Nevada gets its 15 minutes of presidential campaign fame

LAS VEGAS - Nevada spent last year in the shadows of politically sexier early primary states. It was leapfrogged, flown over, breezed through and regularly forgotten by the pundits.

Nevada didn't get Oprah.

Yet with the presidential race surprisingly unsettled, the state is getting its 15 minutes.

Its Saturday caucus has drawn the Democratic race West to a diverse electorate and unfamiliar primary territory. Nevada voters have never weighed in this early in the race and rarely drawn candidates' attention.

Few Republicans dared to tread into the unknown and instead focused on the primary in Michigan and bellwether South Carolina. No major GOP candidate has stepped foot in the state for two months.

But for Democrats, Nevada has become a momentum-builder to Feb. 5, when hundreds of delegates will be awarded by voters in states with significant minority populations. Nevada, with its sizable blocs of Hispanic, union and urban voters, is seen as an early indicator of where the race is headed.

It's also become a toss-up.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's firm support among party activists was bolstered by her surprise win in New Hampshire. But Barack Obama answered with an endorsement from the state's largest labor group, the political powerful Culinary Workers Union, Local 226. A recent poll showed Edwards' support appeared to be growing.

Clinton led every poll taken last year by solid margins. But this week a new survey by the Reno Gazette-Journal shows the three top Democratic presidential candidates in a dead heat - Obama with 32 percent, Hillary Clinton with 30 percent and John Edwards with 27 percent. The poll's margin of error was 4.5 percentage points.

Democrats' campaign offices are packed with refugee field workers from Iowa and New Hampshire. An Obama campaign phone bank has been expanded into a trailer in the parking lot. New Clinton campaign staffers are wearing name tags. The Edwards campaigns' new additions tripled its staff.

Obama is expected to spend nearly as much time in the state this week than he did in all of 2007.

Clinton, the first on the ground after New Hampshire, set the tone.

The New York senator went straight to a heavily Culinary neighborhood and found several members who said they would break with the 60,000-member union to support her.

Message received: She'll concede nothing.

The fight over labor has dominated the Nevada campaign partly because its proven organizing heft is one of the few tested elements in the contest.

Party officials are hoping 10 percent of the state's registered Democrats turn out, about 40,000 people. Four years ago, party officials were pleased when they set a caucus turnout record with 9,000.

Candidates' statewide organizations have been largely modeled on the campaigns' strategies in other early states. Clinton has the support of the Democratic establishment thanks to her state chairman, Sen. Harry Reid's son, Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid.

She lined up the bold-faced names in each demographic group, particularly in the Hispanic community, nearly 25 percent of the population. She went after regular party activists, women and hordes of retirees with time to work the phones.

Edwards locked down some early union support, but wrestled hard and lost when he needed it most. Along with the Culinary, the Nevada chapter of the Service Employees International Union, aligned with Obama after New Hampshire. The Edwards campaign has focused on a badly needed win in South Carolina and has not rushed to match Obama and Clinton's stepped-up campaigns in the state.

Before Obama's labor infusion, his Nevada campaign was fueled by new voters, blacks and scores of out-of-state canvassers from California and Arizona.

His campaign courted the massive work force on the Las Vegas Strip, reaching out to housekeepers, waitresses and bellhops in casino employee break rooms and cafeterias.

The caucus rules are tailored to accommodate Culinary's workers. Nine "at-large" precincts in hotel-casinos will allow Strip shift workers to caucus near their jobs without returning home to their neighborhood precincts. The Strip precincts prompted a federal court lawsuit taking issue with the number of delegates they control. It is scheduled to be heard Thursday.

The rules were unanimously approved by the state Democratic party last March and ratified by the Democratic National Committee in August.

But last Friday, six Democrats and a teachers union, which has ties to the Clinton campaign, sued to shut the sites on grounds they allocate too many delegates to one group. Of roughly 10,000 delegates to Nevada's presidential nominating convention, more than 700 could be selected at casino caucuses, depending upon turnout, which could make them more valuable than some sparsely populated Nevada counties, the lawsuit said. Four plaintiffs are on the committee that approved the sites.

The DNC petitioned to join the suit on behalf of the state party Tuesday.

The Clinton campaign has denied any involvement in the lawsuit, but Obama noted it was filed two days after he was endorsed by the union.

The Illinois senator drew cheers at a Culinary Union event Sunday when he said the rules were fine until the union decided, "I'm going to support the guy who's standing with the working people instead of the big shots."

By Monday, Bill Clinton was defending the lawsuit. "I think the rules ought to be the same for everybody," the former president told high school students near Las Vegas.

The Culinary Union circulated a less subtle message on fliers to members: "Backers of Hillary Clinton are suing in court to take away our right to vote in the caucus." It's airing the same message in Spanish-language radio ads.

Obama has tripled his television advertising buy and added a new commercials touting his union endorsements. Clinton's ads have highlighted her promise to close the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, one of the few local issues to bubble up.

Republican Ron Paul, a natural fit among some in libertarian Nevada, is the only other candidate on television.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also has made a play here among the state's politically active Mormon community.

But polls show Nevada Republicans are split. The Research 2000 poll for the Gazette-Journal showed John McCain at 22 percent, Rudy Giuliani, 18 percent, Mike Huckabee with 16 percent and Romney at 15 percent.

While Las Vegas and Reno has received the most attention, candidates haven't ignored Nevada's "cow counties." Obama and Clinton plan trips to Elko, a small ranching and mining community in the northeast corner of the state.

The trips are part of an effort to scoop up voters left without a candidate when New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson quit the race. A fellow Westerner, Richardson had courted the cowboy boot-wearing Democrats there.

His early departure also left a gap in the Hispanic community in Las Vegas, one which Clinton and Obama are rushing trying to fill.

Clinton has pitched her work for children and education, along with economic stimulus and home foreclosure plans that appeal to a community feeling the pain of the housing slump.

Obama has used relied on his Culinary connection. Nearly half the union is immigrant. It's been working its members for two months, prompting signs that this 24-hour town may tire early of all the political attention.

One graveyard shift worker last week posted this pre-emptive message to union canvassers outside a home: "Yes! We are with the caucusing with the Culinary ... Please do not knock (sleeping)."