Republicans reject resignation of their chairman

Salt Lake County Republican Chairman James Evans tendered his resignation Saturday morning in front of the county's Central Committee, but members rejected it with fewer than five of the 315 present voting for him to resign.

"I don't know if we did everything right or not, but you're the governing body. I did everything I could…I didn't feel like I had enough time to do everything I wanted to do," he said.

The resignation of the leader of a losing party is traditional in politics nationwide, but rare in Utah.

"James is from South Carolina, and there's a tradition nationally that when you feel like things haven't gone well, you tender your resignation," said Stan Lockhart, chairman of the State Republican Party. "So it's not unprecedented, but in Utah it's not a common practice."

Evans said repeatedly that he was willing to essentially be fired because of the party's failure to get its candidates elected. He called the vote to reject his resignation "reaffirming," and pointed to hard-nosed Democratic tactics as a factor in Republicans' failure to capture seats.

"They misrepresented in such an unfortunate way the Republicans. I had to take all this time to deal with that, and then it was 'Oh my goodness, here are three candidates who I wanted to talk to about this and this,'" he said.

Many committee members, including Lockhart, spoke in favor of keeping Evans on as chairman.

"James Evans would walk into the jaws of death to defend the Republican Party and its values," he told the committee.

Jeff Allen, a Salt Lake County Council member, agreed.

"You are the lightning rod for everything that comes up and you are the barking dog for our party," he said. In this year's race between Republican Greg Curtis and Democrat Jay Seegmiller, Evans helped to portray Seegmiller as favoring abortion over childbirth. Seegmiller still defeated Curtis by a 10-point margin.

In the 2006 Salt Lake County Sheriff's race between Jim Winder and four-term GOP incumbent Aaron Kennard, Evan's tactics may have backfired. He peddled a heavily spliced training video that appeared to show Winder boasting about wanting to shoot people at a crime scene. Winder said the video took his comments out of context, and the Democrat won by 28 points. Evans says the police captain who filmed the video told news outlets that Evans had properly portrayed Winder's attitude.

Playing the attack-dog role is something Republican County Councilman Mark Crockett calls "stereotypical" of the job.

"[Evans] has served diligently and he's been a great fundraiser. I can see why the committee would want to keep him through the rest of his term, which ends in just a few months," said Crockett, who lost his re-election bid to Democrat Jani Iwamoto by an 8-point margin. "He's tried to do his best to support candidates."

Evans' only comment: "I don't apologize for trying to win."

smcfarland@sltrib.com