That being said I gotta say I like this news from Utah. A prime example of the milquetoast go along to get along Rockefeller Republican failed to gain his party's nomination in convention for the first time. By a hair. And you know that is pissing him off.
There is hope a real conservative will take the seat from Hatch. No loss to the Senate or the party. From Hotair.com
Orrin Hatch fails to clinch GOP nomination in Utah — by 0.9%
Weird rule out there: The delegates to the Utah GOP convention get first crack at choosing a nominee by voting on the candidates. If anyone gets 60 percent, he’s nominated. If no one gets 60 percent, the top two finishers go to a statewide primary. That’s how Bob Bennett was sunk two years ago, you might remember. Tea partiers filled the ranks of convention delegates and ensured that he couldn’t place higher than third; Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater went on to the primary and you know how that turned out.Hatch’s goal today was simple. To make sure that he’d at least make it out of the convention, he’s been working the delegate process for months — and has been so successful at it that, as of 10 days ago, an internal poll concluded that he had a very real chance of clinching the nomination by taking 60 percent. If he could pull that off, he’d avoid a primary and snuff any chance of a belated tea-party awakening on his challenger’s behalf. As of 2:30 p.m. ET, the votes are in. Hatch’s take:59.1 percent. More from Dave Weigel:
FreedomWorks and other Tea Party groups now have two Causes to distract them from their failure to replace Mitt Romney with some better candidate — the Senate races in Utah and Indiana.
The Tea Party movement is alive in Utah. With representatives from FreedomWorks in the audience, delegates at the Utah Republican Convention managed to force Sen. Orrin Hatch into a June 26 primary. He got 59.2 percent of their votes against Dan Liljenquist, a 38-year-old state senator. Hatch needed 60 percent to avoid the primary. He couldn’t do it. In two rounds of voting, he went from 2,243 votes to 2,313 votes. If he’d gotten 32 more votes, he would have wrapped this up…
Yeah, the last point is key. 59.1 percent sounds hopeless for Liljenquist if it’s an accurate reflection of Republican voters in Utah, but there’s bound to be a burst of tea-party enthusiasm for him now that he and Richard Mourdock are the last best chance to tilt the GOP further right at the federal level. Hatch did himself no favors either when he said this recently of his opponents on the right, FreedomWorks:
“These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans,” Hatch angrily responds. “They’re radical libertarians and I’m doggone offended by it.”Then Hatch, a former boxer, turns combative. “I despise these people, and I’m not the guy you come in and dump on without getting punched in the mouth.”Go read FreedomWorks VP Matt Kibbe for a response to that. If tea partiers didn’t have enough incentive already to pay attention to this race, they do now. There’s also some reason to believe that today’s delegates were actually more pro-Hatch than the general electorate: He and his team shrewdly maneuvered behind the scenes before the convention to make sure his people were well represented on the floor.
More than a year ago, Hatch’s campaign polled the 3,500 Republican delegates who voted Bennett out of office in May 2010.
Its discovery: Hatch had no chance of getting renominated, if those same 3,500 people voted
“This is not going to be a campaign of persuading delegates,” Hatch’s campaign manager, Dave Hansen, said Thursday, recalling a conversation with the senator early last year. “This is going to be a campaign of replacing delegates.”…Hatch is like Arlen Specter, Bob Bennett and McCain. I for one will not miss them after they have left the Senate. I pray the TEA Party takes Bennett out this time. He won't go hungry, he'll only start lobbying his former colleagues. Good luck Mr Liljenquist. God knows Mr Bennett needs to be retired.
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