Will S.L. ever have a GOP Mormon mayor?

[Sean Reynolds]

This article was in today's Deseret News.

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,515037636,00.html

SNIP:

With Molonai Hola's exit Tuesday from the Salt Lake City's mayor's race, once again there will not be a Republican in the final contest.
Mayor Rocky Anderson and his challenger, Frank Pignanelli, are both Democrats. Anderson has called himself a liberal, and Pignanelli has said he's a moderate. But they are both representatives of the state's minority party.
Anderson was the Democratic nominee for the 2nd Congressional District in 1996. And Pignanelli served 10 years in the Utah House as a Democrat, six as the minority leader.
Hola was also an identifiable member of the LDS Church.
Neither Anderson nor Pignanelli is LDS.
So, as we see another Republican fall by the wayside, and see again no faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the final election, the question arises, can a GOP Mormon win Salt Lake's mayor's office?
Before the answer, first a bit of Salt Lake mayoral history.
Jake Garn is the last well-known Republican elected to the office. That was back in 1971 under the old commission form of government, where the mayor sat as another commissioner — holding executive and legislative powers — in the five-member panel. Garn also is LDS.

SNIP

Cannon says Salt Lake City is much like other urban population centers in America: mostly Democratic, mostly liberal.
In addition, Salt Lake — the largest city in Utah with 180,000 people — does not dominate the state population-wise. Utah has 2.3 million people. So it is not that strange that Utah's capital city is different than the rest of the state, he says.

SNIP

Dan Jones, pollster for the Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV, says Salt Lake City is about one-third Democratic, one-third Republican and one-third independent. About 44 percent of city residents tell Jones they are LDS.
Even so, says Jones, most of those political independents usually vote Democratic. And many of those Mormons are more liberal in their voting and attitudes than more conservative members of the church, who may dwell in suburbs or places like Davis and Utah counties, which haven't elected Democrats to local offices in years.

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,515037636,00.html
---------------

How many major US cities can say they've had a Democrat as their mayor since the 70s? Hell, Rocky Anderson is a Socialist Democrat, how many major cities can say they've got a Socialist mayor? ;-)