Voters turning blue

By Jon Ralston

Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

Sarah Palin came to Nevada on Tuesday to reinvigorate the base.

And, boy, does the base ever need it, especially in this swinging state where the pendulum clearly has moved away from McCain-Palin since Saint Sarah arrived in Carson City during her savior period five weeks ago. John McCain still can barely find the state on the map — but he did do a telephonic town hall this week! — and he dispatched Palin to try to salvage a battleground where the war, as Harry Reid might say, might already be lost.

Palin may not have been able to smell it in the Reno-Sparks Convention Center or the beautiful Henderson Pavilion, but that scent in the Nevada air for the GOP is desperation. You can see it in the numbers, on the airwaves, in the mailboxes.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the Republican straw-grasping occurring came from one of the warm-up speakers for Palin, state Sen. Bob Beers, who can play more tricks with numbers than most magicians can with rabbits and hats. Beers urged the crowd to go out and vote because Democrats are beating Republicans in the early vote, but told them to take heart that fewer Democrats had voted each day and more Republicans were going to the polls each day.

Forget accuracy for a moment — more than 15,000 Democrats voted the first day, then about 12,000 the second and 13,000 the third. More important, for Beers and the GOP, everything is relative — 5,700 Republicans voted Saturday, a little more than 5,000 on Sunday and about 6,000 on Monday. If that pathetic pace continues — though it seems unlikely — by the end of the 14-day early voting period, Republicans will be far enough behind to make Nov. 4 an afterthought.

The state Palin visited Tuesday has been overtaken by a Democratic registration tsunami that has put the GOP more than 100,000 voters behind statewide. And now, after three days of early voting, it appears Democrats have converted their registration machine into a turnout juggernaut, holding a 59 percent to 25 percent lead in Clark County in the early vote — 56 percent to 29 percent, if mail ballots are counted.

That is nothing short of devastating if it holds up — no GOP Election Day machine, no voter suppression techniques, no wailing about ACORNs and Ayers can change that. Even Palin seemed to have been tipped off to what is happening in Clark County as she gave a speech that, except for references to her running mate and Ronald Reagan, could have been delivered by Hillary Clinton.

She mentioned the glass ceiling several times, talked about equal pay for women and railed against the subjugation of females in other countries. It was a direct appeal to the kind of voters the McCain-Palin ticket is hemorrhaging, partly because some women have been turned off by the vice presidential nominee who, despite the bobbing of all those “Country First” signs in Henderson, has become a symbol of the emptiness of Politics First.

The Republicans, despite an enthusiastic crowd here for Palin on Tuesday, know they are in trouble. Indeed, the site of her speech — Green Valley — is a traditional GOP stronghold in a congressional district never held by a Democrat, but where one may just win this time.

Rep. Jon Porter, who was on stage Tuesday, needed all the help he could get from whatever is left of the Palin Effect. As the campaign winds down, Porter has decided to answer the question, “How could he top 2006, when he called Tessa Hafen, scion of a family that has lived here for generations, a carpetbagger?” The answer, we have come to find out: Blame Dina Titus, the state senator running against him, for the current economic crisis.

Porter and his allies have at least two ads that have recently aired that accuse Titus of “shady schemes” and have tried to directly link her votes for an infamous pension increase nearly two decades ago to the current recession, portraying her as rapacious in the face of struggling families. It would be comically brazen, except most people probably don’t know the separation in time and might buy it.

If this were any other year, that issue might have killed Titus. But look at those early numbers in CD3: 22,613 Democrats, 11,330 Republicans. If that pace holds, even Titus, despite her baggage and funding disadvantage, will unseat Porter.

Maybe that’s why Palin, arriving in a Democratic county getting more Democratic all the time, decided to sound like a Democrat — the frothing faithful barely noticed. After all, if Democrats aren’t crossing over for McCain-Palin, Porter and others, the landslide is coming.