Orrin Hatch close call in Utah: Tea party rising?

Sen. Orrin Hatch is favored to win reelection, but first he faces a primary election against tea party favorite Dan Liljenquist. Can Hatch avoid the fate of former Utah Sen. Bob Bennett, ousted in 2010 by the tea party?

By Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer / April 22, 2012

Former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist thanks his staff and supporters Saturday in Sandy, Utah. Utah Republicans denied U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch a clear path to a seventh and final term, forcing him into a June primary with Liljenquist.

Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune/AP

Enlarge

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, the tea party movement has shown little clout.

Related stories

Along the way in the GOP nominating process, a string of Republican hopefuls backed by the conservative political insurgency have risen only to fall: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum.

In the end, a mainstream, quasi-moderate – Mitt Romney – is all but certain to carry the Republican flag into presidential campaign battle.

But in the US Senate, it’s a different story.

Two incumbent Republicans – Richard Lugar in Indiana and Orrin Hatch in Utah – are in the fight of their political life. Between the two of them, they’ve served 72 years in the Senate – six terms each.

How much do you know about the Tea Party? A quiz.

But that’s part of their problem in an age when long-term incumbency (committee seniority, appropriations bacon brought home) aren’t necessarily a plus.

In Sandy, Utah, Saturday, Sen. Hatch didn’t lose in the party convention, but he didn’t win either.

Even though he’d pivoted rightward rhetorically in recent months, even though he had a huge advantage in campaign funds, and even though he’d been embraced by the very popular Mr. Romney, Hatch was forced into a primary election by a tea party-backed former state senator, Dan Liljenquist.

True enough, Hatch failed by just a fraction to avoid a two-man runoff. He came up just 32 votes short (out of 3,908 cast) of winning the 60 percent necessary to win the nomination outright (and likely the election in a heavily-Republican state).

He thus avoided the fate of former Sen. Bob Bennett in 2010, when Bennett – a certified conservative who came under fire from the tea party for working too cooperatively with Democrats – finished third at the state party convention. Bennett was replaced by Mike Lee, now a member of the Senate Tea Party Caucus.

Mr. Liljenquist sees himself in the same mold as Sen. Lee – a generation younger than Hatch and Bennett and similar to other relative youngsters in the Senate such as Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida.