Caucus Night Tonight: Be Careful Which Conventon Delegates You Choose

In many respects, several non-federal races will have much greater local impact than the race for Bennett's U.S. Senate seat

We'll let this morning's Salt Lake Tribune story serve as reminder that tonight's the night for Utah's Precinct Caucuses, in which members of the various political parties will select delegates for their respective County and State Nominating Conventions. Here's the lede:

Utah's election for U.S. Senate is still more than seven months away, but Bob Bennett's fate could be decided Tuesday in living rooms and school houses across the state, as Republicans gather in local caucuses to choose delegates to the state convention.
The delegate sweepstakes is a crucial, if often overlooked, first step on the road to elected office since those 3,600 delegates could ultimately decide whose name appears on the November ballot, and both Bennett and his host of Republican challengers were making a final push Monday to stack the meetings with their supporters.
"It's huge," said Republican challenger Mike Lee. "In fact we're referring to it within our campaign organization as Super Tuesday. It's immensely important."

Although this morning's story focuses on the intra-party GOP U.S. Senate race, there are also several state-wide and local races wherein ultimate outcomes could be critically affected by the preferences of delegates who are elected in tonight's Precinct Caucus Meetings. In many respects, these non-federal races will have much greater local impact than the race for Bennett's U.S. Senate seat. We'll reel of those which particularly caught our eye this morning, one by one:

State Senate District 18 (GOP) - Sen. Jon Greiner v. Stuart Reid: In this highly unusual race, Boss Godfrey lackey and mentor Stuart Reid, who ran unsuccessfully against Greiner as a Democrat in 2006, is again challenging our incumbent Republican State Senator/Ogden City Police Chief. This time however Reid has switched parties, adding another RINO* to the Utah GOP party membership rolls. It'll probably be a very lively Utah GOP Nominating Convention race. And yes gentle readers, you can expect Greiner's purported Hatch Act violation to be brought up by Reid on the convention nominating floor. And you can bet your bottom dollar that Boss Godfrey's minions will be packing tonight's GOP caucus meetings with Reid supporters, in the hope of emerging from the caucuses with a majority of delegates who lean strongly in favor of Stuart Reid. If you attend tonight's GOP caucuses, folks, we therefore urge you to thoroughly vet prospective delegates regarding their commitments in re the Greiner v. Reid intra-party race.

State House District 9 (DEM) - Rep. Neil Hansen v. Jesse Garcia: We're scratching our heads, frankly, wondering what's gotten into Garcia, as he challenges 6-term Rep. Hansen for the Leg. 9 House Representative slot. Within this morning's Standard-Examiner story, we find this interesting Garcia quote:

Former Councilman Jesse Garcia is challenging fellow Democrat Neil Hansen, who is the incumbent for the Utah House District 9 seat.
Garcia said he thinks he has a good chance at winning the seat and looks forward to working toward that.
Working across party lines and reaching bipartisan agreements is what Garcia said he brings to the table.
"You don't sell yourself or your party out, but you have to at least communicate through a consensus," he said. "I think I would bring something a little different than what we have right now." [Emphasis added].

We'll take the reference to "working across party lines and reaching bipartisan agreements" to mean that Garcia has caved in to anti-Hansen interests, and is more interested in knocking off Rep. Hansen than in serving the interests of his own Democratic Party. We strongly recommend that you get on down to those mass meetings, Democrats of Weber County Forum, to be sure that the delegates you elect tonight don't serve the interests of those anti-Hansen forces. Think about it folks. In an intra-party battle between an 11-term incumbent and a decent but unexceptional fellow who couldn't even deliver his own re-election last November in Ogden's tiny Ogden City Ward 1, the election of pro-Hansen delegates ought to be a no brainer.

Weber County Commission Seat A (GOP) - Comm. Ken Bischoff v. Rep. Kerry Gibson: This is also an unusual intra-party race, inasmuch as intra-party challenges between simultaneously serving GOP elected officials are virtually unheard of. For those Weber County Republicans who favor Democratic Party candidate Amy Wicks however (we're sure there are more than a few of you), you might want to consider prospective county delegates who lean toward Gibson, who lacks Bischoff's "power of commission incumbency," and whose House District 6 political base doesn't span the whole county, as does Bischoff's. Thus for those GOP voters who favor Amy Wicks, Gibson might be the slightly weaker GOP General Election opponent. Parenthetically we'll add that we've also been hearing rumors from Weber County GOP insider sources, that Bischoff may have already agreed to drop out of the race, (which might explain why Gibson has declared his candidacy for his GOP colleague's Commission seat.)

That's it for now, gentle readers. We hope all of you will attend tonight's caucuses/mass meetings, which represent "grass-roots politics" at its best.

And for those readers who need information about times and locations for your parties' respective meetings, we link the Weber Democratic and Republican Parties' respective caucus location pages below:

• Weber County Democrats
• Weber County Republicans

That's it for now, gentle readers; but we do hope you make it a point to attend your party's caucuses/mass meetings, where a small fraction of Utah voters will have a highly-disproportionate impact on the ultimate choices appearing on 2010 General Election ballots. Politics-wise, these political meetings deliver plenty of bang for the political buck.

For a complete list of individuals who have declared their candidacies for the various offices which will be decided in the 2010 General Election, by the way, be sure to click this link:

• 2010 NOTICE of ELECTION and CANDIDATE DECLARATIONS

Perhaps there are other intra-party races which we can discuss.

Who will be the first to spout off?
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*RINO: Republican In Name Only