Mitt Romney, and University of Utah political scientist Kirk Jowers, as well as Beattie. (Romney did not return multiple inquiries about his interest in the race, while Jowers declined to comment on whether he was considering a bid.)

...A couple of months before this November’s elections, Anderson met with Huntsman in his Salt Lake City office to show polling Jones had conducted on the Lee race, detailing how the senator could be vulnerable with primary voters after the Utah GOP convention in 2016, according to Huntsman.

“I would suspect that not only Mr. Anderson, but several other leading business and professional people are looking for an appropriate candidate,” Huntsman said.

Whether Anderson gets behind Lee or a challenger remains to be seen. Anderson, who declined to be interviewed, “has been supportive” of Lee, plans to meet with him on Monday at the bank’s headquarters as part of their regular interactions and has held fundraisers for the senator in the past, according to bank spokesman Rob Brough. When asked if that meant Anderson would support Lee in 2016, Brough would not go beyond his statement.

Wright declined to discuss his meeting with Anderson, but he said he’s been encouraged by business leaders, GOP insiders and tea party activists to challenge Lee. If he ran, he would try to challenge Lee in the convention, Wright said.

“They tell me that they think Mike has done a lot of pandering in Washington, D.C.,” said Wright, a real estate executive in Park City. “They are frustrated because there are lots of costs, but the only result on the résumé right now is the shutdown-- and we didn’t get anything for that.”

...Jones, the pollster, declined to say whether he has been tasked to conduct such surveys on Anderson’s behalf. But he noted that he polls the Senate race “all the time.”

“He could be vulnerable, but it would take somebody with some real money and great name ID to be able to defeat him,” Jones said of Lee. “It would be difficult to defeat him in the convention because most people that go there-- they have a strong leaning towards the right. But if this Count My Vote remains legal, they have a primary, I think he becomes vulnerable, opposed by another Republican.”

What Jones is referring to is a law enacted in March that allows a candidate to get his or her name on the primary ballot in either of two ways: winning support by delegates at a party convention or securing 28,000 signatures.

The old system required candidates to only go through the convention, something that benefited Lee in 2010. Under that system, candidates would compete for the support of typically hard-core conservative party delegates; if no candidate reached 60 percent of support among the delegates, the two leading vote-getters would face off in a primary before a more diverse electorate. If one surpassed that threshold at the convention, the candidate would go straight to the general election.

The new law, known as Count My Vote, was pushed by a former Utah governor, Mike Leavitt, along with Jowers, who argued that more voters should be included in the process. The law is now being challenged in federal court by the Utah GOP.

If it survives the legal challenge, it could give way to a more moderate candidate to get onto the primary ballot, a potential threat to Lee. But Rich McKeown, a business associate of Leavitt’s who also helped lead the push on the initiative, said that the effort was launched before Lee was even a candidate in the 2010 race and is simply designed to change voter participation-- “not candidate outcomes.” McKeown said Leavitt has not yet endorsed anyone in the 2016 Senate race “but there will be a time when he will.”

The new system could also benefit Lee. If a candidate skips the nominating convention, he or she could face backlash among the base and lose critical earned media, something that would be important to cut away at an incumbent’s name ID advantage.

There’s still a possibility, too, of Lee facing a potentially tough Democratic opponent in retiring Rep. Jim Matheson. But given the conservative leanings of Utah, most political observers believe Lee’s most serious threat remains in the primary.

Lee, who had just $350,000 in cash through the end of September, said he’s planning to step up his fundraising and would be prepared to compete in both the convention and gather enough signatures to be on the ballot.

“We’re prepared to fight under the new system, and I’m confident in my ability to defend my position,” Lee said.

Asked about his lack of money, Lee added: “It’s not easy-- particularly when you’re out of cycle. But we are putting things in motion, and we’ll be in good shape.”

Whether prominent figures like Huntsman can persuade party elders to abandon Lee remains to be seen. Huntsman has long ties to Lee’s family, saying his “dearest friend in life” was the senator’s late father, Rex Lee, who served as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. Huntsman’s son, former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., hired Lee to serve as his general counsel. When the younger Huntsman ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, Lee declined to endorse him in the primary.

But the 77-year-old Huntsman said his real concern is Lee’s policies and position during the shutdown, saying the senator is a “terrible disappointment” who did not follow in the footsteps of his father.

“I think there will be a major primary challenge against him,” Huntsman predicted.

Matheson, of course, is just the kind of grotesquely corrupt, transactional fake Democrat that has the DSCC drooling. The single worst Democratic vote in the House. Last week he ended his miserable career in the House with the single worst ProgressivePunch crucial vote score of any Democrat-- and abysmal 25.86, meaning he voted against progressive positions almost three-quarters of the time. Matheson has been John Boehner's ideal Democrat and has voted with the Republican on key issues more than several Republicans (Chris Gibson, Walter Jones, Justin Amash). Across every issue important to Democratic voters, his record is ghastly. There was not a single issue in his entire career in which he voted with Democrats rather than Republicans... so, of course, the DSCC wants to recruit him to run for the hopeless Utah Senate seat. Having a reactionary like Matheson inside the Democratic Senate caucus-- constantly pushing the GOP line to water down the party message and make every piece of legislation worse-- would be a far worse catastrophe than seeing a Republican sitting in the Utah Senate seat, a state after all that gave Obama just 34% in 2008 and 25% in 2012.