Even some fellow Democrats say the city probably suffered from the anti-Rocky backlash.

“He is one of those politicians who people love to hate, and sometimes he gave the Legislature a great excuse not to do their jobs where Salt Lake City was concerned,” said Nancy Saxton, a Democrat and City Council member who is running for mayor in the November election.

Mr. Anderson announced last July that he would not seek a third term, saying he wanted to devote the rest of his life to grass-roots organizing involving human rights and global warming. He said in the interview that he had not made specific plans.

One of the mayor’s former chiefs of staff, Deeda Seed, who was fired in 2005, described her former boss this way: “I used to be good friends with him. He’s incredibly intelligent. He is delightful to talk to. He can be a really, really good friend. He could just benefit from a little therapy.”

(Ms. Seed said Mr. Anderson fired her after they disagreed on policy issues, including how to handle the news media. He said she was “almost a complete disaster as an employee and I had no choice but to fire her.”)

Supporters say Mr. Anderson has made Utah more interesting, at the very least, by highlighting the political diversity that exists at the state’s heart, in the state’s capital and largest city. He first won office in 1999, and re-election in 2003, essentially by winning the votes of non-Mormons, who constitute about 55 percent of the city’s population. (Statewide, Mormons constitute about two-thirds of the population.) In his last election, he got 54 percent of the vote, even though about 80 percent of Mormons voted against him, he said.

Those election patterns — non-Mormons mostly for Mr. Anderson, Mormons mostly against — set the rhythm for a mayoral administration that many people say has isolated Salt Lake City even more by emphasizing that the city’s political and cultural distinctiveness is also about religion and that being non-Mormon is synonymous with being liberal and urban and different.

“It’s embarrassing for the rest of us; Mayor Anderson is so over the top, nobody wants to be associated with him,” said Matthew R. Godfrey, mayor of the nearby city of Ogden. Mr. Godfrey said Mr. Anderson had not worked well with other mayors across the state and that he was out of step with fellow Utahans.