Tag: NV-03

Whoa.  Is the top Democratic candidate challenging GOP Rep. Jon Porter on the verge of dropping out of the race?  That’s what the Ralton Flash says.  Here’s the House Race Hotline (sub. NOT req’d, for now) summary:

Clark Co. prosecutor Robert Daskas (D) is “on verge of dropping out of race” against Rep. Jon Porter (R), according to NV analyst Jon Ralston. An announcement is “expected soon,” but he’s likely to cite “personal reasons” for dropping the race. The DCCC is “already courting” state Senate Min. Leader/’06 GOV nominee Dina Titus (D).

If accurate, this would be a big setback for Democrats.  Daskas’ fundraising pace has been decent, and he’s sitting on $450K cash-on-hand as of April 1st (good enough to earn him a 44% CoH competitiveness rating), and any late-entering challenger would start out well behind the curve in the money race.

Dina Titus has already declined a chance to run against Porter this cycle, so I’m not sure if she’d be a willing replacement here.

If confirmed, this would be a disturbing turn of events in this D+1 district.

UPDATE: Yup, he’s definitely out.  Here’s the statement from the Daskas campaign:

Citing family considerations, Robert Daskas has announced his decision to withdraw his candidacy for Nevada’s Third Congressional District.  The Daskas campaign has every confidence that another strong, viable candidate will enter the race and unseat incumbent Jon Porter.  Daskas thanks everyone for their support and asks supporters to stay focused on the common goal of changing our representative in the Third Congressional District.  Democrats now hold a 22,500 voter registration advantage over Republicans in the district.

Nevada’s filing deadline: May 16

Later Update: The Politico says that Titus is in:

Democrats have already recruited a new candidate, Nevada Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, who may announce as soon as tomorrow that she’s entering the race. Titus has statewide name recognition, and Democrats hope that she can raise enough money quickly to challenge Porter in November.

“Dina Titus would be an excellent candidate with unparalleled experience and support from people in Nevada’s 3rd congressional district,” DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “Her vision, strength, and ability to get things done for Nevada would make her a powerful voice for change.”

Today, the DCCC unveiled the second wave of participants in its Red to Blue program.  The 13 beneficiaries are:

Kay Barnes (MO-06)

Anne Barth (WV-02)

Darcy Burner (WA-08)

Robert Daskas (NV-03)

Steven Driehaus (OH-01)

Jim Himes (CT-04)

Christine Jennings (FL-13)

Larry Kissell (NC-08)

Suzanne Kosmas (FL-24)

Eric Massa (NY-29)

Gary Peters (MI-09)

Mark Schauer (MI-07)

Dan Seals (IL-10)

There are few surprises here, but the committee’s stamp of approval given to replacement candidate Anne Barth, who is running against incumbent GOP Rep. Shelley Moore Capito in WV-02 seems indicative of the DCCC’s desire to bust open the 2008 playing field in a big way.

This diary is about Nevada’s 3rd CD.

It’s a rhetorical question of course! At least for me.

Nevertheless, it is still an interesting one. On the one side we have one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, on the other a Democratic elite unwilling to jump into the race – whatever reasons they may have.

From the Las Vegas Sun:

Invitations went out to the big dance off, and it had to be tempting. Challenge a Republican congressman who has been unwavering in his support of an unpopular war. Get millions of dollars in assistance from national Democrats. And do all of this when voters are leaning toward Democrats.

The cool kids, though, decided not to show. So a political neophyte will be the candidate.

Robert Daskas, a chief deputy district attorney, filed papers last week announcing his intention to run against Rep. Jon Porter, a three-term incumbent. (The other announced Democratic candidate is Andrew Martin, who will have a tough time beating Daskas, the party’s preferred candidate, for the nomination .)

Daskas has the support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley of Nevada . But that doesn’t mean he was the first choice. At least four other s, three of them veteran elected officials, passed up a chance to run.

“There’s no question Daskas is a fourth-choice candidate for national Democrats,” said David Wasserman, House editor for the Cook Political Report. “That said, Republicans can’t take him lightly.”

If you think this only applies to Nevada’s 3rd congressional district you’d be wrong. The same is true for Oregon’s U.S. Senate race. There, Bush rubber stamp Gordon Smith is seen just as vulnerable as Porter is in Nevada. And yet, one prominent Democrat after the other said thanks but no thanks. In the end, the Democratic elite in Oregon settled on House Majority Leader Jeff Merkley. In Nevada, they settled on Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Robert Daskas.

The number of elected Democrats in Oregon is much higher than in Nevada so the following assertion by the Sun doesn’t quite ring true:

In other states, political parties spend years nurturing potential candidates for higher office. But Nevada Democrats have not always focused on grooming candidates by helping up-and-comers get elected to school boards and city councils to gain experience.

It’s more a resistance of leading Democrats to take a chance and jump into a race with an uncertain outcome. One wonders why. However, this reluctance may be one reason why there is still no talk of a challenger for our Republican freshman in Congress, Dean Heller. What’s up with that anyway?

Cross posted from My Silver State.

Has the DCCC found its man to challenge Republican Jon Porter of Nevada?  According to Roll Call, local Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief that Clark County deputy district attorney Robert Daskas plans to officially enter the race in a few weeks:

Roll Call has learned that after a number of discussions with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Clark County prosecutor Robert Daskas plans to file as a House candidate with the Federal Election Commission by summer’s end if not sooner – provided he sails through the final vetting stages of the DCCC’s recruiting process.

“He’s been in talks with the DCCC,” said one Democratic source, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the recruitment process. “[Daskas] is one they’re focusing on at this point.”

Daskas’ presumptive candidacy would come after months of DCCC failures to field a high-profile challenger to Porter, who Democrats say is increasingly vulnerable in a pure swing suburban Las Vegas district. A Democratic poll from April suggests that just more than one-quarter of local voters want to re-elect Porter and about one-third “want to consider someone else.”

The Garin Hart Yang survey of 405 likely voters, conducted March 13-17, had a 4.9-point margin of error.

Indeed: after flying below the top-tier radar for much of the 2006 campaign, former Harry Reid aide Tessa Hafen surged in the closing weeks of the campaign, eventually falling short of toppling Porter by 1% and less than 4,000 votes in the propeller-shaped third district.  Close elections are par for the course in this district: Al Gore won this area by 1% in 2000, and Bush edged Kerry by that same margin in 2004.

Is Daskas the right guy to send Porter (an apt name for a reliable bagman of the Bush Administration) packing?  If he runs this kind of campaign, I could dig it:

A Daskas candidacy likely would hammer away at Porter’s perceived ties to major White House policy blunders. Last year, Porter voted with the White House 93 percent of the time. In 2007, he voted to approve of the troop escalation in Iraq but was one of 51 House Republicans who voted to override President Bush’s veto of expanded stem-cell research funding.

“He’s been blanket support in the war in Iraq,” a Democratic source said. “He’s a puppet for the Bush administration and every frustration that people have with the Bush administration … they need to realize that Jon Porter is a staunch supporter.”

It may be common sense on this side of the fence, but Republicans like Porter can’t seem to get this simple fact through their thick skulls: 2006 was Round One of the referendum on Iraq.  2008 could very likely be Round Two.

According to The Hill, the DCCC has targeted 14 Republican incumbents for web/phone/radio hits starting on Monday. Here’s the full list, including each district’s Presidential vote in the last two cycles:

State	CD	Incumbent	Kerry ’04	Bush ’04	Gore ’00	Bush ’00
AK	AL	Young	36	61	28	59
CO	4	Musgrave	41	58	37	57
IL	10	Kirk	53	47	51	47
MI	9	Knollenberg	49	51	47	51
MO	6	Graves	42	57	44	53
NC	8	Hayes	45	54	46	54
NJ	7	Ferguson	47	53	48	49
NM	1	Wilson	51	48	48	47
NV	3	Porter	49	50	49	48
NY	25	Walsh	50	48	51	45
NY	29	Kuhl	42	56	43	53
PA	3	English	47	53	47	51
VA	2	Drake	42	58	43	55
WV	2	Capito	42	57	44	54

However, only seven districts (NC-08, MI-09, AK-AL, NV-03, NY-25, WV-02 and MO-06) are getting the radio ads. But this is a good indicator, perhaps, of the districts that the DCCC plans to aggressively contest next year. While many of these look tough, dynamite candidates in State Senator John Unger and Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes (MO-06) could very well be map changers.

The race between Republican Congressman Jon Porter and Democrat Tessa Hafen in NV-03 (the suburbs of Las Vegas) has been one of the closest in the country with 48.46% for Porter and 46.57% for Hafen and Porter winning by less than 4,000 votes. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Democrats, both in DC and in Nevada, are looking for another serious challenger to Porter after Hafen, a former aide to Sen. Reid, declined to run again. Last week, another potential contender, 2006 gubernatorial nominee and State Sen. Min. Leader Dina Titus, took herself out of the running leaving the field with one announced candidate and two others seriously considering.

Thus far only Andrew Martin has announced his intention to run. He’s an accountant making his first run for elected office and would be Nevada’s first openly gay member of Congress. He’s fairly unknown, though, and I’m not sure if he’d be able to raise the funds necessary for a successful run. Another potential candidate is Larry Lehrner, a nephrologist, a former Republican who does not even live in the district but is nontheless taken very seriously because he’s married to Shelley Berkley, Congresswoman Shelley Berkley that is. A married couple representing two districts of one state in Congress, I don’t think we’ve had that before and I’m not sure we’d want that.

So, maybe it’s time for a waitress in Congress.

There has been speculation that Maggie Carlton, a state senator since 1999 is interested in running and this past weekend she confirmed this:

“My husband and I have been talking about it for a while,” she said. “We might try it. I don’t think it’s too far fetched.”

Carlton, a waitress at the Treasure Island resort, said she wants to talk it over with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and her supporters at home before she makes a decision.

“He’s my congressman, and I don’t like some of the things he’s done,” she said of Porter. “Maybe we need a waitress in Congress, not an insurance guy.”

Yup, you read that right, a waitress. Nevada’s legislature is only in session for four months every other year, meaning legislators have to keep their job after being elected and work to make a living. Wonder how Maggie Carlton does it? So did NPR a year ago. You can listen to their profile of Maggie Carlton here.

Maggie Carlton represents the working people of Las Vegas and Nevada in the State Senate. One co-worker says:

We got somebody speaking for us on a higher level. […] She’ll bring up the questions that other senators probably wouldn’t bring up because they don’t know about nine-to-five working people. […] If Maggie wouldn’t be doing it who would do it?

So, you could argue she’s too valuable in the State Senate and should stay put. However, term limits were introduced in Nevada which means she cannot stand for re-election in 2010. Having her speak for the nine-to-five people in Congress might not be such a bad idea.

How could she win? We know the district is competitive, Porter is vulnerable. She’d have one distinctive advantage: the Culinary Union Local 226 – the most powerful union in Nevada, so powerful that the Culinary’s endorsement might swing the presidential contest in the Nevada Caucus next year. Maggie Carlton is not only a member of the Culinary Union and a Culinary Local No. 226 Shop Steward, she says she was actually encouraged to run for the State Senate by the Culinary:

They wanted someone who clocked in for a living and who understood: running to PTA meetings, trying to do the girl scout thing, getting kids to school on time, all those types of things.

Maggie Carlton has been doing her day-job for 30 years now, maybe it’s time she put down that 40 pound tray not just for 120 days every other year but permanently and take her experience to Washington.

Cross-posted from Turn Tahoe Blue.

Nationally, many pundits and bloggers didn’t take Nevada’s 2nd district too seriously in 2006. It was too safe a Republican district to be even slightly competitive, so the argument went.

Well, we all know that Dean Heller in the end won his election against Democrat Jill Derby. Against expectations though, his result wasn’t very convincing. The man who was elected Secretary of State of Nevada three times, barely won more than 50% of the vote in a district that doesn’t include Democratic Las Vegas. So today, I ventured out in search of Republicans who won their districts in 2006 and did worse than him. Turns out that there weren’t that many.

Only 11 Republicans were elected with a worse result than Heller. Among them: Rep. Sali of Idaho, Rep. Cubin of Wyoming, Rep. Musgrave of Colorado and Rep. Doolittle of California. All these districts were presumed to be safely in Republican hands. There was no way they would become competitive and yet they were.

Again, there is talk of Heller being safe, of other Republican districts more important than Nevada’s 2nd. This is reminder for all of these folks that Heller is among the vulnerable dozen Republicans currently serving in Congress:

  * 50.37% Heller
  * 50.24% Pryce (OH-15)
  * 50.21% Wilson (NM-01)
  * 50.14% Hayes (NC-08)
  * 50.08% Buchanan (FL-13)
  * 50.05% Bachmann (MN-06)
  * 49.95% Sali (ID-01)
  * 49.53% Ferguson (NJ-07)
  * 49.26% Doolittle (CA-04)
  * 48.46% Porter (NV-03)
  * 48.33% Cubin (WY-01)
  * 45.91% Musgrave (CO-04)

Results were taken from NPR.

PS: Please note that I only looked at how many people were willing to vote for the Republican, not how well the opponent did. This is not a diary on close margins. Feel free to comment on that below.

Cross posted from Helluva Heller, where Nevada bloggers have united to take down Heller in 2008.

Yep here we go again. With the dust not yet settled on the last challenge in FL-13 (Good luck Christine) we take a look forward to 2008.

Wander below the fold for the good oil.

Well well well. It seems so soon since we were celebrating the Midterm results and our record of contesting 425 Districts. That’s because it is so soon (LOL). Odd thing to do here in Australia watch the midterms but I took the day off work and had a merry old time watching it all unfold on the net and on cable he he he.

Nonetheless time for the 50 State Page to crank up for 2008 courtesy of the redoubtable Barry Welsh. This cycle we have some help however from the magnificent 2008 Race Tracker wiki. Go and take a look at them both right now and whilst you are there throw Barry some cash. He will be running again and is rightly a netroots champion.

Now for the good oil;
248 races with confirmed candidates. A confirmed candidate has either filed with the FEC, The Sec of State or has an active campaign website, or even if they come and blog and say yep I am running.

The 248 includes all 233 Democratic incumbents (yeh yeh I know some will not run but I am assuming we will find candidates in those districts, and all Dem incumbents are also listed as Running But Unconfirmed).

There are also 15 Republican held districts where we have confirmed candidates as follows:
FL-01,
FL-09,
FL-21,
IL-14,
IA-04,
MI-07,
MO-09,
NE-02,
NJ-11,
NC-08,
NC-09,
OH-07,
OH-16,
PA-03,
TX-04.

But wait there is more.
We also have 238 candidates who I believe are running but who are at this stage unconfirmed according to the above criteria. All 233 districts held by Democrats but also 5 districts held by Republicans as follows:

AR-03,
CA-04,
ID-01,
IN-06 hurry up and confirm Barry!,
NJ-05.

We also have 6 rumoured candidates. These guys are mentioned as considering the race in the following districts:
FL-06,
FL-13 *** depends on the outcome of the challenge,
NV-03,
NJ-07,
PA-15,
TX-06.

So we are off and racing for 2008. Use the 2008 Race Tracker wiki as the primary source of gossip and information as it is a fantastic site and I have spent a LOT of time contributing there also.

Any candidate news, particularly opponents for Repubs welcome in the comments!