Hatch Finds ’76 Tactics Now Used Against Him

Now overlay that image with plaid leisure suits and shaggy sideburns, and a different firebrand emerges in a much different time: Senator Orrin G. Hatch.

In 1976, in his first Senate race, Mr. Hatch led a one-man conservative uprising in Utah and helped shape the very idea of the insurgent candidacy in modern politics. Now he is the latest Washington veteran hoping to fend off the fate that took down Senator Richard G. Lugar in a Tea Party challenge in Indiana this month, and upended the Senate race in Nebraska with Deb Fischer’s Tea Party-tinctured victory over the Republicans’ handpicked candidate.

That Mr. Hatch finds himself in this position at all makes for a strange — others might say just — plot twist of history. Mr. Hatch, now 78, was a complete unknown six months before his first election. Then in a bolt of energy and rhetorical swordsmanship against his opponents, he wrested the United States Senate nomination from his own party’s establishment candidate and went on to beat a well-financed three-term Democratic incumbent.

Even at the time, his rise was seen as a signal flare of something completely new. In the American West, Democrats, who had been electable in significant numbers through the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, even in Utah, were heading for a generation in the dustbin. With Mr. Hatch — and only a few years later, to even greater effect, Ronald Reagan — leaping from the trenches, Democrats here still have not fully recovered.

Now Mr. Hatch is facing his first primary challenge since that pivotal first election 36 years ago, and a little-known conservative former state senator, Dan Liljenquist, is studying everything Mr. Hatch did and said back then, trying to use Mr. Hatch’s own ’70s show against him in next month’s party vote.

The result is a closely watched, and for many Republicans here, deeply emotional contest that is raising profound questions about whether Mr. Hatch is still the man they have loved long and well, or whether he was right back then when he said voters should throw out the bums if they hang on too long.

“I’m torn,” said Richard McMillan, 73, a retired high school history teacher who said he had voted loyally for Mr. Hatch every six years and now is not sure what to do. “I don’t dislike Hatch, but I kind of wish he’d go away gracefully and we could all applaud.”

Mr. Hatch, for his part, in asking Utahns for what he has said would be a final, seventh term, denies that anything now feels remotely like 1976. “It’s quite a bit different,” he said in an interview. “I ran against a Democrat,” he added. “I would never run against another Republican.”

But in getting to the November election and the Republican nomination in 1976, Mr. Hatch did vanquish a Republican primary opponent who was better known and widely favored to win, and Mr. Liljenquist, 37, in facing what he admits are uphill odds, said that that is the race to study. In heavily Republican Utah, the party’s nomination, decided by primary voters, is the crucial contest since Democrats are so deeply outnumbered.

Mr. Liljenquist (pronounced LILian-quist) said in an interview: “When we look at 1976, there are a lot of parallels. You have a country that was reeling from threats around the world. That’s the same case now, and the economy, too, wasn’t going particularly well.”

A surge of electricity was pouring into conservative ranks as well in 1976, he added — not unlike the Tea Party movement today — partly in reaction to the liberal post-Watergate end-zone dance by the Democrats, whose fortunes rose after President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in 1974. This year, a Tea Party-affiliated group called Freedom Works has backed Mr. Liljenquist.

“Senator Hatch rode a wave of discontent with the establishment people — people who had been there years and years and were part of the system, and then after 36 years he has become the system,” said Mr. Liljenquist, who was in diapers when Mr. Hatch took office.

But to many Utahns, even some Democrats and independents who said they would never vote for him, Mr. Hatch is almost an institution. Through his seniority, longevity and impact on the state — and the campaign’s message that if Republicans take control of the Senate, he will become chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee — Mr. Hatch has become, in a way, bigger than party or ideology.

“A vote for Hatch is a vote for Utah,” said Matt Tyler, 45, a bank asset liability officer in Salt Lake City, who was on his lunch hour on a recent afternoon. Mr. Tyler said he leaned more toward the Democrats and would probably not vote for either Mr. Hatch or Mr. Liljenquist in November. But since a Republican is almost certain to win the Senate seat, he said, it should be Mr. Hatch because of his clout.

Mr. Hatch has also refused to be a sitting duck. Through months of intensive groundwork before last month’s state party convention, his campaign staff groomed and recruited party delegates, and back-bench supporters of those delegates, aiming to head off the challenge he knew was coming. The effort, though not successful enough to avoid a primary, created a bank of about 70,000 likely Hatch votes, said the campaign’s manager, Dave Hansen. That number, Mr. Hansen said, is about half the total, from a standing start on the day after the convention, needed to win based on assumptions of likely turnout.

The Hatch campaign has also agreed to only one debate before the June 26 primary, on a local radio talk show, a fact that Mr. Liljenquist is using in a new television ad to argue that Mr. Hatch is hiding in plain sight.

What was wrought in the ’70s in Utah — now seen by historians as one of the first breaking waves in what became the Republican tide of the Reagan era — is now simply the background of political life in Utah, unquestioned because so many residents have never known anything else.

But it was Mr. Hatch and his imitators, historians say, who helped forge that system. In the State Legislature, Democrats who controlled the House and Senate in the mid-’70s have now been in the minority since the era of hip-hugging disco pants. The last Democrat to represent Utah in the Senate was the man Mr. Hatch defeated, Frank Moss.

Mr. Hatch’s fight this year, facing a threat in a primary rather than the general election in November, is a measure of how much the state has become a de facto one-party system, historians say, with the spoils of power fought over not between Democrats and Republicans, but between Republicans of varying conservative stripe.

“That’s how far to the right Utah has turned,” said W. Paul Reeve, an associate professor of history at the University of Utah.

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Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch forced into primary fight

SANDY, Utah (AP) – Utah Republicans denied a veteran Republican senator a clear path to a seventh and final term Saturday, forcing the 78-year-old lawmaker into a June primary with 37-year-old former state senator.

By J. Scott Applewhite, AP

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has been working feverishly to avoid being ousted by a tea party candidate.

By J. Scott Applewhite, AP

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has been working feverishly to avoid being ousted by a tea party candidate.

Sen. Orrin Hatch fell short of the outright nomination by fewer than three dozen votes from the nearly 4,000 delegates at the party convention.

In a matter of weeks, Hatch turned the question of whether he would survive the convention into a question of whether he would reach the 60% threshold to earn the nomination outright.

Despite the setback, Hatch holds a significant fundraising edge in what has become the stiffest challenge since his election to the Senate in 1976. The eventual Republican nominee will be the heavy favorite in November because of the Republican dominance in Utah.

"A few months ago, a lot of people weren't giving me a chance. So I feel good. I consider it a victory with everything that happened in the past," Hatch said.

Hatch urged that delegates endorse him so he can help repeal President Obama's health care law and potentially lead the powerful Senate Finance Committee if Republicans regain control of the chamber in the November general election. Hatch argued that he was only one candidate who had the ability to enact the Republican Party's priorities from day one of the next congressional session.

"I'm a tough old bird, and I've never felt more eager," he said.

But former state senator Dan Liljenquist said that Hatch's seniority was overrated and said that he was ready to work with freshmen Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky in changing how the Senate works.

"It is time for a new generation of leaders. We know it to our bones," Liljenquist said shortly after the results were announced.

While most states rely on primaries to secure a party's nomination, Utah elects delegates to get first crack at determining whether a candidate should earn the nomination outright. In all, 10 candidates ran for the Senate seat and took turns Saturday attempting to convince the delegates to support them. Hatch and Liljenquist advanced from the first round of voting after Hatch got 57% of the vote and his challenger took 28%.

In the second round, the incumbent earned 59.2% of the vote, just short of the 60% needed for the outright nomination. As a result, they will face each other in the June 26 primary.

Hatch began laying the groundwork for the convention even before he watched U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett go down to defeat two years ago. With a game plan designed to answer his critics' every claim and with a boost from likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, it's became ever more clear that he wouldn't experience a similar fate.

Hatch has emphasized Romney's endorsement during speeches and debates. Romney introduced Hatch via a recorded video message. Romney said Republicans needed Hatch back in the Senate "if we're going to turn this country around."

Romney is extremely popular in Utah because of his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and his leadership during the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

Hatch's top challengers were Liljenquist and state Rep. Chris Herrod, who didn't make the second round after getting just more than 10% of the first-round voting.

Whoever wins the Republican primary will face former state senator Scott Howell, who received the Democratic nomination on Saturday. Howell lost to Hatch in 2000 and no Democrat from Utah has been elected to the Senate since 1970.

This year's race essentially began in 2010, when Bennett was ousted by delegates fueled by ultraconservative tea party politics.

Hatch shifted to the right rhetorically and with his voting record over the past two years to address the claims that he was not conservative enough.

Bennett's loss frustrated many Republicans, who believed that a vocal minority hijacked the nomination process. This year, turnout at the neighborhood caucus meetings more than doubled and many attendees said they wanted to make sure Hatch wasn't treated in the same way.

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