Hatch Heading for a Fall?

[Geee]

National Review:

All the senator’s horses and all the senator’s men couldn’t quite wrap up the Utah Republican nomination for Orrin Hatch on Saturday. At the GOP convention, the seven-term senator narrowly missed winning the 60 percent of delegates he needed to avoid a primary against former state senator Dan Liljenquist.

Polls still show him favored in the June 26 primary, but Hatch now faces his first serious challenger since he won his seat in 1976. And, as Richard Lugar can testify — the 80-year-old Indiana colleague of Hatch’s is now suddenly neck and neck with a challenger in his own May 8 primary — a lot can happen in the few weeks of an intense campaign.

Hatch knew he would face opposition this year after Tea-party delegates, who dominated the Republican party’s 2010 state convention, unceremoniously dumped his Senate colleague Robert Bennett in favor of Mike Lee, the constitutional scholar who is now Utah’s junior senator. Bennett didn’t even receive enough delegate votes to force a primary.

 

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Tea-party leaders then promptly announced they were likewise upset with Senator Hatch for failing to confront the Washington establishment. And last year, Liljenquist, the author of the state’s pioneering public-pension-reform law, announced he would challenge Hatch from the right.

So Senator Hatch pulled out all the stops for this year’s nominating convention. He spent an unheard-of $5.7 million to encourage newcomers to run in the GOP caucuses that select state-convention delegates. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which dominates Utah, had letters read from the pulpit for three weeks in a row urging people to attend the caucuses, a not-so-subtle sign that the church sought a different caucus electorate than the one that showed up in 2010.

[Rokke]

We need to get rid of all the old heads. He's been a Senator since 1976?!?! No wonder nothing useful gets done in D.C. anymore.