Aug. 13, 2007
Campaign: Everyone's in Elko!

By Steve Friess

Until this spring, the last national candidate to campaign in Elko, Nev., was Vice President Richard Nixon in the quest for re-election in 1956. But John McCain was here at this Interstate 80 outpost in April to kick off his campaign. Then came a visit by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, followed last month by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and, this month, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. It's enough to make the 50,000 residents of this Old West gold-mining county (with four legal brothels), 300 miles east of Reno, a bit giddy.

"You can walk around and talk to everyone in Elko and they're saying, 'This is so fantastic, finally we're important'," says Lance Whitney, who stepped down as Elko County Democratic chair last week to work for the Richardson campaign.

Why all the love for a place so tiny that there's not even a direct flight from Las Vegas, where about 70 percent of Nevadans reside? The state's stock has risen now that it will hold one of the first caucuses in January. And Elko, small as it is, is still the third most populous county. With a state this spread out, says Las Vegas Review-Journal political writer Molly Ball, "Elko visits are symbolic visits to 'the rural'," which face different environmental and economic issues than the cities. Elko Mayor John Franzoia says that despite the nearly 2-to-1 Republican registration edge in his county, candidates of both parties get rapt attention from an engaged electorate known for some of the highest voter turnouts in the state.

And, Franzoia says, the parties have structured the caucus system in such a way that it takes fewer votes to win delegates in rural areas, so trailing candidates like Richardson and Romney can hope to score better that way. Ball also points out that an Elko visit is a guaranteed front-page grab there, sometimes for days, whereas "my newspaper has to cover everything from urban crime to Céline Dion." We didn't know she was running, too.

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