Friday, Feb. 6, 2004 | 4:47 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
Feb. 7 - 8, 2004
Nevada Democrats who meet next Saturday in statewide caucuses will hand a Valentine's Day gift to one of their party's presidential contenders.
But the outcome won't have a major impact on the nomination process.
One reason is that Nevada Democrats will have only 32 votes of the 2,162 needed to nominate a presidential candidate at the party's national convention in July.
Another reason is that the caucuses are conducting what amounts to a nonbinding straw poll in which no delegates will be committed to particular candidates. Most of Nevada's delegates won't be committed to a candidate until the state Democratic convention in April.
By then, it is quite possible that one of the candidates already will have locked up the nomination. That's because other states are holding primaries and caucuses where delegates are automatically won by candidates depending on the percentage of votes they receive.
This is not to say that the Nevada caucuses will be pointless.
They could gain more national attention than ever before because they are occurring earlier in the year than in the past and because Nevada is holding the only state caucus on Saturday -- the District of Columbia caucus is the only other presidential contest that day.
"The Nevada results will be on all the news shows the next morning," University of Nevada, Las Vegas, political science professor Ted Jelen said. "It'll be a good one-day news run."
Nevada will not be a make-or-break state. With four major contenders still left in the race as of this weekend -- front-running Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and fellow candidates former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., and retired Gen. Wesley Clark -- it will take more than a poor showing in Nevada to thin out the field.
Jelen said Edwards has the most to gain by capturing Nevada because that would show he could win outside the South. Jelen's advice to Edwards is to do what it takes to win this state.
"A win in the West would be worth the price and he could do it on the cheap in Nevada," Jelen said. "Even if he won in Tennessee and Virginia, that's intramural and he'd still be a regional candidate. Edwards has to live down the idea he's a southern candidate.
"If he's going to continue raising funds, he needs to convince people that he is viable outside of the South."
Winning Nevada is not as necessary for Clark because he's not viewed as a regional candidate, Jelen said.
"If Kerry wins Nevada, it just means he's denying it to Edwards," Jelen said. "I don't think Dean is a viable candidate even if he wins Nevada. He's having trouble raising money and he hasn't delivered his base."
A sweep of this weekend's caucuses in Michigan, Washington and Maine by Kerry would go a long way toward helping him win Nevada, political science professor Eric Herzik of the University of Nevada, Reno, said.
"You'd see a big shift in Nevada to Kerry," Herzik said. "Momentum will change a lot of people's minds.
"A month ago Nevada probably would have voted for Dean. He was all the talk. Now, he's a nonfactor. I've never seen anyone implode so quickly."
The federal government's decision to bury high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, could be a factor in the outcome of Nevada's caucuses.
Kerry voted against the dump plan in Congress while Edwards voted for Yucca Mountain. Clark said he opposes the dump. Dean initially supported Yucca Mountain when he was Vermont's governor, but has since said that, if elected president, he would halt construction of the dump and order a complete safety review.
Clark County Democrats will hold their caucus from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday at Chaparral High School, 3850 Annie Oakley Drive. Democrats in Nevada's other 16 counties also will be meeting that day throughout the state.
The exercise is open only to registered Democrats, though individuals who are not registered voters or who belong to other political parties may register as Democrats at the caucuses.
Because the nomination is not yet secured, the state party is expecting a better turnout Saturday than in March 2000, when then-Vice President Al Gore, the eventual Democratic nominee for president, captured 90 percent of the caucus vote in Nevada. There were slightly more than 1,000 participants statewide, including 712 in Clark County.
"It's coming at a time when Nevadans will have a stronger voice in the process," Nevada State Democratic Party spokesman Jon Summers said. "We're seeing record numbers of people in the primaries and I think we'll see the same thing here."
Because caucuses tend to be dominated by party regulars and in some cases special interests such as labor unions, the results won't necessarily reflect the preferences of all registered Democrats and therefore can be unpredictable.
Three long-shot candidates have emerged victorious in Nevada caucuses. It occurred twice in 1988, when Democrat Jesse Jackson and Republican Pat Robertson came out on top. And it happened again in 1992, when former California Gov. Jerry Brown won the Democratic contest.
Brown owed his victory to Culinary Union Local 226, whose membership includes waitresses, porters and other resort employees.
"We won the state for Jerry Brown because he came out and walked the picket line with us during the Frontier strike," Culinary political director Glen Arnodo said.
Culinary, which has 45,000 members and is the most politically potent union in Southern Nevada, has not yet committed to a Democratic presidential contender this year so its impact on the upcoming caucus is uncertain.
Other special interest groups that are expected to participate in Nevada's caucuses are firefighters on behalf of Kerry and members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union for Dean.
The real purpose of the caucuses is to select delegates to the Democratic county conventions, which will be held next month. Each precinct gets to send one delegate to the county convention for every 50 registered Democrats in that precinct, with each precinct guaranteed at least one delegate. If only one person shows up at a caucus representing his precinct, he is automatically qualified for the county convention.
Each of Nevada's 17 counties can send one delegate per 150 registered voters to the state convention, which will be held April 16-18 at the Riviera.
The state convention will elect 22 delegates and four alternates who will be pledged to a specific candidate on the first ballot at the national convention in Boston in July. Those individuals will be joined by 10 super-delegates, who are not bound to any candidate, Summers said.
Seven of Nevada's super-delegates are already determined. They are Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., Clark County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, who chairs the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus, state Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, who is Nevada's Democratic national committeewoman, Steven Horsford of Las Vegas, who is the state's national committeeman, Nevada State Democratic Party chairwoman Adriana Martinez of Las Vegas, and state party first vice chairman A. Brian Wallace of Gardnerville.
Three other super-delegates, one representing each of the state's three congressional districts, will also be elected at the state convention.
Of the super-delegates, only Atkinson Gates, who supports Dean, and Wallace, the chairman of the Washoe Tribe who has endorsed Clark, have indicated their candidate preferences. They can change their minds and vote for someone else at the national convention.
The Nevada Republican Party will hold its precinct caucuses Tuesday. The GOP county conventions will occur next month and the state convention will be held April 29-May 1 at the Peppermill hotel in Reno. There is no drama for the Republicans this year because GOP President George W. Bush is seeking re-election and faces no significant opposition.
Kerry, who won seven of the first nine contested states and is now attacking Bush on a frequent basis, is counting on his momentum from those victories to carry him in Nevada's caucuses.
"After Tuesday night's primaries, John Kerry emerged as the only viable candidate," state Sen. Terry Care, D-Las Vegas, co-chairman of Kerry's Nevada camapign, said. "I would just hope the supporters of the other candidates take a look at his position now and get behind the obvious front-runner."
Clark had raised $204,861 in Nevada as of Jan. 31, the most among the Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan Washington group that tracks campaign contributions.
Clark is looking to convince voters that Kerry is not yet a cinch to gain the nomination for the right to face President Bush in November.
Sam Lieberman, a former aide to Reid and Berkley, who is Edwards' authorized representative at Nevada's caucuses, said he was hopeful his candidate would finish among the top two positions.
"The feeling is that if Edwards can make a strong showing here, it can be a foundation for the West," Lieberman said.
Many political observers believe Dean, who had not won a state entering this weekend, will be next to drop out. Dean has indicated he may quit if he doesn't win the Wisconsin primary on Feb. 17, which is three days after the Nevada caucuses.
Atkinson Gates, Nevada chairwoman of the Dean campaign, said the candidate's team in this state will reassess the campaign following this weekend's contests to determine "if in fact we're going to continue or become free agents."
"If we don't do well this weekend, I think that will have a huge impact in terms of support," Atkinson Gates said.
Because many caucus participants dream of becoming delegates to the national convention, they may switch candidate allegiances if they believe it gives them a better chance of being elected by their peers to represent Nevada. Atkinson Gates said support for Dean may slip away in Nevada with a poor showing this weekend.
Conversely, she said she believes Dean has a great chance of winning Nevada if he survives this weekend because of the organization his campaign has assembled in this state.
"What's disturbing to me as a Democrat is how we beat up on each other. We haven't seen all the political attacks in this state that we have seen and heard in other states. That puts everyone on an equal footing here."
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