Jim Matheson, with his powerful name, long incumbency and “moderate” profile and voting record, only managed to beat newcomer Mia Love (who is a convert to the LDS church and does not come from an old Mormon family, and is descended from Haitian immigrants, not Brigham Young) by 0.2% in a congressional district that is about 6% less Republican than the state as a whole
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Youre forgetting that there was another candidate on that ballot who got that extra 2.6% of the votes..
the guy was a Libertarian making him closer to Matheson than to the Conservative Mia Love...
Most of those votes would have gone to Matheson making the spread 51% to 48/49% for Mia..
looking at the results that way doesn’t make it such a close race..
Plus in 2002 Matheson beat the Republican Jim Swallow by just 1,621 votes...both getting 49% of the vote..
However 2 years later in 2004 he beat that same Jim Swallow again this time by 40,000 ..
so the odds of Matheson beating Mia Love again in 2014 are more in his favor..
It seems winning by a few votes now and again doesn’t effect the outcome for Matheson all that much...