Will they still love us on Wednesday?

Kirsten Searer, Ed Koch and Benjamin Grove

Friday, Oct. 29, 2004 | 7:16 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

October 30 - 31, 2004

Usually ignored in the presidential campaigns, the battleground state of Nevada is now in the cross hairs for Tuesday's election.

Campaign television advertisers have spent an estimated $18 million in the Las Vegas market this year, and that doesn't count the radio ads and millions of pieces of mail sent to voters.

Third-party groups are flooding Nevada streets with canvassers, pestering people to vote.

And the candidates and their high-profile surrogates have made Nevada a regular stop. With the national media in tow, they have raised Nevada issues such as the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

"In our history, this attention is unprecedented," state archivist Guy Rocha said. "What we (typically) see is candidates coming to Las Vegas for the money at private fund-raising events.

"But what we have seen this year with so many public appearances is a once-in-a-lifetime experience."

In 2000, Bush defeated then-Vice President Al Gore by 4 percentage points in Nevada, slightly more than 21,500 votes. Because of the closeness of the contest and the fact that Nevada's five electoral votes could make the difference this year, campaign strategists focused their attention here.

Political experts and campaign watchers, though, are split on what Nevada's newfound popularity will mean after Nov. 2.

Some think the Silver State will fade back into small-state obscurity, destined to be pushed around in Washington on issues such as Yucca Mountain, growth and water rights.

Others think Nevada will continue to be evenly divided, meaning that if the election is close, the state's voters will be courted.

"Nevada is a state that I believe will be significant in the outcome of the (election of the) next president of the United States of America," said Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., a co-chairman of Kerry's campaign who is in Nevada this weekend.

"When you read the papers across the country, Nevada is prominently mentioned. Everyone in New York knows we're coming here (to Nevada)."

But once the campaign is over, there's not much history to suggest presidents spend much time fretting over the state-specific issues raised on the campaign trail, said Frank Fahrenkopf, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a co-chairman of the presidential debates this year.

"They never do," said Fahrenkopf, now president of the American Gaming Association.

Elections follow a familiar pattern, said Fahrenkopf, who has long been active in presidential campaign politics.

Candidates, their surrogates, and the national media focus a bright spotlight on local issues in the cities and states where they need votes most.

But after the election, the president and Congress move on to other issues and set their own priorities.

"Most of these (campaign state) issues are usually forgotten," Fahrenkopf said.

Nevada is not alone, Fahrenkopf noted. The other battleground states will face the same problem keeping a focus on their issues after the election, he said.

The question, then, is what does Nevada gain from the attention?

The answer, some say, is action on Yucca Mountain.

In 2000, Bush said he would approve Yucca Mountain based upon "sound science."

Kerry has tried to tar Bush as a liar, saying the science behind the proposed nuclear waste dump is flawed and saying the president is too close to the nuclear energy industry.

Bush, who signed off on the project, said he was relying on sound science, and after a federal appellate court struck down part of the project, said he would abide by the court's decision.

Kerry, though, has pledged to kill the project, saying Yucca Mountain would not happen "on my watch."

Congress and the rest of the country are not likely to think about Yucca again much after the election, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Only when nuclear waste is traveling on its way to Yucca Mountain is the rest of the country going to be interested," Jamieson said.

But she noted that while much of the campaign rhetoric is forgotten after the election, promises are not.

In general, when presidents make specific promises -- as Kerry has on Yucca Mountain -- they keep them, said Jonathan Hurwitz, a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Breaking a specific promise, as Bush's father famously did with a no-new-taxes pledge, can forever tarnish a president, Hurwitz said.

"Presidents cannot really get away with violating those promises very often," he said.

Former Republican Gov. Robert List said he thinks that if Kerry wins Nevada, "Sen. (Harry) Reid in particular would be holding a big I.O.U. from Kerry."

Reid, D-Nev., the Senate assistant minority leader, has been the biggest opponent in Congress to the project.

List is now a consultant for the nuclear industry's lobbying group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, which strongly supports Yucca Mountain.

He said many see Kerry's pledge to stop Yucca Mountain as the final referendum on whether Nevadans think the project is inevitable.

"After all this splashy issue-oriented campaigning against the project, if Bush still carries the state, many will say we had a referendum on it," he said.

Yucca Mountain opponents decry that thought, but do recognize that the issue has been raised on a national level, which could help Nevada in the future.

The number of visits by the candidates, their high-profile surrogates and political operatives is bound to help in the future, state Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, a political science professor at UNLV, said. She said Nevadans are making contacts in the campaigns, and those contacts could turn into influence in the future.

Plus, she said, Reid's close relationship with Kerry could pay off if the Democrat wins.

"I don't think (Republican Sen. John) Ensign has that same relationship with Bush that Harry (Reid) would have with Kerry," Titus said.

Gov. Kenny Guinn, who is co-chairman of Bush's Nevada campaign, said he knew Bush as a fellow governor on a first-name basis long before Bush set foot in the White House.

Guinn recalls Election Night 2000, when he said CNN phoned him at 9 p.m. to say they were calling the state for Gore.

The network thought Gore would win because he was so far ahead in Clark County, Guinn said.

"I suggested to them that they pay attention to the whole state, and they wait another hour or so," Guinn said.

The conservative rural counties hadn't been counted by the network, and Guinn was right.

In 2000, the rest of the nation didn't know much about Nevada, but that has changed.

Close elections help put states like Nevada on the political map. A close election this year could keep the state there.

"I suspect we will see more of this kind of attention in future elections," said Hal Rothman, chairman of UNLV's history department. "No one has an idea who will win on Tuesday. The country is split almost in half."

Strategists typically color a U.S. map with red for Republican states and blue for Democratic states. Nevada, Rothman said, is purple.

That may help the state maintain some prominence over the next four years, said Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.

"Nevada was equally important in 2000, except the candidates did not know it at the time," he said. "Had Al Gore spent as much time in Nevada as Kerry has spent this time, he might have taken the state and won the election."

Herzik said there has been a shift in the way presidential campaigns have operated. In 2000, the campaigns used the "old model," he said, going after big states, even the ones that they had sewn up.

"Gore spent his time in California, which he was going to get anyway," Herzik said. "This time the two campaigns look at the map and have been aggressively going after states that are purple, like Nevada."

But, he said, this may be the last time Nevada sees such attention.

"Given that most elections are not this close, the likelihood is that it (the attention) won't happen again," he said.

Others see it differently. State Republican Party executive director Chris Carr said he thinks of Nevada like the rest of the nation -- evenly split.

The state will mirror the nation more and more as it takes in so many new residents, Carr said. And as long as Nevada is divided among political parties, it will likely get presidential attention, he said.

List pointed out that Nevada has been a good bellwether for the rest of the nation.

In the last 26 presidential elections, Nevada has voted for the winner 24 times.

He noted that the state had gained an electoral vote since 2000, "so our significance has grown."

"We're a very independent group of folks out here," List said. "I think Nevada will be a state to watch from a national level for a long time to come."

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