Nevada: Republicans switch, fatten Dems’ numbers

Perhaps the biggest winner in Saturday’s caucus will be the state Democratic Party. Judging from observations by Sun reporters at precincts across the state, many voters who had been registered as independents or Republicans declared themselves Democrats.

Caucuses are intended to enrich political parties in advance of general elections. Despite the intramural elbow-throwing among the competing Democratic campaigns, Saturday’s caucus may embolden the state party as it heads into the national election in November.

In Republican-rich Elko, 13 people of 76 in one downtown precinct changed their party affiliation from Republican to Democrat before the caucus, as party rules allow. Other caucusgoers said they’d switched parties before Saturday.

In a precinct in an older Las Vegas neighborhood, 16 of 51 people registered as Democrats on Saturday in order to caucus. Many of them had been Republicans.

And at a school near Tropicana Avenue and Pecos Road, 23 Republicans switched their affiliation to caucus as Democrats, which officials said caused them to run out of ballots and registration forms.

To be sure, this is all anecdotal. The number of people who registered as Democrats on Saturday probably won’t be known for weeks, party officials said. New registrants had to fill out paper forms, which will be sent to county registrars.

But many Republican leaders took notice of what the Democratic Party had created.

“Whichever Republican nominee survives will have to take a hard look at what Democrats accomplished in the last 12 months, and will have to put a lot of resources on the ground here,” said Robert Uithoven, a veteran Republican consultant.

Whether newly registered Democrats reflect a one-day spike or will remain loyal to the party is the next question. Some Republicans think that if Clinton is the nominee, lost party members might return to the fold.

“If we have a good Republican candidate, the pendulum swings,” said Pete Ernaut, chairman of the Nevada Republican caucus. “If Hillary is the nominee, the chances of keeping crossover registration is much less likely.”

The Republican caucus, organized much later than the Democrats’ and overshadowed by South Carolina’s GOP primary Saturday, also exceeded projections, he pointed out.

Still, all three major Democratic candidates made last-minute pushes in previously rock-solid Republican counties.

Barack Obama, in particular, targeted Elko, in a county where 24 percent of voters were registered Democrats. In August, 900 people turned out to hear him speak; last week he drew about 1,300 people, filling a high school gymnasium.

Among his supporters: former Republican Rita Todd, a 50-year-old caregiver who said she’d stick with the party and support Clinton should she win the party nomination in Denver.

This is an incredibly, incredibly insidious strategy.

The two ‘caucuses’ in Nevada had only two things in common: 1. They took place in Nevada. 2. They took place yesterday.

Otherwise, the rules and purposes of the events were so different they can barely be compared in the same conversation. Take a few that I noticed firsthand.

(Observant Jews, go screw yourself. The vote was held on Saturday to allow the largest number of teachers union members to attend.)

1. The GOP had to vote at 9am on Saturday. And there was 45 minutes allocated for the GOP to get all their work done. The demoncrat party attendees used the same polling places as the GOP (in addition to the ‘super caucus sites’ on the Strip) and they were supposed to start setting up at 10am for their 11am caucus for which they were going to get three hours to do their business. Because the GOP caucus was too confusing for the party officials, it ran a little longer than 9:45am so the democrats announced immediately that they would need to start later and they ‘may need’ more than the three hours they were alloted. Basically, they would keep the caucus open as long as it was going to take to get the vote counts they needed.

2. In the GOP caucus, there was one round of voting and no do-overs. No candidates allowed or lawyers for campaigns. On the demoncrat side, not only could the candidates show up at the caucus sites but they could have their lawyers crawling over everything arguing about things in real time. But the media was barred by the demoncrats.

3. Demoncrats (Harry Reid, DNC, Clinton lawyers) decided last year that Nevada would move up in the primaries to take advantage of the growing union membership (the only one in the US and growing with no credit to the unions themselves) and the 20% latino population in Nevada. The primary was designed specifically for union members and latinos (which are also mostly union members in the eyes of demoncrats).

4. Knowing that The Hillary was going to be running, the DNC bosses elected to make Nevada a caucus. The causus allows the special interests to herd their ‘supporters’ into a room where they can physically enforce party line voting. In this case, the Culinary Union on the Strip bought red Tshirts for their members with OBAMA on it in big letters to make it imtimidatingly obvious that you were supposed to be standing in the Obama line when the party officials called for a vote.

Unions are virtually the entire base of the demoncrats in Las Vegas. There are about 200,000 union members in the Las Vegas area (teachers, hotel workers, construction, etc). The caucuses were chosen because the unions typically lose about 40% of their members who choose to vote against the ‘endorsed’ candidate and the union bosses figured they could get a much higher compliance rate if they could get their people all in the same room and count them by hand. (Unions hate the idea of secret ballot like Republicans hate the idea of government run health care. Doing away with secret voting is gospel for union bosses.)

5. Party registration rules were changed just for these caucuses to require that independents change their registrations to actually join a party if they wanted to vote. Like most states, independents are a large chunk of the Nevada population and a faster growing registration group than demoncrats. The DNC (Reid, Clinton, Dean) figured that they would flush out the liberals in the ‘independent’ registered voters and make they self-identify that they are really demoncrat-leaners. Even GOP voters who wanted to show up just to get a chance to vote against another Clinton, were forced to put ‘Demoncrat’ on a voter registration card which had to be submitted to the State Elections Commission in order to get in the door. (And Obama had his cult members walking and calling all GOP voters in Las Vegas trying to get the non-Mitt supporters to switch sides for the day and vote against Hillary)

On the GOP side, we obviously have no bosses to hold our jobs over us to get us to vote. And there is no special interest which would ensure that we even show up to go through this debacle. Being a fairly libertarian state in general, the idea of having to spend hours ‘voting’ is anethma on the GOP side. Apparently, RNC lawyers didn’t give a sh!t about Nevada GOP voters so they let Harry Reid create the playing field.

6. The Nevada caucuses were put in between South Carolina and New Hampshire to allow Harry Reid to get attention primarily and secondarily to try to ensure that the demoncrat nominee would get pigeonholed and make promises to the large unions who would provide virtually every vote in NV. The hispanic vote was a nice second thought for them. Arizona was a McCain state and New Mexico was just too damn hispanic and the the 60%+ of the voters in NM who are registered demoncrats (yes, that number is correct) tend to disaffect to the GOP in alarming numbers each 2 years. CA was a non-starter since it was too big and the latinos could literally take over the primary if they wanted to. CO is still too GOP controlled and the latino population there is not under any one umbrella which would allow them to be herded easily. In Nevada, the hispanics are mostly hotel employees and the Culinary Union promised to bring them to the demnocrat caucus with a nice matching t-shirt on.

Nevada was a goat-f*ck for the GOP. South Carolina decided to jump the gun and screw themselves but ensure that they got the candidates to pander to them in person. Romney is also Mormon and Las Vegas has the second largest Mormon population in the world. Both reasons for everybody in our party to just ignore Nevada and skip the chance to have another one of these retarded caucus things. And because of the little quirk of having to change your registration in order to vote, the GOP having no actual contest going on gained us absolutely ZERO new registrants and probably cost up a few thousand if in name only.

The demoncrats now believe that they are going to get to hang on to those voters who changed registrations. Its not likely. But they did manage to get thousands of liberals hiding behind the ‘independent’ shield to publicly confess that they were actually demoncrats and voted for demoncrat candidates.

The demoncrat party didn’t not count on the fact that Hillary would not get the gold medal in Nevada which was the Culinary Union endorsement (a union larger than the teachers and covering the majority of employees in hotels on the Strip). This was a wrinkle which put their two largest unions in conflict since the Teachers Union of NV picked Hillary. Culinary Union workers were never asked who they wanted to vote for, by the way, so the endorsement of Obama was basically an act of heresy. The entire rigged process which included having the votes being cast not in a precinct site but at the actual jobsite of the Culinary Union workers became contentious.

Culinary had hotel employees on the Strip saturday mostly in their uniforms for the various hotels they worked out. And during the hours the caucus when on, all Strip employees were given time off to go over to caucus sites and vote. Not curiously, the caucus sites on the Strip did not include any of the 1/3 of hotels which were not unionized including monsters like The Venetian (the largest hotel in the entire freaking world).

Culinary figured that by physically routing all the people who were wearing a uniform into the Obama rooms they could control things. And they took the extraordinary step of providing Obama/Culinary bright red t-shirts for anybody else who didn’t happen to be in uniform but showed up to vote. What they didn’t count on was Bill Clinton personally showing up in the middle of their caucus site and campaigning. Clinton was working the ‘back of the house’ places in some of the big hotels were there are only employees (ie, kitchens, break rooms, laundry areas, prep areas) and gladhanding the peons. This proved to be an incredibly disruptive force.

With Clinton (and his lawyers) literally holding court in the middle of the area Obamas caucus area was at, Clinton effectively prevented the Culinary thugs from forcing people to stay. Facing the choice of following Clinton and his team of Secret Service agents over to the Hillary tables or facing the Culinary thugs, Clinton won most of those battles. Its not like Culinary thugs could threaten somebodies job right there in the room where you have Secret Service agents with guns. Clinton was telling everybody that he knew most ‘working people’ wanted to vote for Hillary and that some Obama campaign workers (read: Culinary Union thugs) were trying to force them to vote against their own wishes.

With Saturday Night Bill working the room full of cocktail waitresses (in uniforms which made it impossible for him to avoid staring a cleavage), Culinary was effectly crippled to strongarm their people. They never figured that they would be on opposite sides and nobody was accounting for Bill Clintons ability to disrupt things. (The Clintons were staying all last week in the Bellagio Villas. The Villas don’t have a price tag because you cannot rent them out. They are for super-VIPs and high rollers only and would be worth about $10,000 or more a night. Bet your life the Clintons paid the Bellagio the standard $179 a night for a normal non-suite room to report to the FEC. And unlike butlers, maids and servants in a typical hotel room, the staff in the Villas have a confidentiality agreement in place and they risk not only dismissal but prosecution civilly if they leak any information about the Villa guests. So Bill could spend a week with cocktail waitresses in the Suite while Hillary was up in Reno and there will be no talking witnesses.

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