Day before election: ‘Jim can still win’

Sunday, Dec. 31, 2006 | 7:02 a.m.

The day before the November election, Gov.-elect Jim Gibbons' pollster sent a distressing e-mail to the campaign brain trust, a small group of about seven advisers.

"Well, losing two straight rolls is not how we want to go into Election Day," Glen Bolger wrote. A "roll" is the rolling, three-day average of daily tracking polls.

Gibbons was down in his own polls.

"Jim can still win, but it's going to be close at best."

The e-mail - obtained from a source close to the campaign - as well as interviews with advisers to Gibbons and his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Dina Titus, provide a glimpse inside the manic, crisis atmosphere of both campaigns. A picture emerges of just how competitive the race had become by Election Day, and how frantic Gibbons was to hold a lead that had evaporated like desert rain.

The Gibbons campaign had been hammered in the final weeks of the campaign. Chrissy Mazzeo, a single mother and Las Vegas cocktail waitress, had accused Gibbons of assaulting her; a woman said she had been an illegal immigrant when the Gibbons family hired her to be a nanny and housekeeper; and The Wall Street Journal had Gibbons on Page 1 accepting a lavish cruise from a wealthy defense contractor.

Daily e-mails from Bolger, who is one of the most sought-after Republican pollsters in the country, arrived in inboxes usually about 3 a.m. and went to advisers who shared a conference call every day at 6 a.m. to discuss strategy: campaign manager Robert Uithoven and his deputy Cory Kennedy, as well as consultants Sig Rogich, Jim and Dani Denton, Greg Ferraro, Jim Innocenzi and Bolger.

They examined Titus' media buys and adjusted Gibbons' buys accordingly. They brainstormed about script ideas for new TV, print and radio ads. They crafted responses to the latest allegation or scandal story. They tracked the progress of their ground operation.

At one point, Bolger told colleagues they had driven up negative impressions of Titus and should go in for the kill. They brainstormed and drew up an ad based on a nasty voicemail Titus had sent a Democratic volunteer that wound up on the Internet. Once the spot began running, the Titus negatives shot up further.

In the final days, Bolger told the 6 a.m. group he believed Gibbons would win among those who hadn't already voted in the early voting period. The key strategy, then, was getting those voters to the polls. The campaign shifted money into its get-out-the-vote operation accordingly.

Still, the picture was somewhat grim. The day before the election, Bolger reported that Titus had opened up an 8-point lead in the Las Vegas market and a significant lead among women.

The Gibbons campaign also found itself in a financial crunch in the final days, even though Gibbons maintained a massive money advantage through much of the campaign.

The campaign was forced to raise loads of late money, Ferraro said. Because the triple scandals had created such a rough media environment, Gibbons had to spend large sums on expensive advertising to counteract it.

Much of the fundraising drudgery fell to Uithoven.

"It's a challenge when you have to go back to the well," Uithoven said. "Everybody could see these stories, news cycle after news cycle, and it wasn't looking good for us. And raising money in those circumstances isn't easy."

Uithoven said half his job was "investor relations" - phone calls to big donors, soothing their fears and keeping them up to date on where the campaign was headed.

Gibbons' advisers said media strategy on the Mazzeo story fell to attorney Don Campbell, in consultation with Rogich, who has decades of media crisis-management experience.

To keep the Republican faithful in the fold, Uithoven held a conference call with party central committee members every afternoon and let them in on strategy and tactics. When they suggested Gibbons had been set up in the Mazzeo matter, Uithoven didn't disagree, and the notion became popular among the Republican base.

The Gibbons 6 a.m. strategy group had to deal with another irritant: By 10 a.m. the second-guessers began calling and e-mailing. People with access to Gibbons and especially his wife, Dawn Gibbons, often questioned strategy and criticized the team's performance as the race tightened.

For some, it left a bitter taste.

"It sucks. My opinion is Jim Gibbons would not have won this election were it not for Robert Uithoven, and I believe he was treated badly from beginning to end," said one source close to the campaign who didn't want to be named because Gibbons didn't authorize him to speak to the media. (Uithoven, presumed to be the leading contender for the job of chief of staff, withdrew his name from consideration.)

Uithoven and Ferraro downplayed these episodes: "Campaigns are emotional things and that's going to happen," Uithoven said. Often the internal critics weren't privy to the thinking behind the decision-making, he said.

"It was an intense battlefield environment," Ferraro said. "You make the best decisions you can and you move on."

Despite the Gibbons slide, his advisers remained optimistic, they said.

Bolger's election eve e-mail offered some hopeful signs. Although the candidate was down in the three-day average, he was ahead in the Sunday poll. The slide had stopped. And, he was holding on to his Republican base.

The 6 a.m. group was confident it laid the groundwork for victory back in the late summer and early fall, when it used its financial advantage to hammer Titus by defining her for many voters as a tax-and-spend liberal. "Many voters made up their minds about Sen. Titus long before Election Day," Ferraro said.

Uithoven said he was confident his candidate looked and sounded more like a governor, especially in the debates. Debate preparation fell to Ferraro, who said he tried to stress temperament to Gibbons.

"We got a bump from the debates because she had a command of issues, but not necessarily an ability to communicate that command," Uithoven said.

At the last minute, the campaign moved money from advertising to its get-out-the-vote operation, a move that Uithoven believes paid off.

Ferraro called it a return to "basic blocking and tackling of a campaign": finding supporters and getting them to the polls.

Finally, the 6 a.m. group stuck with its strategy of driving home Gibbons' message that he wouldn't raise taxes. It didn't get thrown off by the scandals.

"We were consistent," Uithoven said. "People criticized us for not saying anything, but we were consistent."

While Gibbons' team was busy painting its unappealing portrait of Titus early in the campaign, she was riding out a crisis of her own. She had no money following an expensive primary. National Democratic fundraising groups such as Emily's List weren't riding to the rescue, in part because of a rocky relationship.

Steve Sisolak, the university system regent who was an important Titus adviser and fundraiser, said Gibbons' early attacks were debilitating: "If we could have gotten the early money from the national groups, that would have made the difference," he said.

Once the campaign recovered financially, it wound up with some unimpressive ads and had to fire its ad firm.

Titus turned to her old student, Billy Vassiliadis, whose firm R&R Partners created the "What happens here, stays here" campaign.

Sisolak praised Vassiliadis, but said the campaign had too much to overcome: "Once you get defined, it's hard to get undefined."