All politics is local, so...

I'll start my analysis of what happened on election day, and what it means for American politics, by talking about the experience I had on the ground in Washoe County, Nevada. The biggest delay in making a blog entry on this topic is that there is truly too much material. I'll aim to be concise. As I blogged earlier, we had an uphill battle in Washoe. We were outregistered by 12,000 Republicans in the county. Still, we managed to lose by only 4 percent. Here were the results in 2000 and in 2004 (sorry for the bunched-up numbers, couldn't figure out how to reformat): 2000 Bush, George W. 52.02% 63,640 Gore, Al 42.59% 52,097 2004 BUSH, GEORGE W. 51.26% 81,545 KERRY, JOHN F. 47.05% 74,841 In other words, we got an additional 23,000 voters to the polls this time; the Bush team got an additional 18,000 voters. Given that this was Republican country, we more than pulled our weight. Still, we lost Nevada by the same margin Gore lost in 2000: by about 20,000 votes statewide. In order for Kerry to win, we needed to improve slightly in the rurals (where Gore got an abysmal 13% or so in 2000), come close to parity in Washoe (done), and dominate Clark County, or greater Las Vegas, a Dem stronghold. Let's see how Clark did: 2000 Bush, George W. 44.72% 170,932 Gore, Al 51.31% 196,100 2004 BUSH, GEORGE W. 46.22% 255,337 KERRY, JOHN F. 51.01% 281,767 Basically the same margin of victory as before. The Republicans got 84,000 more voters to the polls, and Team Kerry got 85,000 more to the polls, nearly replicating the 15,000 margin of victory. Not enough for the statewide win. I'm not pinning blame on the Clark County folks -- they obviously would have had a difficult time making up a 20,000 vote difference statewide singlehandedly. But a Democratic presidential candidate must find a way to make this formula work to take Nevada's 5 -- and growing -- electoral votes.