I will keep this short so I can get out this morning and continue my work here.
I arrived in North Charleston late Monday. Lauren and John, who are working on the campaign in Berkeley county north of here, obliged my request to knock on doors by assigning me to the town of Goose Creek, where I spent my first day. Canvassing a predominantly African-American neighborhood I found strong backing for Barack Obama. The Clintons have succeeded is sowing some doubt, however, revealed by the indecision of some voters who had previously indicated support. But many previously undecided or not yet identified voters signaled they are going to vote for Obama. I see my task here as ensuring the voters do not take an Obama victory for granted and to Get Out The Vote.
Republicans will be lucky if they can figure out where to caucus tomorrow. First, as reported in the Reno Gazette-Journal, thousands of Republicans received postcards from the state party with incorrect caucus locations. Then, the state party's web site directed people to he wrong location until it was fixed Wednesday night.
Next, it looks like the party is unclear on its rules, changing its mind a couple times on whether Republicans not on their list tomorrow can sign an affidavit attesting they are appropriately registered with the party.
Half of Carson City's Republicans just had their caucus location moved. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, with all the problems they're having, and with the lack of enthusiasm for the Republican field and the lack of Republican candidates contesting the caucus, they're going to have an embarrassingly low turnout.
UPDATE II: John Edwards has already left Nevada. He got on a plane for Oklahoma yesterday, probably his strongest February 5th state. But I'll guess if he's already left that they're not expecting much to celebrate today.
UPDATE III:Weather forecast for Nevada today: Sunny, relatively warm, high of 48 degrees.
Before we all get carried away watching the results come in from Nevada, I was wondering about a more fundamental question about the nominating process that the Las Vegas Gleaner raised yesterday.
The hope was that bringing the candidates to Nevada would encourage them to talk about issues addressing Western states and Latinos. This never really happened. Unlike in Iowa, where candidates unleashed elaborate ethanol production schemes and brushed up on their knowledge of agricultural issues like hog farming, there was never really an opportunity to do the same in Nevada. Candidates instead came to Nevada with the programs and framed candidacies that had carried them through other states.
No one took up grazing or water rights, the unsustainable growth of Las Vegas (as the Gleaner points out), mining regulations (at least not recently), gambling restrictions, or problems of the Native American community --- or at least there was no real discussion of them. This was in part because Western candidates like Bill Richardson never gained traction here. The party establishment locked in early for Clinton to try to give her a win but may have damaged the process that might have come out of it.
And no one addressed the issues of Latino voters in a real way aside from recording some ads in Spanish. The immigration debate, which had burned so hotly elsewhere, barely came up this week. As the Gleaner points out, there was no discussion of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. He supposes that the immigration failed to come up for lack of disagreement between the candidates.
It may also be due to the fact that Latino voters have yet to exercise their voting rights in a powerful way, yet to vote in proportion to their population --- a trend that today might change, leading them to become a greater voice in political discussions.
The only real exception was Yucca mountain, on which there was no disagreement, despite all of Clinton's attempts to cast doubts on Obama's support from an Illinois nuclear power corporation (while not raising her own similar stated agnosticism about nuclear power). But this wasn't so much a conversation as a tiresome repetition of a talking point.
Last weekend, tourists in Las Vegas were greeted by the sight of Ron Paul supporters parading down the Strip, chanting:
We’re not just the Internet. We’re flesh and blood.
Could this serve as the motto of the 2008 campaign? The election when online social networks proved that they exist, by out-fundraising traditional party elites, by helping create surging turnout by consituencies long dismissed by party insiders, and by spawning effective grassroots organizing across the country on an unprecendented scale.
Just before the Iowa caucus, the Clinton campaign tried to spin an impending loss in Iowa as the result of illegitimate voting by college students. On the stump, Bill Clinton sounded ominous tones about college students pretending to be Iowan for a day and then voting again in their home state primaries.
The results however were disastrous. Confusion reigned among Clinton campaign volunteers about whether or not they should be encouraging Iowa college students from out of state to caucus.
In the end, the Clinton campaign ended up suppressing no one's vote but their own, losing the Iowa youth vote by 45 percentage points --- 11% to 56% --- in an election where young people tripled to make up 22% of caucus-goers.
Now, on the eve of the Nevada caucus, the Clinton campaign is again betting against voter turnout, making encouraging statements about a lawsuit that would have shut down nine caucus locations and disenfranchised tens of thousands of shifts workers just hours before the caucus --- with little chance to make other plans to participate.
And again, their own campaign seems confused by the mixed messages.
I hadn't yet watched this video, which is extraordinary. Bill Clinton got into a verbal tussle with a reporter over the lawsuit, while staffers try to pull him away from the event. Already 125,000 views on YouTube:
On DailyKos, obamamama wrote an emotional diary titled "I Feel Like I'm Going Through A Divorce" that gets at how a lot of us feel about the transformation of Bill Clinton in this race and our sudden estrangement from him. It hasn't been pretty:
The last few weeks have made me see Bill and Hillary as the people that I always swore they were not. It is really, really painful for me, and I feel riven. I'm giving up something that was really important to me, but it's just gone. It went away. So I've taken down the life-sized cardboard cutout of Bill with his saxophone that I've carted to three houses, and I've disposed of the campaign buttons and even the signed photos. I can't explain how it feels.
I feel betrayed and disrespected and taken advantage of. I feel cheated and I feel stupid. These people are almost the cartoon characters of Limbaugh and O'Reilly. I know that's over the top, but so are my emotions right now. They have no shame.
It kind of reminds you of the aging professional athlete who just doesn't realize when his time is up. I wonder if the Clintons undertook one election too many and are risking their legacy by running again.
Regardless, the lawsuit was thrown out today in federal court, leaving decisions about the voting process to the Nevada Democratic party, which set up the at-large caucus locations. The lawsuit would have unceremoniously shut down the voting places just days before the election and left tens of thousands suddenly without a place to vote and little chance to make other plans.
The national DNC has stepped into the dispute over at-large precincts in Nevada, siding with the Culinary Union in favor of allowing casino workers to vote at their workplaces at the special caucus locations set up for them six months ago by the Nevada Democratic party.
Yesterday, the DNC filed a legal brief supporting the side of the Culinary Union and the Nevada Democratic party, arguing that the case has national import for the delegate selection process.
This perhaps shouldn't be seen as all too surprising and shouldn't necessarily be seen as a gesture of support from Howard Dean towards Obama. The defendent in the case is, after all, actually the Nevada Democratic party. In this case, Clinton supporters were actually suing their own state party to close polling places. It's not hard to see how the national party has an interest in stepping in.
The Obama campaign has actually been very successful in some of these voting spats with the Clinton campaign in getting national, impartial organizations involved. In the case of the wrangling over student voters in Iowa, youth vote organizations like Rock the Vote, Young Voter PAC, and Iowa PIRG stepped in. It's been a very successful tactic for them in the past.
In other Nevada news, Jack Carter has endorsed Obama. Carter was the 2006 Democratic nominee for Senate from Nevada, is the son of the former president, and was until now a Biden supporter.
Via Inside Nevada Politics, Clinton was asked if she supported the lawsuit filed to prevent casino employees from voting at their workplace as part of nine at-large precincts the Nevada Democratic party set up to try to enfranchise as many people as possible:
Asked about the lawsuit Clinton said:
"I know about the lawsuit. I hope it can be resolved by the courts and by the state party. Obviously, we want as many people as possible to participate."
In a later interview, I asked Clinton again about the lawsuit. She repeated her criticism of the caucus process, that it leaves too many people out and said she wants as many people as possible to participate. Does she support the lawsuit?
"I have no opinion on the lawsuit."
Does she have an opinion on the at-large precincts as a way to make the process more fair?
"I don't. I just don't know."
In other words, she wants as many people to participate, she's just not sure about some people and isn't willing to take a stand for expanding the number of people able to participate if it could potentially harm her campaign.
Is anyone having flashbacks to the way her campaign handled the youth vote in Iowa?
They wouldn't really go there, would they? AFSCME officials questioned whether culinary workers are even citizens:
Union officials backing Mrs. Clinton note that many members of the culinary local are not American citizens and therefore cannot participate in the caucuses.
What a difference a day makes. The inter-union fighting sparked by the lawsuit from a teacher's union over at-large precincts in Nevada casinos has boiled over even further, with Nevada SEIU and the Culinary Union questioning some of AFSCME's tactics in the state.
Nevada-based blogger desmoulins reports on the latest from Nevada. First, yesterday the Clinton campaign set up a conference call for casino executives challenging Obama's record on gaming from the Illinois state senate. More from the Chicago Tribune:
"It seems a little hypocritical," said Jan Jones, a Clinton supporter who is a former Las Vegas mayor and is now a senior vice president for casino giant Harrah's Entertainment. "It certainly makes me question the endorsement. You're endorsing a candidate who speaks ill of their industry. I think that's something the employees would want to know."
But an Obama spokeswoman said the Clinton campaign was "again distorting Barack Obama's record. "
"Obama has said that Nevada is a model for how states should regulate the gaming industry and he applauds the success of the state in harnessing gaming as an engine of economic growth while cracking down on illegal activities," said spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
I guess if you can't be on the side of union workers, you might as well be on the side of, um, casino executives?
desmoulins described a recent negative mailer from the Clinton campaign:
I'll tell you about a mailer that arrived from the Clinton campaign today. It contrasted Clinton's proposed middle-class tax cut with Obama's proposal to raise the cap on social security taxes -- in terms that were, to me, shocking. It referred to her proposal to "let taxpayers keep more of their own money" and Obama's "trillion-dollar tax increase on the middle class."
Not only is it, to me, unclear why a Democrat would so closely replicate language used by republicans, but Bill Clinton in 1992 attacked his primary opponent (Paul Tsongas) along the same lines and offered in contrast his middle-class tax cut, then abandoned it once in office when Alan Greenspan came out against it.
The last time I saw a Democrat use an anti-tax message in a primary here, it came from County Commissioner Myrna Williams in 2006 against Chris Guinchigliani, who went on to defeat her and is currently a Clinton campaign state co-chair.
desmoulins also has more on the transparent Clinton effort to try to stop workplace voting. You can check that out here.
UPDATE: The Nevada blog Las Vegas Gleaner notes that Hannah's donated at least $50,000 to the Republican candidate for governor in 2006. With much sarcasm:
So to recap. Prominent personalities from deep in the bowels of the powerful corporate gambling infrastructure, renowned locally for its deep concern for an open and fair political process that gives everyone a voice no matter what their income, point of view or socioeconomic status, would like all the people who are voting in a Democratic caucus to know that the world's biggest gambling corporations prefer Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Okeydoke. Noted.
First, they tried everything to discourage students from participating in Iowa. Next, they disparaged same-day registration, an election reform that has led to surging voter participation in the states where it's been enacted. And now, they're involved in suing to ensure that union workers aren't able to caucus.
Nice.
The Nevada Democratic Party, as I wrote about yesterday, decided to set up a series of at-large caucus meetings at nine of the large casinos in Las Vegas, so that workers, a powerful force in Nevada Democratic politics, would be able to participate in the caucus.
The proposal was an admirable attempt to try to enfranchise as many voters as possible. "The at-large precincts are being established because thousands of hotel workers cannot leave work to participate in the midday caucuses in their home precincts."
Employers even agreed to grant the workers the time off to attend the caucus, and no one opposed the decision... until the Culinary Workers Union endorsed Obama for president. Then the knives came out.
The polls tell the story. People are hurting in their pocketbooks and becoming complacent about the war as the visible toll of violence in Iraq has subsided. Never to let such an opportunity escape, Hillary Clinton has rolled out an ambitious economic package that she hopes will resonate in the next set of caucuses and primaries to restore her electoral edge. The immediate and most prominent part of her package is the three month moratorium on foreclosures, a doubtful proposition barring voluntary compliance. This makes Hillary the shining knight on the white horse. Clever that, resurrecting Bill Clinton's old war cry: "It's the economy, stupid".
The population was just under 2.5 million --- shockingly, this represented a 24.9% growth over the year 2000, more than four times the population growth rate of the US as a whole. Nevada is today only slightly smaller than Iowa.
Perhaps due to this rapid growth, Nevada also has a young population. In 2005, the median age was only 35, compared to a median age in Iowa in 2005 of 38.5. The population of people 18 years and younger is 25%, above the national average and higher than Iowa, while the population over 65 is only 11%.
In 2006, more than a quarter of Nevada's population was Hispanic, 23% spoke a language other than English at home, and close to 8% of the population was African-American, making Nevada a far more diverse state.
And the youth vote (18-29 years old) has been on the move in Nevada. In 2004, youth participation in the presidential election surged ten points to 43%. Given that the youth vote tripled in Iowa and doubled in New Hampshire, and many of the upcoming states have never seen such a competitive primary, it's fair to say that the youth vote is likely surge again.
I'll be looking into the student vote in Nevada, which college and universities are in session, the number of Students for Barack Obama chapters in the state (by my count, there are at least six college and community chapters and nearly forty high school chapters.)
Many blame Democrats' failure to gain ground in places like Elko for the party's statewide losses. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid has said the Democrats' 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry, would have won the state had he spent more time campaigning outside the urban centers of Reno and Las Vegas. Kerry lost Nevada by 2 percentage points. Source
Democratic candidates for president have started venturing out of Reno and Las Vegas in preparation for Nevada's early caucus currently scheduled for January 19th, five days after Iowa's caucus and three days before New Hampshire's primary. They're starting to show that they'll go just about anywhere to find Democratic caucus voters. This bodes well not just for the caucus but for Democratic general election chances in Nevada.
Clinton and Obama will face off next in Nevada on January 19th. Unlike in Iowa, where the caucus was held on a weeknight, the Nevada caucus will actually be held on a Saturday morning, beginning at 11 am.
There are seventeen hundred precincts in Nevada, of which 70% or one thousand precincts are in Las Vegas, which is in Clark County --- so the city plays an outsized role in winning the caucus. As in Iowa though, since representation is proportional by delegate count instead of popular vote, no one can afford to ignore rural Nevada, hence Obama's network of eleven campaign field offices across the state, including one in Elko, Nevada. The campaign has five offices in the Las Vegas-Henderson area alone.
Many on Obama's Iowa caucus organizing team have already moved to Nevada for the duration, including Iowa state director Paul Tewes. They hope to replicate Obama's phenomenal Iowa GOTC (Get out the Caucus) efforts. The Obama campaign also plans to focus on the six February 5th states that hold caucuses, including Kansas, Alaska, and Minnesota. The caucus format allows Obama's superior grassroots organizing to shine.
Astonishingly, the Obama campaign has already recruits precinct captains in 95% of Nevada precincts and will have the volunteer manpower to contact not just registered Democrats but independents and young people as well.
By now you know how it turned out. Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, getting 2.6% more votes than Obama. It is certainly true that her campaign very successfully mobilized support from women of all ages to deliver a narrow winning margin. But to understand how close the outcome was, consider that Clinton and Obama both took the same number of delegates, 9 each (Edwards won 4). And Obama, with 3 of 5 of the state's superdelegates (Dem officials), has effectively "won" the NH delegate count.
In my opinion, what really happened Tuesday is that a "perfect storm" of expectations-driven behavior, combined with the sympathy generated in the closing days by the debate and Hillary's highly publicized weeping, gave her the narrow win. Obama "lost" the New Hampshire primary to the general expectation of a large win following Iowa. Public opinion polls on the last day before the primary had Obama ahead by 10-13%. This expectation stimulated voter behavior, particularly among Undeclared (independent) cross-over voters and anti-Hillary Democrats, that would probably have been very different if the polls had been able to convey the degree to which the race had narrowed by Tuesday.
I had not one, but two days to figure out the answer to the question with which I ended my last post: "Will tomorrow's outing reinforce our impression that we had actually registered the "momentum" everyone said follows an early state win?" We continued knocking on doors on Sunday and Monday, reaching almost all of the voters on our list for the area we were assigned, which had not been visited by any campaign this season.
Our results provide a consistent answer: Yes! Obama is enjoying a measurable momentum. Our sample is of course too limited to know if it will be enought to score a decisive win in NH. There are still a lot of undecided voters, and there is ample support for other Democratic candidates. But there is a clear willingness of voters to entertain an Obama presidency, and they are far more positive about his candidacy than in any of my previous canvasses since May. We'll know tomorrow. But from what we heard from the Undeclared (independents) and Republicans, he is in great shape here for the general election if he becomes the Democratic nominee.
I have no doubt that a win here will boost Obama further in the South Carolina primary. But what about Nevada? The answer to that question is: it all depends on how successful we are in the ground game there.
On On the eve of the Iowa caucus, we may be on the verge of a major transformation. A transformation of the Obama campaign into the "Obama Movement".
I don't just mean that figuratively either. Sure, you've seen some evidence of this already if you have spent any time in the field in Iowa, NH, NV or SC. But a win in Iowa, or even a reasonably good showing, will build momentum and "move" many undecided voters elsewhere to support Barack Obama. And that will happen quickly and be reflected in polls on a national scale. But there is something larger and more tangible that is also about to become apparentl, and that will be the evidence of a nationwide physical movement.
The end of the Iowa portion of this campaign, and the New Hampshire campaign in another 5 days should immediately result in the transfer of hundreds of staff from these early states to Nevada and South Carolina. The logistical planning is already underway, with transit accomodations being arranged for the caravan of staffers who will be heading southward in the coming days.
There are currently also hundresds, if not thousands of volunteers (we probably will not be told the actual numbers until later in the month) in Iowa. And a large number are in or on their way to New Hampshire (I leave for Keene NH first thing in the morning and will stay until after the January 8 votes are counted). Once the contests in these two states are over, others have committed to move into the other two early states. And the February 5 states are already well-organized, with the enthusiastic involvement of thousands of local volunteers across the country. Early state success will boost such activity significantly.
So it should become clear in the coming days that our campaign has transformed itself into a Movement, fueled by the energy of thousands of mobilized people, many engaged politically for the first time in their lives. The Obama Movement is the name of something that is not just about gaining the nomination, and not just about winning the election. It is about harnassing the energy of the American community to transform its politics, to regain control of the Government, and to implement Change.
