Jim Gibbons’ time as governor of Nevada is just about up

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, May 16, 2010 | 2 a.m.

It has never happened in Nevada history. But it will happen June 8: A sitting Nevada governor will lose in a primary.

The unprecedented yet inevitable result is inescapable after another flawed but still telling Mason-Dixon poll was released this week (paid for by the Review-Journal) showing Gov. Jim Gibbons trailing ex-Judge Brian Sandoval by 18 percentage points (45-27). The poll may be wrong because any poll can be wrong. But if these numbers are off, they are off in ways that benefit Sandoval — too many men were sampled (58 percent) and Sandoval is crushing Gibbons with women (49-18), and not enough Washoe County voters were polled (4 percent off) and Sandoval is up by 18 points in the North.

Our long state nightmare will soon be over. Since 1910, when Nevada began holding primary elections, no governor has lost in a primary, state Archivist Jeff Kintop confirms. That will change in a few weeks.

We media types have this bad habit — despite the preponderance of evidence that a race is over before it begins, we ignore Occam’s razor and try to find a way to make it competitive. We have all labored, using Gibbons’ flashes of leadership (or were they blinks of an eye?) and Sandoval’s wishy-washiness to convince ourselves the governor could win. And there are still core Republicans who will vote for him, as his victories in straw polls indicate.

But a statewide poll can’t be that wrong. Cue the dirges.

Sometimes, horror movies with innumerable sequels aside, dead means dead. As the late Jim Joyce used to say after elections, when you see a lifeless camel covered in straw, it’s hard to discern which straw broke his back.

Never has that been more so with James Arthur Gibbons, may his career R.I.P.

Gibbons was elected 3 1/2 years ago not by some rush of good will from the electorate but by voters who cast ballots less for him than against Dina Titus, who grated on too many and who was transmogrified into Dina Taxes by Team Gibbons. Surviving three scandals in three weeks in the run-up to the 2006 balloting, Gibbons had nowhere to go but up. Or so we thought.

From a secret swearing-in ceremony that began his term, one the governor dissembled about, to his current, embarrassing campaign with insipid radio ads, Nazi-name-calling and botched news releases with the grammar and syntax of a child, Gibbons’ tenure has been characterized by public personal humiliation and startling governmental ineptitude.

I recall a conversation with a prominent gaming executive when he was asked to support Gibbons four years ago. He wondered why the state’s power elite would anoint someone who was quietly embarrassing in D.C. amid 435 members and give him the chance to be loudly embarrassing in the state’s most important and high-profile job. Good question.

And now we see what that has wrought.

That’s why the Democrats, so desperate in a problematic year for the party to find a way to reclaim the governorship, formed that Committee to Protect Nevada Jobs to try to prop up Gibbons. The governor went from anointed to snubbed in 3 1/2 short years as many of the same folks who funded him four years ago decided to anoint Sandoval or Rory Reid this cycle. So he has little money to run a campaign, leading the Democrats to begin to run ads pounding Sandoval. But either the ad buy has not been large enough to do any damage or nothing you could say about Sandoval would influence the Anybody But Gibbons caucus in the GOP.

As one insider put it, the Gibbons brand is so badly damaged that no repackaging, no attempt to turn Manischewitz into Opus One, will sell. People — in this case, GOP voters — simply are not buying.

To put it in starker terms, Gibbons can’t get much past 30 percent (if that) in any poll. He still might have survived (maybe) if ex-North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon had any money and could do some damage. But the “only electable conservative,” as Montandon cleverly calls himself, can’t get any of his buddies to spare a dime.

Maybe Gibbons will call me late primary night and repeat that famous Mark Twain line to me. But I don’t think I am exaggerating here, folks.

To my media colleagues, to the Committee to Protect Jobs, and to the daily Rory Reid Prayer Group, it is with great pain that I declare the Jim Gibbons era over (long, problematic lame-duck period notwithstanding).

The resuscitation effort has failed. Time to pull the plug.

The funeral is June 8.