Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

Republican support in rural communities remains strong as rural voters’ influence statewide is declining

Once upon a time — say, way back in 2004 — overwhelming Republican Party support in rural Nevada offset the Democratic advantage in densely-populated Clark County. Swing county Washoe, Nevada’s second most populous, often determined who won statewide campaigns. John Kerry won Clark County in 2004 by a less-than comfortable 5-point margin while George W. Bush won every other county in the state — Washoe by 4 points and rural counties by up to a 4-to-1 margin.

Fast-forward to 2008. Barack Obama lost the rural counties (but had a better showing than Kerry), improved his margins in Clark County, and flipped Washoe. Postgame analysis is far from over in the state, but one early question is emerging: Do the rurals still matter?

Obama fought hard for the rural counties, visiting Elko three times and drawing out the few liberals hiding in the shadows. John McCain, who finished third in Nevada’s Republican caucuses, wasn’t helped by lukewarm support among conservatives in the state, many of whom were more anti-Obama than pro-McCain. Most expected the rurals to play their usual role in helping determine who would win the state’s five electoral votes, but the Las Vegas Sun reports that “even if Obama had not gotten a single vote in the 14 counties outside Clark, Washoe and Carson City, and even if all of his votes had gone to McCain instead, he still would have carried the state.”

“I said in 2004, this may very well be the last statewide election where rurals can leverage the vote,” Elko Republican Party Chairman Reece Keener told the Sun. “We just don’t have the pull that we once did.”

In a close election, every state and every voter matters. Had Kerry won Nevada, he would have won the White House. Given Obama’s electoral vote drubbing of McCain, the Democrat didn’t need to win Nevada (or Colorado or New Mexico.) Similarly, his 12-point victory in Nevada meant he didn’t need the rurals any more than he needed any other specific subset of voters.

But by 2012 (or even the 2010 midterm elections, when the governorship, one Senate seat, and all the House seats are up for grabs), who’s to say Nevada Latinos will vote as overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates or at all? Maybe the slim voter registration edge enjoyed by Democrats in Washoe will reverse itself or turnout in Clark County will fall from the heights seen this year.

If the blue wave continue across Nevada, the rurals likely won’t matter in statewide campaigns as witnessed this year. But on a local level, the gun-loving ranchers and miners in rural communities will continue to dominate and could resist shifting blue themselves. It could all depend on how the new Democrats in power choose to govern.

“When we start to see some of the new programs coming out of Washington, it’s going to really galvanize things for us,” Keener said in the Sun.

Or maybe the blue waters will wash across the rural counties, too.

“When people see we are not radicals who shut down mines and take away their guns and we go out and fix the economy, things switch,” Lance Whitney, chairman of Elko’s Democratic Party told the Sun. “People’s minds switch.”