Probably My Last Election Piece: How Reid Won

I'm out front on The Daily Beast today with an assessment of how Harry Reid won. I like to think it's a colorful view, and it includes remarks from folks like Danny Tarkanian, who lost to Sharron Angle. Here's the top:

How Harry Pulled It Off
By STEVE FRIESS

As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took his victory lap on Wednesday before a state and a nation that had anticipated his humiliating demise, the reasons for his triumph became so obvious that it’s a wonder the outcome was ever in doubt.

Yes, he ran a magnificent, vicious, and effective campaign, one to be studied by political masterminds for generations. But rival Sharron Angle also ran an epically terrible campaign, one that comes with a sidesplitting blooper reel for the DVD.

It’s not simply that Angle was a tragically flawed candidate given to surprising, polarizing, or baffling statements. Under the right circumstances—say, when running against a loathed incumbent who is the chief lieutenant of an unpopular president, and your state’s economy is at all-time lows—Angle’s peculiarities might have been overlooked or charming.

But the uncompromising Tea Party purist seemed to work actively to avoid expanding her base in a way that would ever have resulted in a win in Nevada, ...

Read the rest at TheDailyBeast.Com

Nevada Secretary of State Fails To Look Ahead On Web

One of the folks I should have included as a WINNER in my list of media winners and losers from the election is Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller. The Web efforts he has helmed have been terrific, with timely and merged data rolling in and available for press and normal person alike at SilverState2010.Com.


Last go-around, they used now-defunct SilverState2008.Com, so they're building a bit of a trademark. The design is attractive and easy to use and I heard no complaints about load times or crashing on Election Night.

But. On a whim, I went to see how much foresight Miller's gang have had. I searched the GoDaddy.Com registry for SilverState2012.Com. Lookit:


The state doesn't own it. For about $10, a 35-year-old Chris Langhorst of Las Vegas snapped it up.

Two nights ago.

Oops.

Langhorst, who has this audio/video company, tells me he was watching the TV coverage at home and decided to check the SoS site because numbers were slow to roll in. Then he went to GoDaddy.Com on his iPhone, saw that the next logical iteration of Nevada's election Internet center was vacant. He grabbed it.

"I was very surprised," he told me. "You’d figure they’d take care of that stuff."

You would think. And look what's still out there:

Langhorst didn't do it to cybersquat, really. He doesn't know why he did it, other than that it was cheap and he was curious what would happen next. He even asked me what I knew about this sort of thing, and I mentioned I'd covered the topic some. Here's my New York Times piece from September 2008 on political domain-name squatting.

Yet this is a little different. Langhorst hasn't grabbed someone's name, which could be considered their trademark or intellectual property and which Internet governing agencies have forced surrender of in certain situations. (And by the way, Sen. John Ensign does NOT own JohnEnsign.Com. Some dude named Eugene does. Really. A clue to his future plans?)

I'm just fascinated that the crack team in Miller's office -- and I mean that sincerely, because their election night site is really a model for the nation -- didn't think ahead. Their options now are to (a) ask Langhorst nicely to vacate, (b) pay Langhorst to vacate or (c) pick another URL. And if they go with (c) they might buy up the next permutations in advance. Or, better yet, pick one that's not year-sensitive.

Consider this an S.O.S. to the SoS.

Election Winners & Losers, MEDIA EDITION

OK. As I wrote for Politics Daily, Harry Reid's a winner and Sharron Angle's a loser. Duh. But there's much, much more to it.

* WINNER: MSM. Sharron Angle believed the Fox/Limbaugh hype that the "lamestream" media is irrelevant. And perhaps in the national universe that's become more true. But not in local races and certainly not in places like Nevada. Literally running away from reporters looks juvenile and inept. Believing you can simply say you never said the thing you just said and get away with it when you're recorded makes you a bad liar. Pissing off the most significant pundit in the state by reneging on a clear promise to debate before him with your opponent is just asking to be treated as if you have no credibility. Angle will surely claim the press was out to get her, but she even froze out the Review-Journal after the June 8 primary, and those are her people. Yes, Harry Reid also played hard-to-get with the media, but at least his people didn't, providing quick and thorough responses to every niggling question in a usually timely, respectful manner. Also, he's the incumbent with years of media under his belt; you're the relatively unknown challenger. Contrary to what Palin and Friends say, The Media is an important means for leaders to be held accountable for their statements and actions and a useful way to communicate with the broadest cross-section of the public they hope to lead. This trick may work in Kentucky because Rand Paul was always the red-state favorite, but it didn't work for Angle or Delaware's Christine O'Donnell and probably not for Alaska's Joe Miller. Miller's folks handcuffed a reporter.

* WINNER: Jon Ralston. The only pundit who got it right is also, as we learn again and again, the only pundit who matters when it comes to Nevada. He could've played it safe and hedged, but he perpetually railed against the likely inaccuracy of the polls -- oversampled this, ignored that, did not make any sense. He predicted a win for Harry Reid and saw silver linings in early voting data and took some guff for it, most notably from the Review-Journal publisher Sherm Frederick, who claimed it exposed Ralston's partisan bias. I'm offended by Ralston's simplistic, petty and personal version of "media criticism" precisely because it lacks the guts and balance and any introspection whatsoever, all things he applies to the rest of his journalism. But he swung for the fences this weekend and bashed it over the wall.

* LOSER: Sherm Frederick. Sunday's Opinion section of the R-J was soaked with pieces explaining why Reid would lose. The worst offender was the publisher, who suggested Reid would need a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment to pull it out. So, when Sherm turns out to be wrong, does he at least show a little class and humility and offer a mea culpa to Ralston or his entire readership? Boy, that's a funny thought, isn't it? No. Instead, he keeps referring to it as a "surprising" Reid victory and quotes that same Dewey-Truman column to compliment himself for foreseeing the House flipping red even though he merely got that impression from pollsters and journalists elsewhere whom he saw on Fox. Reid's victory wasn't that surprising to the people he tried nastily to discredit before the election - Ralston and Reid's people. Sherm just spent YEARS viciously attacking the senator and eviscerating the public's ability to respect or trust his reporters' work. He laid waste to any claim he had of being able to read Nevada's mood and sank to a shocking low by giggling when Sharron Angle gave the sneaky slip to reporters asking reasonable, important questions. He even wrote of Reid at about 10 p.m. last night: "Initially, he was up over 50%, which was hard to believe. But the margin of victory appears closer now, and more credible." Reid's final tally? 50.2 percent. Sorry, Sherm. As the kids say, epic fail.

* WINNER: KNPR. You might recall back in June, I was pretty peeved that Our World of News and Information was re-running morning chat shows as the votes were being tallied. That is, they sat out the first big act of the most significant Senate race in Nevada history. I'm a massive fan of KNPR and I put my prospects of being invited to appear on the air again at risk over that, and KNPR management wrote in the comments that such coverage was too expensive and not in public demand. My solution to the first part was to partner up with a local TV station and take the audio of live victory and concession speeches, maybe have some anchor in the studio talking to analysts and calling up candidates. I don't know if they did the latter, but in my drive from Venetian (GOP party) to Aria (Dem party), I did hear them taking KSNV audio of Rory Reid's speech. Given that the local race was a national one and the national NPR feed contained tons of Nevada reporting, that was pretty adequate. I'm delighted they did it, so I'll be sending an extra check real soon.

* WINNER: KSNV. This one's a point of personal privilege. Miles and the News 3 crew slaved and stressed for weeks to craft the NBC affiliate's election night coverage. I didn't get to see any of it because I was running around doing my thing, but I understand from many people that it was fantastic. And many people should know, because the station won the night in the ratings. Awesome.

* LOSER: Me. I've made more money in the past two months than in the dreadful second half of 2009, thanks to Reid, Angle and new clients such as CBS, Politics Daily, Tablet and The Daily Beast. But now it's over and there's no Sen. Sharron Angle, R-Cuckoo, to appallingly fascinate the political world. Proof of how fast the national media has lost interest in all this? I spent the morning pitching the idea of a profile of Jon Ralston, the only-pundit-who-got-it-right. Responses, and I quote: No, No, Who cares, Thanks but we'll pass. If this had been a big CA or NY race and it was one dude against the entire pollosphere, you know they'd snap that one up. So once my Daily Beast How-Reid-Won piece posts, I suspect that'll be all for now on this. I'll be on to covering the World Series of Poker, and I just don't think anyone's going to care nearly as much.

Seriously, R-J?!?

This is a screen shot from a real e-mail I just got from the R-J. It's funny because:

(a) If I didn't know the fucking paper was going to cover that, I'm a fucking idiot.
(b) Someone took effort to distribute this despite (a).
(c) Whatever they have in the Wednesday dead-tree edition will NOT be the "latest" news and commentary because of some various pieces of newfangled technology they probably haven't heard about yet.
(d) If they're referring to their website, that's funny because their website is a joke and I'm fairly confident you're better served to look elsewhere tomorrow morning for the "latest" beyond whatever their people write later tonight.
(e) Also, this email does not provide a link to the R-J's website.

Did I miss anything?

Election Day: Not Angle's Time, WHHSH & Ralston 'Media Analysis'

A few random thoughts as we head into the election:

* BEST cover ever! Awesome, right? Oh, also, if you're already done with this election, be sure to skip ahead to 2012 in my column this week.

* The WHHSH Watch Is Baaaack! That is, tomorrow I plan to shame the national reporters so lazy that the best they could do was start or transition parts of their stories with, "Nevada voters made sure that what happens in Vegas didn't stay in Vegas...". Our very first violator of the day is, in fact, not a journalist but some scribe with the Sharron Angle campaign who pushed out a missive this morning predicting victory that began: "For one night – tonight – what happens in Vegas, will not stay in Vegas." GROAN.

* Where's Sharron?


Notice someone missing? The Angle campaign may believe that its anti-media position will help them, but it also ensures her utter irrelevancy as part of the national dialogue and conversation should she win. Why isn't the ultimate Tea Partier who may slay the ultimate Obama proxy on the cover of Time? Or even mentioned at ALL in this piece? Why are two likely losers -- Meg Whitman and Christine O'Donnell -- there instead? I suspect it's because Angle wouldn't talk to Time or even sit for a portrait. Meanwhile, by another measure, Sharron Angle is the sixth most covered politician of 2010, behind THREE likely losers, Whitman, O'Donnell and Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania. That may -- and in O'Donnell's case definitely -- relate to candidates' proximity to the nation's media nerve centers of New York, DC and Los Angeles. But add this disinterest to the fact that many Angle voters I spoke with today at the polls seem to believe her more extreme positions don't matter BECAUSE she won't have any power, and I suspect Angle will be surprised at how irrelevant she is if/when she gets to Washington.

* RalstonSpin. It's worth noting that Jon Ralston took yet another jab at the R-J for its Election Day editorial reiterating their desire to see Reid go bye-bye -- an opinion piece on the opinion pages, the nerve! -- but conveniently didn't care that the by-far dominant image on the newspaper's front page today was a beautiful shot of uber-popular Michelle Obama embracing the senator. How is THAT explained in the world view of those who view an entire reporting and editing operation as the subsidiary of Sharron Angle's campaign? And while the Las Vegas Sun surprisingly managed not to shove our faces in its pro-Reid bent today, the last big campaign story the paper chose to print was yesterday's front page piece about a 4-day-old John McCain appearance in which it is posited that the Arizona senator is champing at the bit to restart Yucca Mountain as a nuclear repository once Reid is gone. This sentence, in the reporter's voice, was particularly intriguing: "Reid is the only obstacle between McCain and his energy platform, which relies on construction of a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain." As I've said before, both papers have their problems, but the Sun's bias in its news columns is far more overt and strident. It doesn't matter to Ralston because where his bread is buttered matters more than being fair to his colleagues.

Vegas Podcast-A-Palooza Is TODAY! #vpp

We are LIVE today at the Flamingo Las Vegas' GO Pool for the third annual Vegas Podcast-a-Palooza!

The three biggest independent Vegas podcasts will perform live versions of their shows from 4-6:30 p.m. PT, and you can either attend in person for free or watch via the Web. Or, of course, you can pick up each show separately.

First up is "Vegas Gang" with Tropicana president Tom McCartney as their special guest. (Regular Vegas Gangstars are former Sun scribe Jeff Simpson, Hunter Hillegas of RateVegas.Com, Dave Schwartz of UNLV and Vegas Seven, and Chuck Monster of VegasTripping.Com.)

Then Miles and I are for "The Strip" on with our guests, Rita Rudner and her husband, Martin Bergman. And finally, Tim & Michele of "Five Hundy By Midnight" will be on. After that, Harrah's is hosting a nifty little reception. They're also giving away pretty cool prizes, and Total Rewards members who attend get a 3x multiplier for the weekend.

If you can't make it, watch it on the LIVESTREAM and chat with fellow viewers/listeners. If you CAN, here's how to find us:


Thanks to John Katsilometes of the Las Vegas Sun for the blurb in today's paper, and Vegas Gangstar Dave Schwartz for his column in Vegas Seven!

Geeking Out On Voter Data: Harry Reid's In Trouble

I'm on the hook to be supplying election data and analysis (off-air) for a major TV network in addition to my other clients this election, so I've spent the past two days digging deep into the numbers that are out there right now. Today is the final day of early voting, and at least 33.4 percent of registered voters have already cast ballots or mailed them in.

The only thing we really know is how many people of each party have voted early or by mail for four counties that represent nearly 90% of the state, Clark (Vegas), Washoe (Reno), Carson City and Douglas (South shore, Tahoe). The Nevada Secretary of State has also put out party breakdown for the first week of early voting for all counties, so I've incorporated that data as well. (The other 13 counties do not provide daily breakouts of party affiliations.)

I know, I know. It's a lot of numbers. But here's some of what I've distilled:

* As of this morning, Democrats hold about a very tenuous 7,400-vote lead statewide out of more than 330,000 cast, a figure that includes the four counties with up-to-date data plus the first-week totals from the rest of the state. It's actually probably a lot smaller because we haven't got second-week breakdown from 13 counties that represent 10 percent of the state.

* 55,423 "others" have already voted. The GOP needs about 57% of those to neutralize the Democratic statewide advantage.

* All of this, of course, assume that all D's vote D and all R's vote R. They don't, obviously, and Jon Ralston wrote that behind recent CNN-Time poll (which was 49-45 Angle but of which he questions the age of the sample) found significantly more D's said they were voting D than R's for R. If that's true, Harry Reid wins. However, the R-J is out today with another 49-45 poll for Angle in which both candidates are getting about the same support from their own party and Angle is getting 55 percent of independents. The R-J poll doesn't show the oversampling of independents that Ralston found in the CNN-Time poll, either.

* The big question is whether the Republicans are more energized. I've analyzed the data for the four counties that are up-to-date as well as the first-week party-breakdown data for the other four counties with more than 10,000 residents. Together, that accounts for more than 97 percent of the state. The result? In every county, Republicans are outperforming their share of the electorate by at least 5 percentage points and in several cases more than 7 points. That's a GOP surge.

* The reasons why it doesn't make for an automatic Sharron Angle landslide is (a) not all R's vote R and (b) a 5-point overperformance in Clark County by Republicans still doesn't overcome the Democrats' registration advantage there, and Clark County is 66 percent of the state.

The real conclusion is, of course, that there is none. If:

* ...independents break big for Angle, she wins.
* ...the Democrats' mythologized, legendary get-out-the-vote apparatus kicks in today and on Tuesday in Clark County, Reid might win.
* ...anti-Reid voters split a few points among minor-partiers and "none of these jerks," Reid might win.

One more point. It is likely that 60 percent of those who vote will have voted by the end of today. Rarely do percentages change much in terms of party breakdown or even vote outcome percentages after that. That is, the first bunch of numbers we see at about 8 p.m. PT on Tuesday night will be all of this and, historically, the standings don't budge much after that.