By Bob Bernick Jr.
Deseret Morning News

      State Rep. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, will say in the next few days whether he will run against longtime U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, next year.

Rep. Stephen H. Urquhart Scott G. Winterton, Deseret Morning News

      Urquhart, a Republican like Hatch, is currently the Utah House majority whip, a leadership position that puts him in line to run for speaker some day. But he would have to give up his Utah House seat to challenge Hatch in 2006.
      Tuesday, Urquhart was talking like he was in the race.
      "I don't see a downside" to challenging Hatch, Urquhart told KCPW radio. "It's good for the democratic process" to have longtime incumbents challenged within their own party.
      If Urquhart does run against Hatch, who is 71, it would be the second election in a row in which Hatch has had a strong intra-party challenge. In 2000, conservative attorney Greg Hawkins got within several dozen convention delegate votes of getting into a party primary with Hatch.
      Urquhart is not exactly like Hawkins, however. Urquhart is a Republican insider while Hawkins ran as a dissident, outside the party structure.
      "We would just as soon not have (an intra-party) challenge," said longtime Republican campaign consultant Dave Hansen, who is managing Hatch's sixth U.S. Senate campaign next year. "Frankly, we'd rather not have any Democratic opposition, either."
      XMission founder Pete Ashdown has already announced he's running as a Democrat against Hatch.
      "But we kind of expected both. We'll win in both arenas. We're ready for it," Hansen said Tuesday night.
      According to Federal Election Commission reports filed last Friday, Hatch has $1.72 million in cash in his main campaign account — "the most he's ever had" a year out from election, said Hansen.
      A GOP party leader, who asked that his name not be used, said last week that any GOP Hatch challenger has to knock off the well-known, well-financed Hatch in the May 2006 Republican State Convention.
      Hatch "would win a primary" because he could flood his GOP opponent with ads on TV and radio, and with campaign organization, the leader said. And it is in state GOP conventions where some delegates have stood up to the longtime senator.
      In the late 1990s, delegates actually passed a resolution opposing what became CHIP, the Hatch-sponsored child health care plan that provides federal dollars to states that insure low-income children.
      Hatch walked to the convention stage to chide delegates for not being willing to help poor kids, citing scripture in his speech.
      In 2000, Hatch was booed by some delegates and onlookers before his nominating convention speech but went on to get more than 60 percent of the delegate votes, eliminating Hawkins and winning his party's nomination outright.
      In a poll conducted last month, Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV pollster Dan Jones & Associates found 72 percent of Utahns like the job Hatch is doing. Jones found that 87 percent of Republicans said they approve of Hatch's job performance.
      But like Hawkins, Urquhart would look for support among hard-coreGOP delegates, who may be more finely tuned into some of the senator's stands — like his support for stem cell research, opposed by many arch-conservatives.
      And Hatch is seen by some as becoming increasingly distant from his Utah voters. While keeping an official residence in Salt Lake City, Hatch lives most of the year outside of Washington, D.C., and has become embroiled in beltway politics.
      In 2000, Hatch ran for U.S. president at the same time he sought re-election to his Senate seat. (The Legislature actually changed state law to allow Hatch to file for two offices at once — a law he didn't need to use since he dropped out of the presidential race before the mid-March candidate filing deadline.)
      Urquhart, 40, is an attorney in private practice in St. George. He was first elected to the Utah House in 2000 and was elected into leadership last November. Considered a computer "techy," Urquhart has sponsored several bills aimed at punishing spammers and those who send marketing viruses into citizens' personal computers.
      Urquhart was one of several southwestern Utah lawmakers who convinced Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and lawmakers to give millions of state dollars to flood relief to Washington County this year.
      Urquhart told the radio station Hatch had personally been calling influential Republicans the past several weeks in an attempt to keep Urquhart out of the race. Those people hang up the phone with Hatch and call him to encourage him to run, Urquhart said.

E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com