State may be more for Obama than Democrats

By David McGrath Schwartz

Sunday, Nov. 16, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Nevadans supposedly woke up to a new reality after the election. The state, which had morphed from Republican red into a battleground in the run-up to the election, was now solidly blue.

But at least in Northern Nevada, that truism might not be so true.

Sure, Democrat Barack Obama took Republican John McCain to the woodshed statewide. He beat McCain by 12.5 points here — 120,000 votes.

Some conservatives and Republicans, though, argue this was less a win for Democrats than a win for Obama. In short, the news for the GOP might not be as dire as some would believe.

The silver lining comes in the form of Republican Rep. Dean Heller, who won his rematch with former Regent Jill Derby by 10 points, twice the margin he beat her by in 2006.

The 2nd Congressional District covers Northern Nevada, the rural counties and a sliver of Clark County.

Before the election, conventional wisdom was that Derby, who like Obama preached a message of change, would have to take Washoe County by a large enough margin to overcome the Republican leanings of the rural counties. The statewide Democratic registration effort was assumed to have helped her chances.

Yet when the votes were counted, Derby lost Washoe County by 1,700 votes. Two years earlier, she had won Washoe by 4,000 votes.

Meanwhile, Obama, with a massive organization there, won the county by 12.5 percent and 23,000 votes.

“Why did all these Obama voters not vote for Derby? I don’t know,” said Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. “But this would worry me if I was a Democrat.”

Herzik, a Republican, said it appears 7,500 voters in Washoe voted for Obama and left the voting booth without voting for anyone else. Others voted for third-party candidates, including a Green Party, Libertarian and Independent American candidate.

“A chunk of Obama voters came and went home,” Herzik said. “Another chunk came and randomly distributed their votes down the ballot. That’s my interpretation right now.”

Other political consultants argue Derby, though relatively well-funded, did not run an aggressive enough campaign. Others noted that two years ago, Heller emerged from a brutal primary without any money. This time he faced only a token primary challenger.

Since joining Congress, Heller has burnished his conservative credentials, voting against the $700 billion bailout twice and voting against expanding health care for children.

Derby, meanwhile, served as chairwoman of the state Democratic Party.

If this was a Democratic wave, those factors would have hurt Heller and helped Derby.

In addition, the outcome of two measures on the ballot don’t support a Democratic wave, or leaning, for Washoe. Two proposals to raise tax revenue in the county, one for schools and one for transportation, failed despite support from labor and teachers unions.

In Clark County, Democrats picked up two state Senate seats and an Assembly seat and took out Republican Rep. Jon Porter. No such gains were made in the north.

How much the political tides of Washoe County matter to the rest of the state is an open question. There’s an argument to be made that the north won’t matter now if Democrats have taken solid control of Clark County.

As recently as 2006, Republican operatives working on Gov. Jim Gibbons’ campaign argued that they’d come out of Northern Nevada and the rurals with a 60,000 vote lead, and there were not enough Democrats in Las Vegas to make that up.

That might not be the case, given the huge registration gains made by Democrats in recent months, particularly in Clark County. In future elections — particularly the governor’s race and U.S. Senate race in 2010 — the north could be irrelevant.

“The Obama effect gave Democrats such a huge mathematical advantage it can’t be made up,” said Jim Ferrence, a Democratic political consultant. “The partisan edge in registration is going to hold up. Nonpartisans’ leaning toward Democrats is going to hold up. Clearly in two years, it’s not going to be undone.”

But Herzik questioned whether the enthusiasm for Obama will carry over when he’s not on the ballot.

“Are all these new Democratic voters Democrats, or Obama-ites?” he asked. “In 2010, when Barack Obama is not on the ballot, will they turn out for the charismatic Harry Reid? I won’t say that they won’t. But it remains to be seen.”