Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa makes his first visit to Nevada to speak to party loyalists at UNLV on Dec. 3. Vilsack announced the official start of his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination here. Photo by Louie Traub/Review-Journal.
This mating dance is a strange one.
It takes more than a year, for one thing, and occurs only once every four years. It is consummated not in the spring but in January. And it traditionally takes place in parts of the United States that might not be considered the most romantic: Iowa and New Hampshire.
Advertisement
But now this odd courtship has a new venue, someplace a little warmer and a lot sexier: Nevada.
Over the summer, the Democratic Party picked Nevada to host an early 2008 presidential caucus. That means voters here can expect to be flattered, wooed and glad-handed for the next year, until, on Jan. 19, 2008, they get to make one of the first and most influential statements about who the party's nominee should be.
"Nevada should be excited about this," said Ross Gittell, a professor at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics.
For residents of New Hampshire, which hosts the nation's first presidential primaries, the process is exciting and educational, he said.
"All of the candidates come through, and it's real retail politics," he said. "They go to people's houses. They go to events. They meet people on the street. They go to the big cities and the small towns. Citizens really get to touch and communicate with the candidates for president."
In Nevada, the process already has begun, with Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack stopping in Las Vegas earlier this month to announce the official start of his bid for the nomination.
Numerous other Democrats thought to be seeking the nod came to Nevada during the run-up to the Nov. 7 election.
Nevada now faces being in the center of America's political sights for the first time. For the state, for the candidates, for the Democratic Party and possibly for the nation itself, the early Nevada caucus stands to be a very big deal.
It also stands to be a very big undertaking.
THE LOGISTICS
Nevada Democratic Party officials have only guesstimates at this point, but the numbers are impressive.
The party expects to spend $1 million to $2 million to hold simultaneous caucuses at as many as 1,000 sites throughout Nevada. The number of participants could be as high as 100,000.
"We joke that we're Vegas, so of course we know how to put on a big event," party spokeswoman Kirsten Searer said. "But this is unique."
The state party has hired veterans of national Democratic politics and the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus to direct the effort. They will be responsible for the myriad tasks associated with the caucus, including raising money, identifying caucus sites, recruiting staff and volunteers to operate them, setting up a massive headquarters to process the data coming in from across the state, and helping the various candidates coordinate their Nevada campaigns.
"Our state party is arguably the most organized it's been in years, but it's important to get people who have done this before," Searer said.
Earlier this month, the party announced it had hired the Iowa Democratic Party's executive director during the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, Jean Hessburg, to serve as campaign director of the Nevada caucus.
Hessburg, who lives in Des Moines, will serve as a part-time consultant, while her Iowa colleague, Jayson Sime, will move to Nevada and work full time on the nitty-gritty.
Two veterans of presidential campaigns also are onboard to assist with communications: Jamal Simmons and Bill Buck, who did press work for Wesley Clark in 2004, and Roger Salazar, who was national spokesman for John Edwards' 2004 primary campaign.
Nevada Democrats have been using a caucus to select their presidential convention delegates since the 1960s. The idea of a caucus is to bring neighbors together for meaningful discussion, rather than the solitary, impersonal process of voting in a booth, as takes place in a primary.
"Caucuses in general are a party-building activity, wherever they are," Hessburg said. "They draw activists in to take care of party business and talk about the candidates. Nevada moving up in the calendar means more people will be interested in participating in the caucus, and that in turn will enhance participation in the party."
THE EFFECTS FOR NEVADA
Party officials hope the early caucus will get more Democrats to vote and more Nevadans to vote Democratic. There is no parallel early Republican caucus, so Nevadans will be meeting Democratic politicians, seeing them on television and reading about them in the newspaper while the Republican contenders are concentrating their efforts elsewhere.
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he believes Nevada, which gave its electoral votes twice to President Bush, already is trending more Democratic, but the attention brought by the caucus will help.
In last month's elections, Democrats picked up four new statewide offices and a seat in each house of the Legislature, although the party didn't manage to wrest any of three congressional seats from Republican hands.
"A lot of people in Nevada are getting a chance to be involved in national politics that have never been before," Reid said.
For example, Reid said, national political operatives have been contacting two of his sons. "Now, when people go to Las Vegas, they call my son Rory," a Clark County commissioner. "When they go to Reno, they call my son Leif," a lawyer, Reid said. "We'll have presidential debates here. I think that's good for Nevada."
The early caucus also will force Democratic candidates to broaden their message to include issues important to most Western states generally: public lands, water, environmental issues, renewable energy. And candidates will have to address a few issues specific to Nevada: gold mining, nuclear waste disposal, and gaming and tourism.
"Nevada will focus a spotlight on tourism," Reid said. "We're one of the top two or three destinations in the world, but you take any state, it's got some tourism. And yet, since the Reagan years, we (the federal government) spend no money trying to get tourists to come to America."
Liberal blogger Hugh Jackson, proprietor of the Las Vegas Gleaner site and a contributor to the online publication Nevada Today, noted that, with Reid becoming majority leader and Nevada getting the early caucus, the senior senator's clout has increased exponentially. Reid has promised to remain neutral during the caucus, but there's no question candidates will be currying his favor both in the Senate and in Nevada.
Jackson, like Reid, predicted the new caucus would turn Nevada blue.
"More people are going to register as Democrats. More people are going to vote, especially in Clark County. It'll enhance the party's performance and build the organization and structure," Jackson said.
WHY NEVADA?
The hope of turning a red state blue is one of the reasons Democratic leaders have said they chose Nevada from among several states vying for an early caucus. With the population of the American Southwest booming and its demographics changing, even as the Rust Belt states age and empty out, Democrats see states such as Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico as key to future national victories.
In choosing Nevada for the early caucus, the party cited the state's racial diversity and strong labor presence.
"I've always felt that the way we selected the president has been unfair," Reid said. "Iowa has little diversity; New Hampshire has no people. But those two states pretty much determined who was going to be running for president."
Reid said he has been campaigning to diversify the early nominating rounds for about 15 years, an effort that finally paid off after the 2004 election, when the Democratic National Committee came around to the idea that the process needed changing.
Reid denied that the DNC's decision to change the process after losing in 2004 was because of regret over nominating John Kerry, a candidate whose selection many Democrats now look back on as a mistake. Iowa and New Hampshire voters apparently went for Kerry because they thought he would be more appealing to the general electorate than his rivals, especially Howard Dean.
Dean now chairs the DNC and has refocused the party on a so-called 50-state strategy that emphasizes having a Democratic presence and campaign throughout the country, even in Republican strongholds.
"John Kerry is not the reason for this (the caucus shake-up), but Governor Dean is," Reid said. "He knows what a lousy process we had. He was way ahead, and suddenly things went bad."
DNC spokesman Luis Miranda took the same tack. "This change is in line with Chairman Howard Dean's 50-state strategy," he said. "The idea is to make sure we have a nominating process that truly encapsulates the American people."
Iowa, according to Census figures, is 94 percent white, 3 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black. New Hampshire is 96 percent white, 2 percent Hispanic and 1 percent black.
Nevada, by contrast, is 75 percent white, 20 percent Hispanic, 7 percent black, 5 percent Asian and 1 percent American Indian. South Carolina -- the other new early nominating state, and also chosen for its diversity -- is 67 percent white, 30 percent black and 2 percent Hispanic.
The idea is that by vetting presidential candidates with minorities, laborers, and voters concerned with Western issues, the resulting nominee will be more globally appealing than one whose early test consisted only of the opinions of what Jackson referred to as "snowbound farmers."
"In the future, nobody can just slip by in Iowa and New Hampshire and say they've won," Reid said. "They have to go to Nevada and South Carolina, too."
NAYSAYERS
The loudest criticism of the change has come from New Hampshire, where some columnists and pundits have caricatured Nevada as a land of gambling and prostitutes that threatens to cheapen the political process. The Granite State, it seemed, was not happy to have its place in line taken by the Silver State.
Reid dismissed those voices: "It's just jealousy."
Gittell, the New Hampshire professor, said it was really fear. Gittell wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post in August arguing that New Hampshire still would have plenty of influence in the election process.
Since Nevada was first selected, the New Hampshire doubters have quieted somewhat as candidates have continued to visit New Hampshire. "The fear was that candidates wouldn't visit as much or New Hampshire wouldn't get the same amount of media attention," he said. "But that hasn't happened, and it won't happen. New Hampshire is still the first-in-the-nation primary state."
Earlier this month, rising Democratic star Barack Obama visited New Hampshire and drew capacity crowds numbering in the hundreds. "Evan Bayh came the same weekend and had trouble filling a living room, and he decided maybe this wasn't the year to run," Gittell said.
Bayh subsequently announced he was dropping out of consideration, illustrating the way taking voters' temperature in New Hampshire continues to be a bellwether for candidates.
Another form of criticism comes from those who say the presidential selection process is fatally flawed, and adding more states to the early going only makes it worse.
"The whole system is insane, and it's becoming more insane every four years," said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, who is writing a book arguing that the U.S. Constitution should be amended to include the presidential selection process, including reforming the nomination process and changing the way the Electoral College works.
Sabato said the nominating process is too "front-loaded" and quick, with states racing to be first to choose, the result being that "the whole contest on both sides will be over by the end of February, or maybe even early February, and the parties are going to be stuck with someone, with no chance to reconsider."
Kerry was a good example, Sabato said. "He seemed to be good -- he was a war hero, he'd served in Vietnam, he could debate Bush on national security," he said. But the voters who picked him "didn't know John Kerry. They didn't know that he wasn't a very attractive candidate."
The basic problem of the front-loaded process will not be solved or substantially affected by adding Nevada and South Carolina, Sabato maintained.
A less abstract knock on the early Nevada caucus comes from those who wonder whether the state can pull it off.
Critics point out that the 2004 Nevada Democratic caucus was so disorganized that the Clark County gathering had to be held on a football field when more people showed up than were expected.
But Searer said there was no chance the party would blow it this time. The caucus in "2008 is not going to look anything like 2004," she said. "We're talking about hundreds of caucus sites, not just one per county."
With the DNC voting every election cycle on the schedule, Nevada Democrats will have to prove they can handle their new assignment or risk having it taken away, she said.
"We don't know if the DNC is going to try this for one or two or 10 cycles to see if it works," she said. "It's incumbent on us to show that we can do it."
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Questions and answers about the early Nevada Democratic presidential caucus:
Q: What is a caucus, and how is it different from a primary?
A: A caucus is a meeting that takes place in person. Participants discuss their views before dividing into camps. A primary is a traditional election in which secret ballots are individually cast by qualified voters.
Q: Who can participate?
A: Any registered Democrat will be allowed to participate in the Nevada caucus. However, the state party is considering setting a deadline for party registration, possibly Dec. 31, 2007, in order to make it easier to keep track of voter lists and prevent fraud.
Q: When will it be held?
A: Nevada's Democratic caucus is scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008. It will come between the Iowa caucus (Jan. 14) and the New Hampshire primary (Jan. 22). South Carolina also was moved up in the Democrats' schedule and is to hold a primary on Jan. 29. According to Democratic Party bylaws, the rest of the states must hold their selection processes between Feb. 5 and June 5.
Q: Where will it be held?
A: Nevada Democrats will meet at as many as 1,000 sites throughout the state. Each site will report its votes to a central headquarters, which will tabulate results.
Q: How does the selection process work?
A: The format hasn't been finalized, but here's how party officials expect it will go: At an individual caucus site, registered Nevada Democrats from a few nearby precincts will meet, probably in midmorning, and start talking about the candidates. This process of conversation and consensus-building is key to the caucus process. The participants then will divide into groups based on who they support. After a head count, any candidates who receive less than 15 percent are disqualified, and their supporters must pick a different candidate. Once all participants are committed to candidates who each have 15 percent or more, the results are phoned in to the state headquarters, which tabulates all the results to come up with the final vote.
Q: Who pays for it?
A: The caucus is conducted and paid for entirely by the Democratic Party. State government has no oversight or involvement in the process. The party estimates the caucus will cost $1 million to $2 million, which it hopes to raise from donors.
