In Nevada, Apathy Is a Front-Runner
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: August 28, 2011
RENO, Nev. — Do not come here expecting to find optimism. Unemployment in the state is at 13 percent, and foreclosure rates remain among the highest in the country. Ask people about the future, and they speak of fear and dread. They may have come to the state with big dreams, but these days they are just trying to get by.
Ask them about the federal government, and the disdain quickly gives way to contempt.
So it is not surprising that there is little interest in the coming special election in the state’s Second Congressional District. The Democratic candidate, Kate Marshall, the state treasurer, has spent much of the campaign boasting about a jobs bill she wrote in the spring. The Republican, Mark Amodei, a former state senator and the state party chairman, has repeatedly criticized the federal stimulus and says government should get out of the private sector’s way.
But for many voters, the arguments sound like white noise. Few here have any hope that whoever they elect will be able to improve things for them.
“For me, it’s just a lesser of two evils,” said Susan Ramstad, a 59-year-old former health care worker.
A registered Democrat, Ms. Ramstad voted for President Obama but has grown increasingly disappointed with him. “It’s gotten to the point where I don’t believe anything,” she said. “I’m terribly concerned about our economy and Medicare and Social Security, and I don’t have the impression that anyone knows what to do about any of it.”
The election to succeed Dean Heller, who was appointed to the Senate after John Ensign resigned in the spring, is the first House special election in the state’s history. In another time, it might have been the kind of race that inspired fierce debate and impassioned activism. Now, even as early voting began on Saturday, it evokes a mere shrug.
Ms. Ramstad’s frustrated ambivalence was echoed again and again in interviews with more than two dozen voters here, in the largest city in the district.
“The question I get asked the most is, ‘Why would you want to go back there?’ ” Mr. Amodei said. “People don’t have a lot of trust in what is going on in Washington.”
The district encompasses nearly all of the state outside Las Vegas and includes rural areas that have long been conservative strongholds.
No Democrat has ever represented the district, and Republicans outnumber Democrats by 30,000 registered voters. Most polls show Mr. Amodei with a comfortable lead.
But many here worry about turnout, saying they expect roughly 25 percent of registered voters to show up at the polls on Sept. 13. The National Republican Congressional Committee has spent more than $500,000 on the race, and a conservative group said late last week that it would spend an additional $250,000 on campaign commercials that tie Ms. Marshall to Mr. Obama, who is deeply unpopular here.
The fierce battle for the Republican presidential nomination, meanwhile, is casting no shadow whatsoever on the race. None of the contenders have come to campaign for Mr. Amodei — though Speaker John A. Boehner came in for a fund-raiser this month — and neither Mr. Amodei nor Ms. Marshall has made the contest a part of their message.
But Democrats say Ms. Marshall could be the candidate to turn history around. If Republicans are not motivated to show up at the polls, she could be the beneficiary. Some say that the large amount of spending by Republicans is evidence of such a fear. But Democrats have not spent any outside money on the campaign so far, which many here see as a sign that they do not think Ms. Marshall can win.
“Nobody wants this to be seen as a test case that they fail,” said Jon Ralston, a longtime political analyst in the state. “But the Democrats really have demographics against them. To win this would take a very strong candidate, and Marshall hasn’t shown herself to be that strong.”
Republicans are trying to frame the race as a referendum on the president and Democrats. Ms. Marshall has been more than willing to try to distance herself from both Mr. Obama and the party.
“With all respect to the president, if he has done a lot, he has done a poor job of explaining it,” she said in an interview here. “He seems to be a day late and a dollar short on a lot of things.”
Her voice rises. “For the middle class in this country, where is he?”
She has played up her conservative bona fides, boasting of support from the National Rifle Association and saying she would have voted against the increase in the federal debt ceiling.
She has also repeatedly criticized Mr. Amodei for voting to raise state taxes in 2003, although every Democrat in the Legislature also supported the increase. Since then, Mr. Amodei has signed the no-new-taxes pledge pushed by the activist Grover Norquist.
Mr. Amodei sees the race as a harbinger. If he wins by a comfortable margin, he said, it will help build momentum for the 2012 Senate and presidential races, where Nevada is expected to be an important battleground.
“We’ve got to win this first round,” he said. “People have seen what it looks like with Democrats in charge, and they are not happy. We know they aren’t happy with a lot of things.”
Still, Mr. Amodei has voters in his own party he still has to convince.
Rodger Moller and Frank Avera have met at a coffee shop every Friday for the last two years to discuss the economy and politics, and they have grown more exasperated by the week. Mr. Moller’s home was foreclosed on this year, and both men lost their jobs in construction. Now they are enrolled in master’s degrees programs — Mr. Avera, 44, plans to become a health care economist, and Mr. Moller, 51, is studying to be a nurse.
Mr. Moller has voted Republican for as far back as he can remember. Now, he said, he is frustrated by gridlock in Congress and has grown weary of the “change, change, change” trope in each election cycle.
“Everything is an ugly battle, and it’s sickening,” he said. “We need to be spending money on education to get people jobs, not just saying no to everything. I want someone to come in with a plan, with some ideas. I don’t hear any of that anymore.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/us/29nevada.html?hp
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