More on Nevada and South Carolina

From the Financial Times:

McCain and Clinton score key election victories

By Matt Garrahan in Las Vegas and Andrew Ward and Stephanie Kirchgaessner in South Carolina

Published: January 19 2008 21:34 | Last updated: January 20 2008 04:51

Hillary Clinton won a tightly fought contest in the Nevada Democratic caucus on Saturday, while John McCain swept to victory in the South Carolina Republican primary.

Mrs Clinton’s victory gave her campaign a much-needed boost going into next Saturday’s Democratic primary in South Carolina and re-establishes her credentials as frontrunner in the race for her party’s presidential nomination.

John McCain’s narrow win against Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist minister and governor of Arkansas, sets him up as the major contender for the Republican nomination ahead of the all-important “Super Tuesday” races on February 5. With 95 per cent of the votes counted, Mr McCain led 33 per cent to 30 per cent.

The victory was particularly sweet for the war veteran, because it was his defeat in the 2000 South Carolina primary that ended his run for the White House and virtually guaranteed the nomination of George W Bush. Mr McCain’s win will inevitably give him the “front-runner” status that has so far eluded the Republican race, in part because the winner of the South Carolina primary has traditionally gone on to win the Republican nomination.

Mr McCain faces a tough race in Florida’s January 29 primary against New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, who won the Nevada primary on Saturday. By winning South Carolina, Mr McCain has proven that he can appeal to conservative southern voters, not just moderate Republicans and independents, who helped guarantee his win in New Hampshire last week.

The South Carolina results mark a potentially lethal blow to the candidacy of Mr Huckabee, whose early win in the Iowa caucuses helped propel his poorly financed White House bid. Mr Huckabee was counting on a strong showing by the state’s evangelical and Christian conservative voters.

The Nevada Republican caucus was won by Mitt Romney with 53 per cent of the vote – his second triumph of the week after winning the Michigan primary last Tuesday. Ron Paul, the libertarian-minded Texas congressman, and John McCain were tied for third. About 25 per cent of Nevada voters are Mormon and 95 per cent of eligible Mormon voters voted for Mr Romney.

Clinton and Obama trade blows

In Nevada at a victory rally at the Planet Hollywood casino, Mrs Clinton greeted cheering supporters. “I guess this is how the west was won,” she said. “We will all be united in November.”

Mrs Clinton received significant support from women as well as members of Nevada’s fast-growing Hispanic population.

The number of Hispanic voters in western and southwestern states such as Nevada, California, Arizona and New Mexico is increasing and the community’s support could play a critical role in deciding the outcome of November’s presidential election.

Mrs Clinton won 51 per cent of the vote against Mr Obama ‘s 45 per cent. John Edwards was a distant third with four per cent, raising doubts about the viability of his campaign.

Mr Obama said in a statement that his campaign “appealed to people’s hopes instead of their fears”.

“That’s the campaign we’ll take to South Carolina and across America in the weeks to come, and that’s how we will truly bring about the change this country is hungry for,” he said.

Unlike the New Hampshire primary, which forecast victory for Mr Obama in the Democratic contest, polls in Nevada were correct in forecasting the win for Mrs Clinton.

However, her victory came amid deteriorating relations with Mr Obama, with the pair trading blows over comments he made about the Republican party.

In the interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, Mr Obama said Republicans had been “the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten to 15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom”.

At a rally ahead of Saturday’s caucus, Mrs Clinton said: “That’s not the way I remember the last ten to 15 years.”

She also accused Mr Obama’s supporters of intimidating caucus participants in Las Vegas. Mr Obama won the endorsement of the 60,000 member Culinary Workers Union, which dominated caucus locations in and around the Las Vegas Strip.

However, many CWU members ignored their union’s endorsement and instead voted for Mrs Clinton.

Mr Obama’s advertising campaign also came in for criticism, with Mrs Clinton calling on the Illinois senator to denounce radio advertisements accusing her of not respecting Hispanic people. Mrs Clinton said the advertisements were “shameless and offensive”.

A spokesman for Mr Obama said the campaign had discouraged supporters from running their own advertising campaigns.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ed602dc4-c6d4-11dc-bd9c-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Is the Nevada Caucus an Omen?

Senator Harry Reid was right, 114,000 voters turned out for the Nevada caucus, 10 times more than in 2004. Timing and campaigning made the difference. Yet, how much was influenced by the greater interest the American voter is taking in this election? Perhaps we are desperate to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes of 2000 and 2004.

Or is it that Latino community pushed their voters to make sure they caucus. Remember the non-voters are just as important, it is in their vested interest to influence this election. They will make their voice heard and their second generation American cousins will listen to them.
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Women, Latinos Propel Clinton To First Place

By Shailagh Murray and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 20, 2008; A01

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 19 -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won Nevada's Democratic caucuses on Saturday, handing Sen. Barack Obama a second consecutive setback in a volatile nominating contest that is now poised to become a coast-to-coast battle.

Competing in the first state with significant blocs of minority voters, Clinton won 51 percent of the vote, Obama took 45 percent and former senator John Edwards garnered 4 percent, the result of a colorful and at times chaotic process that included caucuses held in casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Clinton won almost every casino site and dominated among women and Latino voters, while Obama drew overwhelming support from blacks -- a potential foreshadowing of how the contest could play out when almost two dozen states vote on Feb. 5.

"I guess this is how the West was won," Clinton declared at a victory rally in Las Vegas.

Obama's campaign argued that the outcome in Nevada was a shared victory and laid claim to 13 delegates, compared with 12 for Clinton, because of the way his support was distributed around the state. Obama aides also complained of what they said were voter-suppression tactics. "We're not treating this as a loss," said senior adviser David Axelrod. "We'll keep letting them spin the victories, and we'll keep taking the delegates." Obama left the state without delivering a concession speech, and his campaign sent messages to supporters heralding the edge in delegates...

Clinton scored her latest victory after an especially bitter exchange last weekend over racial divisions, and after her husband took on an even more visible role as both a glad-handing surrogate on the Vegas Strip and a sharp critic of Obama. In one notable exchange on the eve of the vote, Bill Clinton lambasted a reporter who asked about a recent court ruling on the caucus arrangements; the incident, replayed repeatedly on television, bore echoes of his comment the night before the New Hampshire primary that Obama's stance on the Iraq war is a "fairy tale." In both states, his wife won.

The Nevada results contained some worrisome signs for Obama along demographic lines. The heavy support that Clinton won among Hispanics suggested that he could face an uphill climb to win that important group in California, New York and New Jersey, the three most populous states with primaries on Feb. 5. In the first contest in which race has played an important role, white caucusgoers in Nevada backed Clinton over Obama, 52 percent to 34 percent, and nearly two-thirds of Latinos chose Clinton. Black voters broke heavily for Obama over Clinton, 83 percent to 14 percent...

Racial divides could trigger renewed friction within the Democratic Party as the two sides rush to pick up support from blacks and Hispanics. Although leaders of a "black-brown" coalition have sponsored Democratic debates focused on minority issues, the two groups have a history of mutual mistrust in politics and could find themselves in a tug-of-war between Obama and Clinton. Already, the campaign has been engulfed by identity politics after remarks by Clinton about the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, and after Spanish-language ads, run by a union backing Obama, questioned Clinton's support for Latinos.

Saturday, Clinton continued to outperform Obama among women, a trend that began with her victory in New Hampshire on Jan. 8 -- in contrast to Obama's early victory among women in Iowa. According to network entrance polling, women made up 59 percent of all caucusgoers in Nevada, and they went into the caucuses favoring the senator from New York over Obama, 51 percent to 38 percent, similar to the advantage among women she enjoyed in New Hampshire. Winning strong support from women has been the cornerstone of her strategy for winning the Democratic nomination.

Despite a late endorsement by the powerful Culinary Workers Union, Obama did not win enough support from Nevada's hourly laborers -- or any single demographic -- to produce new momentum after his initial burst of success in Iowa. Since his first-place finish there, the senator from Illinois has struggled to outpace Clinton in consecutive contests and is now banking heavily on a victory next Saturday in South Carolina, where as much as half of the Democratic electorate will be African American.

But Obama's advisers said that, under the complex apportionment rules governing the Nevada caucus process, he will wind up ahead of Clinton by one delegate in the state. Clinton currently leads in the overall national delegate count, including the "super delegates" who can choose their preferred nominee without waiting for any individual state results but may also change their minds at any time...

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson rejected the rival camp's claim. "Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses today by winning a majority of the delegates at stake," he said. "The Obama campaign is wrong. Delegates for the national convention will not be determined until April 19."

Perhaps the clearest winner of the Nevada caucuses was Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, who secured the early spot on the calendar for his state and boldly predicted turnout of 100,000 -- more than 10 times the Democratic turnout in the 2004 Nevada caucuses. That forecast appeared to come true, with upwards of 114,000 caucusgoers reported. Reid was neutral in the race, but his son, Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid, served as Clinton's Nevada chairman and helped her to lock down support from the Democratic establishment...

Polling director Jon Cohen and staff writer Paul Kane in Washington contributed to this report.

for complete article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/19/AR2008011902598.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR

image: http://images.politico.com/global/070629_nevada274.jpg

Day of Reckoning in Nevada

This is the day of consequences. The number one tenet we all learned as children was that there were always consequences to our behavior. Remember the "if you touch the burner on the stove you will be burned," "if you hit your brother you can't go out and play," "if you get home after midnight you can't go out tomorrow night,"

The outside world infringed on our lives when we went to school. If we misbehaved in class we were sent to detention. If we cheated on an exam we might be expelled.

Today in Nevada we will find out how Latino people feel about being called names; told they have leprosy, or that they have to return to Mexico (even though they are fourth generation Americans).

Even if it is not an immigrant voting - (believe it or not, there are some Latinos whose families have been here since before 1776- but I guess that doesn't count because they didn't live on the east coast) - many Latinos identify and have empathy for undocumented immigrants. They know about their grandparents being called greasers in the 1950s or the 1940s. They don't want these stories for their children - and will choose their vote accordingly.

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New York Times
January 19, 2008

Editorial

The Immigrant Vote

The Nevada caucuses today will be the first test of the mood of immigrant voters since comprehensive immigration reform was killed.

Nevada is the first state on the election calendar with a sizable Hispanic vote, and among them will be a substantial number of immigrants. We don’t know who they’ll choose, but we do know they are anxious. They have endured the racially tinged rhetoric used to sink immigration reform; they have witnessed Republican candidates exploiting the xenophobic nastiness. Families have been torn apart as illegal immigrants have been deported, leaving their citizen children behind.

Meanwhile, applications for citizenship have surged. About 1.4 million immigrants applied for citizenship in the fiscal year that ended in September, according to government estimates. That was double the number from the same period the year before. One motivation was a desire to beat a 66 percent increase in the application fee in July. But anxiety over the government’s crackdown on illegal immigrants and anger at Republicans’ efforts to make immigrants into the whipping boys of American politics, were big motivators. The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials expects at least 9.3 million Hispanics to vote in November, 1.7 million more than in 2004. We hope the emergence of new immigrant voters will help temper the immigration debate.

President Bush largely got it right on immigration. He recognized the hard-working nature of immigrants, even those who arrived illegally. He said the nation needed a path to legal status. According to exit polls, Mr. Bush drew about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 — a record for a Republican presidential candidate.

But just one current Republican contender, John McCain, offers anything but lock-step allegiance to the enforcement-only approach now. In a poll late last year by the Pew Hispanic Center, only 23 percent of Latinos identified themselves as Republicans, down from 28 percent in 2006. Hispanics who identified themselves as Democrats surged from 49 percent to 57 percent.

The Latino voters’ group expects Hispanics to account for 11 percent of the vote in Nevada, a state that Mr. Bush — with 39 percent of the Hispanic vote — won by a mere 2.6 percentage points in 2004.

It is of utmost importance that the government deal promptly with the flurry of new citizenship applicants. Mr. Bush has agreed to a proposal from Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, to do just that. Still, immigration authorities expect waits of 18 months, which would prevent many applicants from becoming citizens in time for the November election.

The citizenship and voter registration drive in immigrant communities should be celebrated by both parties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/opinion/19sat2.html?ref=opinion
photo: ttp://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/election2006/media/ahora%20votamos%202.JPG