Parties push to get voter turnout

Monday, Nov. 6, 2006 | 7:34 a.m.

WASHINGTON - For all the talk of a wave that could sweep Democrats to power in Congress and beyond on Tuesday, there is still one major hurdle to clear: getting Democrats to vote.

Pollsters say Democrats are fired up to cast ballots, more so than in years - even more so than the Republicans were when they took control of the House in 1994.

That could help Democrats Dina Titus, who is running for governor, and congressional candidates Tessa Hafen and Jill Derby in Nevada. But maybe not.

Democrats nationwide are nervous about the Republicans' vaunted voter turnout machine, which is credited with pushing the party to victory in the past few cycles. The Republican National Committee has sent 100 activists into Nevada to work for candidates - namely Rep. Jon Porter, who is fighting to keep his 3rd Congressional seat from Hafen.

Republicans promised a 72-hour push straight through to Election Day.

Early voting suggests Republicans are doing well, casting ballots at a slightly greater rate in Clark County than expected. Republicans are 37 percent of registered voters in the county, while 40 percent of the votes cast so far are Republican.

In Porter's district, more Republicans than Democrats had voted by late last week, despite a slight Democratic advantage in registration.

Washington pollster Mark Mellman doubts the power of "Republican magic" to get voters to the polls. People vote for many reasons - the war in Iraq, the mood of the country - not just because a phone bank volunteer urged them to vote.

Still, if you haven't voted, you might expect to hear from someone because chances are, Republican and Democratic operations know it.

They also know what kind of car you drive, what magazines you read and whether you have a hunting license. The two parties have been mining political and consumer data to build vast databases in their efforts to target would-be voters.

This is an important component of the national machine Republicans perfected in 2002, when they beat the Democrats at their own game. Democrats had long ruled turnout efforts thanks to armies of union worker volunteers.

This time, the Democratic National Committee spent $8 million to match the sophisticated Republican operations. Neither party would disclose how much it is spending in Nevada.

Yet despite all the money and interest in what could be a historic election, Larry Lomax, Clark County's registrar of voters, said he does not see the enthusiasm in the numbers.

His daily reports from two weeks of early voting have forced him to revise downward his voter turnout projections from 60 percent to 53-54 percent, at the low end of typical turnout in the years Nevadans elect governors.

Lomax expected that with Democrats poised to take Congress, and Nevada's status as a swing state, residents on both sides would be motivated to fight. "I thought the parties would have a bigger push," he said.

Nationally, the Democratic Party's internal struggle between Chairman Howard Dean and House campaign boss Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., over how best to win the election can be seen in rural Southern Nevada, where the party started trolling for voters a year ago with a novel approach: birthday greetings.

Every day for the last 12 months, volunteers from the Pahrump field office scrolled lists of potential voters, determined those with approaching birthdays, then called with a birthday hello. The effort stems from Dean's strategy to rebuild the base by attracting wayward Democrats in a region where Republicans rule.

Slowly but surely, Democrats have come back to the fold. Pahrump's annual summer meeting drew twice as many as the year before, said John Murray, the DNC's point man in Pahrump.

Republicans, however, have hardly been idle. They have taken a more direct approach: Drop 100 outsiders into the state and put them to work making calls and walking precincts to keep Nevada's two Republican House seats from going Democrat.

Edward Grefe, a national Republican strategist, said it's hard to beat the party's approach. "When you have a tug of war on the one issue that needs to be highly disciplined, I think the Republicans will have the edge."