Politics and Nevada

First, an anecdote.

The other day I'm at the table eating dinner, minding my own business. My two-and-a-half year old is sitting next to me, eating dinner, minding his own business. Suddenly, completely without warning, he throws his fork on the table and shouts in rage, "GAAAAAH! DEMOCRATS!"

I look at him in shock. Seriously, did I just hear that right? There's no way I heard that right. Did his mother teach him that while I was at work? The wife comes downstairs and I tell her what I just heard, and she looks at me skeptically. She thinks I'm making the whole thing up. My son has been looking at me with an impish grin the whole time. Again, "DEMOCRATS!!!"

By this time, the wife and I are laughing uncontrollably, and the kid responds by yelling "DEMOCRATS!" every once in a while for the rest of the evening. I told everyone at work, who thought it was so funny that they decided to use it as a replacement swear-word. So when the copier jams, "DEMOCRATS!!!"

So that's my son's contribution to the cause. I'm glad to see he's already on the right track. But since I don't run around the house yelling "DEMOCRATS!" I don't know where the kid got it in his head to yell that word the other evening while I was eating dinner, minding my own business.

Sabato is handicapping the 2006 Senate races, with some Gubernatorial stuff thrown in for good measure. His conclusion is that, while it's obviously too early to know for sure, it looks extremely unlikely that the DEMOCRATS! are going to take back majority control of the Senate. Fiscal conservatives can reasonably wonder whether that's a good thing.

But Nevada has some especially interesting things going on. First and foremost is Harry Reid, the Senate Minority Leader who seems intent on out-Daschle-ing Daschle. If two Minority Leaders in a row get booted for excessive Leftism, do you think the DNC might get the hint? We've got Jim Gibbons, a U.S. Rep leaving his spot to run for governor, but his district is the reddest part of the state. The other two Reps up for re-election are Democrat Shelley Berkley (whose seat is in the middle of extremely blue Las Vegas) and Republican John Porter (whose seat covers a lot of blue Clark County). If there's a shift in Nevada's U.S. Rep population, I imagine it would be Porter, but I don't know enough about him to comment on whether his seat is safe.

So much for federal elections; the next interesting race is for governor. Republican Kenny Guinn is term-limited, so his seat is up for grabs. The DEMOCRAT! hopefuls are state Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus and Henderson Mayor John Gibson (Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins dropped out this past weak with name-recognition problems). So far the presumptive Republican front-runner is U.S. Representative Jim Gibbons (yeah, with a Gibson and a Gibbons in the race, my feeble brain might overheat) and state Senator Bob Beers. I don't know anything at all about Beers. I know Gibbons has already raised over 2 million bucks.

So Nevada is an interesting state to watch because
- we could topple a Senate Minority Leader and turn a blue seat into a red seat
- we could turn a red governor's seat blue with inter-party fights between Gibbons, Beers, and whoever else (I'm thinking a guy named Rogers who runs UNLV, but he hasn't announced, and I don't know how certain he is about running).
- we could turn a U.S. Rep seat from red to blue.

In the state legislature, our Senate is heavily Republican and our Assembly is heavily Democrat. After a quick and highly uninformed look at the numbers, I doubt the majorities will change at all.