Will local races feel an Obama bump?

By Mike Trask (contact)

Thursday, March 19, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Thanks in large part to voters’ excitement about Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy last year, a record number of residents in North Las Vegas and Henderson registered to vote in the November election.

And now the weight of those new voters may be brought to bear in the two cities’ municipal elections.

The question being asked in the campaigns is what effect, if any, the blast of new voters will have on suburban politics. Will the sweeping excitement of the 2008 presidential cycle and the early Nevada caucuses carry over to the April 7 municipal primaries?

“We have no historical precedent” in dealing with a large and sudden influx of new voters, says political consultant Dan Hart, who is running Shari Buck’s mayoral race in North Las Vegas. “It could mean a lot or it could mean nothing.”

Steve Redlinger, a veteran Nevada political consultant who is managing Mike Mayberry’s mayoral campaign in Henderson, agrees that the effect of all these new voters is unknown. “That’s the million-dollar question,” he says. “Do these activists transfer their activism to the local level?”

North Las Vegas mayoral candidates William Robinson and Stephanie Smith think the answer is yes — and have tapped former Obama volunteers and staffers to work for them.

But a few dozen political junkies is different from thousands of voters.

The election turnout in North Las Vegas and Henderson is notoriously dismal — between 8 percent and 15 percent during each municipal election over the past decade.

The 2008 voter registration drives, primarily driven by the Democratic Party, boosted North Las Vegas’ numbers by 32 percent, and Henderson’s by 14 percent. To put it into context: North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon got 4,586 votes when he was reelected in 2005. Over the past year, 18,000 new voters have registered in North Las Vegas.

In Henderson, Mayor James Gibson easily won the primary in 2005 with 8,327 votes. Now the city has 16,000 new voters.

The debate among political wonks is whether the new voters will be as disengaged in suburban politics as the voters who have been on the rolls for years.

Some political observers say that, six months after President Barack Obama’s election, the local elections have the feel of a beer league softball game following the World Series: there’s just not the same level of excitement.

“Those people aren’t going to vote,” David Damore, a UNLV political science professor, says of the new voters. “Getting people who were energized through the presidential election to follow through is difficult.”

In parceling out their limited resources, the campaigns will first target voters who have voted in past municipal elections, then identify voters who participated in the caucuses, the August primary and the November general election.

At some point, the campaigns have to decide which voters are worth the 50-cent investment of printing and mailing a campaign flyer.

“You don’t just blindly mail to all voters,” says Ronni Council, campaign manager for Stephanie Smith, a North Las Vegas mayoral candidate. “You would have to raise far too much to do that.”

In lieu of direct mail, campaigns cobble together e-mail lists of voters as best they can.

At least one candidate thinks he will be elected mayor of North Las Vegas by tapping the new voters. Ned Thomas, a Henderson city planner, said he’ll find them the old-fashioned way — by knocking on doors.

If he can draw their interest, he says, they’ll swing to his corner and carry the day for him.

And if he succeeds, the next mayoral elections in 2013 may become very interesting — and expensive for the candidates.