If Republicans are hurting nationally this election year,
there may be few places where the pain is quite as acute, or
has arrived as quickly, as Nevada, where a confluence of problems
has left a once-potent state party in tatters. Just two years
ago, Republicans occupied all six statewide constitutional offices.
Today, they hold only the posts of governor and lieutenant governor.
Democrats now enjoy a 60,000-voter registration edge in a
state where the parties were virtually tied a year ago. The
state GOP raised less than one-third of the $1.3 million the
Nevada Democratic Party's central committee took in during the
first half of 2008. And the Republicans who hold two of the
state's three U.S. House seats are in danger of losing them.
A Republican primary race between the state Senate majority
leader, Bill Raggio, and a former assemblywoman was emblematic
of the trend. Raggio, 81, won a six-point victory on Tuesday
after being forced to campaign actively for the first time since
his initial race in 1972. His opponent is a hero of Nevada's
hard-core fiscal and social conservatives angered by Raggio's
compromises on such things as a large 2003 tax increase.
"Obviously there has been creeping disunity within the party,"
Raggio said. "I have not had a very serious, tough election
up until this primary."
Former governor Kenny Guinn and Reno Mayor Bob Cashell walked
Raggio's district with him earlier this month but the current
governor, Jim Gibbons, did not.
Nor, say several prominent Republicans, have many GOP candidates
asked for Gibbons's help, preferring to avoid association with
the former five-term congressman, who is the subject of an unceasing
barrage of negative publicity. The Republican chief executive's
troubles began in 2006 when a cocktail waitress accused him
of assaulting her in a parking lot after a night of drinking
three weeks before Election Day. Surveillance video cast doubt
on the accuser's claim and no charges were filed, but the flap
turned an expected Gibbons walkover into a squeaker.
Then came reports in the Wall Street Journal that the FBI
was investigating Gibbons and his wife, Dawn, in a public corruption
probe
This year, Gibbons has been mired in controversy over allegations
by his now-estranged wife that he has had an affair, and revelations
that he sent a married woman 850 text messages in one month
on his official cellphone. The Gibbonses are divorcing, but
Dawn Gibbons refused to move out of the governor's mansion in
Carson City for two months, a further embarrassment. And last
month Elko County Assessor Joe Aguirre, a Republican, went public
with accusations that the governor pressured him for a property
tax break on 40 vacant acres Gibbons owns there. Gibbons has
become so politically isolated that Sen. John McCain's presidential
campaign turned to Lt. Gov. Brian K. Krolicki rather than to
the governor to chair the Republican candidate's Nevada effort.
"I don't know if the problems in the [Gibbons] administration
drag the ticket down rather than that it's a loss of the opportunity
to lift the ticket up," said Pete Ernaut, a veteran GOP activist
and Guinn strategist who predicted that Gibbons will face a
primary challenge in 2010. "I don't think the governor's numbers
have negative coattails, but it's the loss of the opportunity
to be able to stand next to the governor."
Beyond Gibbons's woes, though, Ernaut and others note that
the state party has not recruited high-quality candidates the
way it did in the 1990s.
"You can't get any higher than where the Republicans were
in 2002," said Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Erin Neff.
"They really won it all. Once they hit that level, their farm
team had been pushed up. They weren't grooming anyone for office.
That was going to result in an uptick for Democrats irrespective
of the national scene."
In the past 40 years, Nevada has gone Republican in all but
two presidential elections -- 1992 and 1996, when Ross Perot's
independent candidacies helped Bill Clinton pull off upsets.
In addition to how dispirited many Republicans are, the Democrats
enjoyed a huge boost in registration and fundraising from its
Jan. 19 caucuses. About 116,000 Democrats took part, more than
double the number of Republican participants.
Nevada GOP Chairman Sue Lowden is one of the few who say they
do not see significant problems in the state party. She points
to the 45,000 Republicans who participated in the Nevada caucuses
as a success story, and she insisted that Gibbons has been actively
campaigning and effectively fundraising on behalf of state and
local GOP candidates. She also dismissed assertions by Ernaut
and others that Gibbons could face a revolt from within in 2010.
She said the party's woes, if there are any, come from the
broader anti-GOP mood nationally.
"The overall Republican brand doesn't seem to be as appealing,"
Lowden said. "But I'm optimistic that all of our incumbents
are going to win. . . . If we stay a red state, I'll be a hero.
If we don't, I'm not going to be happy."
The Nevada Democratic Party's executive director, Travis Brock,
said his team also deserves credit for building a solid party
full of appealing candidates and for taking better advantage
of the early caucuses to excite the base. He's particularly
pleased about the prospects of state Sen. Dina Titus, who lost
to Gibbons in the 2006 governor's race, to topple three-term
U.S. Rep. Jon Porter in a district where there are now 25,000
more registered Democrats than Republicans. The Democratic edge
was about 3,000 voters when Porter won his last reelection by
fewer than 4,000 votes.
"One of the real reasons I wanted to pursue this career opportunity
was that I saw an organization that was on the edge of a big
sea change," said Brock, who assumed the job in April 2007 after
years working for Democrats in Iowa. The Republican Party's
problems, he said, were evident even then and have only grown
worse since. "To say that I love it is an understatement," he
said.
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