Voters in Nevada give Bush the edge

Kirsten Searer

Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004 | 11:03 a.m.

Independent to the last vote, Nevada didn't disappoint Tuesday night in its role as a battleground state.

Nevada and its five electoral votes went unclaimed until midnight, when Gov. Kenny Guinn hopped on stage at a Republican party at the Mandalay Bay to announce Nevada voted for President Bush.

The television networks were slow to agree, but Guinn and other top Republicans said they thought Nevada would tip the presidency to Bush.

"One more time, who put it over the top? Nevada!" Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said to Republican supporters who chanted, "Four more years!"

While the vote was still being counted in Ohio, Nevada's voters gave Bush the edge by 2.6 percentage points, 414,939 to 393,372 votes.

But there wasn't much Republican momentum down the ballot in Nevada.

Despite the millions of dollars spent by the political parties and outside groups, no political party -- or, in the case of the 10 measures on the Clark County ballot, political ideology -- emerged an absolute winner in Nevada.

"Clearly Nevada's (political) diversity played out again," state archivist Guy Rocha said, calling the state "eclectic." "Welcome to Nevada."

The Republican incumbent won the presidency, even though he approved the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository -- a project his opponent pledged to kill.

The congressional delegation didn't change -- it's still a mix between Republicans and Democrats.

The Legislature, some of whose members were targeted because of their votes in favor of the 2003 tax increase, saw four seats change. The Democrats, targeted for their support of the tax plan, picked up those seats.

Voters supported an initiative targeted to help education but opposed a measure to increase school funding. At the same time, voters supported an initiative to raise the minimum wage in the state, and Clark County voters approved a plan to raise the sales tax to pay for more cops.

"It's not unusual for Nevada," Rocha said. "Nevada is not monolithic for what it is and what it supports.

"It's not necessarily of one mind, it's not of two minds. It's of many minds."

Democratic spokesman Jon Summers said his party was surprised the numbers weren't closer because of the strong grass-roots work on behalf of Democratic nominee John Kerry. Democrats and their supporters registered 90,305 new voters in the past year.

"Certainly there was a lot of energy out there to get George Bush out of office," he said. "But at the end of the day, that may not be the case."

The tight race in Nevada was encouraging for future Nevada elections, Summers said.

"It's the battleground that people thought we wouldn't be," he said. "A year ago they didn't think it would be close in Nevada.

Republicans claimed a sweet victory Tuesday night, pointing out that Republicans will retain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

"It was a great night for Republicans all across the country," Porter said.

In Nevada, the status quo won in Congress.

Democrats retained Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley, and Republicans held onto seats of Reps. Porter and Jim Gibbons. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., was not up for election this year.

Democrats, however, gained some momentum in the Legislature.

Republicans had hoped to win control of the Assembly, Democrats actually picked up three more seats, leaving the Assembly with a 26-16 majority.

Several legislators were pegged for defeat because of the anti-tax movement created by last year's historic tax increase, but the biggest target, Assemblywoman Valerie Weber, R-Las Vegas, squeaked by with a 244-vote win.

That's in spite of the Republicans' anti-tax, pro-water reform Contract with Nevada, which Republicans hoped would push them into the majority but apparently didn't connect with voters.

"Anytime you try something like that, you hope people grab onto it," said Brian Scroggins, chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, as he shrugged his shoulders.

Some Republicans hoped the voters would remember the record tax increase passed by the 2003 Legislature. The Republican caucus was able to stall the tax package, faltering only after months of keeping the bill at bay.

Instead, it seemed to work the other way.

Two Northern Nevada Republican assemblymen who lost -- Don Gustavson and Ron Knecht -- were both strong opponents of the tax plan.

And Democrat Susan Gerhardt won an Assembly seat from Henderson, vacated by Republican Josh Griffin.

Republican activist George Harris blamed the losses in the Assembly on the minimum wage initiative, which he said did too much to rally Democrats.

"We had nothing on the ballot to bring Republicans out like the minimum wage," said Harris, who unsuccessfully tried to put two measures on the ballot, one to repeal last year's tax increase and another to ban public employees from serving in the Legislature.

In the Senate, Republicans had hoped to pick up another seat or two, but Republicans ended up losing the seat held by Sen. Ray Shaffer, R-North Las Vegas.

Shaffer, a former Democrat, changed parties before the 2003 Legislature, and went on vacation while the Legislature passed the tax plan. He represented a district with a distinct Democratic registration edge.

"We lost one seat, we still have a 12-9 majority and we'll ride out the storm in the next session," said Joe Brezny, executive director of the Republican Senate Caucus.

When it came to taxes, voters said yes to police and no to tax breaks for corporations.

Clark County voters said yes to a higher sales tax to pay for more police on a 51-48 vote. Nevada voters, though, overwhelmingly killed a plan to revise and extend certain tax exemptions on a 62-37 vote.

Voters shut down a proposal to raise per-pupil education spending to the national average or higher. Another education measure that would require the legislature to fund education before other budgets won.

Doctors won big, seeing a win on Question 3, which would tighten laws aimed at keeping medical malpractice insurance costs down. Such an issue is typically supported by Republicans.

At the same time, two other initiatives, which could have shredded the doctors' initiative, failed. The initiatives sponsored by trial attorneys and such measures usually gain support from Democrats.

Organized labor was credited with many of the Democratic wins on Tuesday, largely because the measure to raise the minimum wage won strong support.

The most-watched race, though, was for president. Nevada has correctly picked the winner in every presidential election but one since 1912, and the state maintained its streak.

Ultimately, about 77 percent of Nevadans voted, compared with 70 percent who voted in the 2000 general election.

Throughout the day, exit polls showed that Kerry and Bush were separated by just about a point, with third-party candidate Ralph Nader securing about 1 percent of the Nevada vote.

Dan Barkan, a retired private investor and Henderson resident, said he voted for Nader because he thought the two major-party candidates would do the same thing.

"He's got something to say," Barkan said. "I think the other guys don't."

Jeff Duran, a Henderson retail manager, said he voted for Kerry because he thinks its time for a change. The decision, he said, was easy.

"No negotiation at all," said Duran, who tried to vote twice at the Galleria Mall during early voting but said he didn't because the lines were too long.

But Bush gained a more decisive victory as returns came in.

Hal Rothman, chairman of the history department at UNLV, said he was not surprised at all by how Nevada voted on the different issues.

He agreed that voters in the state do tend to compartmentalize issues and look at them on their own merits rather than as part of a bigger picture.

"Nevadans are notorious ticket splitters," Rothman said, pointing out the high poll numbers earned by Reid, Berkley and Porter, who all won their races by large margins.

"Nevadans don't now and really never have toed any political lines."

Rothman said the best example of that was that Reid won 65 percent of the vote against Republican challenger Richard Ziser, while Bush only narrowly squeaked out a win.

Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, a political science professor at UNLV, said that people look at "how a ballot question directly affects (them as) an individual as well as how an individual directly relates to a candidate."

"Rather than look at the very big picture things, people look at very personal things," she said.

She said the passage of one education initiative and the failure of the other showed that Nevadans liked to have it "both ways."

"They want education to be a priority but they don't want to raise taxes to pay for them," she said.

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