Jon Ralston on why Democrats serious about winning state races shouldn’t waste their time in rural Nevada

Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006 | 1:20 a.m.

As Democrats around the country rejoice about Tuesday's victories, only delusional party members here believe the resolution of Campaign '06 is cause for celebration.

Winning four constitutional offices, while it may set the table for the future, hardly eclipses losing the governorship and two competitive congressional contests, not to mention the inevitable U.S. Senate loss. (Could Sen. Harry Reid have been so prescient as to realize he could leave John Ensign alone and still become majority leader? A mad genius, I tell you!)

Alas, with all the Sturm und Drang that characterized the campaign, especially the waning weeks as the SS Jim Gibbons almost sank, this could have been forecast long ago. A top of the ticket - Dina Titus-Jack Carter - that sounded as if it were from Georgia and whose politics seemed as if they were from Massachusetts was a prescription for disaster. What were they thinking?

Meddler-in-Chief Reid never wanted Titus to be the nominee and his sub rosa support for Jim Gibson only roiled the grass roots and was not ratified by the Henderson mayor, whose campaign had elephantine problems from the beginning and was sadly impotent by the end.

Titus lost the most important race in the state for many reasons - Gibbons' effective ads about taxes (true) and immigration (false), fueled by his gargantuan financial advantage, her unfocused, ineffective general election campaign and Mazzeomania, which brought Titus closer but obscured the more substantive issue of the illegal nanny in the basement (hello hypocrisy) and the cruise paid for by the donor who got favors (hello pay to play).

It doesn't always matter if you speak better than your opponent, especially if it's with a grating accent that seems to embody your personality to too many. And it doesn't matter if you know the issues better than your opponent, especially if so few issues really matter to the public and especially if one of your past issues was. "I don't like the North."

All of these factors played a part. But Gibbons guru Sig Rogich, who had a tortuous few weeks after letting his candidate off his leash at McCormick & Schmick's, encapsulated the Democratic problem in this race and other important statewide contests two years ago when he told the Las Vegas Sun: "I'm just of the opinion that (Jim Gibbons') strength in Northern Nevada and the rural communities, coupled with the fact that he is building momentum in Southern Nevada, will make him very difficult to beat if he chooses to run (for governor)."

Democrats can live in a dreamland, hoping for the new governor to be indicted (as Titus expressed to the Sun last week), or exist in a land of recriminations (as Titus did in the same interview, pointing fingers everywhere but in the mirror). Or they can follow the new leader of the Democrats in this state (Reid is too busy in D.C.), Speaker Barbara Buckley, who extended an olive branch to Gibbons while keeping her knife in its sheath - for now.

The Democrats also can fuse their philosophical concerns with practical realities by abandoning all hope of succeeding in rural Nevada, where no Democratic contender facing a substantive GOP candidate will ever fare well.

The future of the Democratic Party in this state is an urban strategy - turn out voters in Democratic Southern Nevada and then ignore the cow counties and concentrate on Washoe County, where there are enough Lincoln Chafee Republicans to make success possible. The issues that appeal to Renoites are the same as those that appeal to Las Vegans and they cross partisan lines - the environment, ethics, education. The Democratic hopefuls just need to lay a northern foundation and build upon it.

It's been proven in the past by candidates such as Reid, and it was shown this cycle by the likes of Secretary of State-elect Ross Miller (he won Washoe by 15,000 votes) and Jill Derby, whose run for Congress was crushed in rural Nevada but made close by Washoe (where she won by 4,500 votes).

The Democrats have the horses to compete in four years - Miller the Younger has precocious political skills, Attorney General-elect Catherine Cortez Masto improved immensely as the campaign wore on and Tessa Hafen, even though she lost a congressional bid, clearly has a future.

But you can take the horses to rural Nevada and the vote pool will still be dry. Until Democrats realize that they will have to concentrate on the state's two urban areas and let the rurals be Republican, they will remain in the political wilderness.