Republicans' Fortunes Falling in Nevada

State Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, left, waits for election results with campaign adviser Greg Ferraro in a Reno hotel on Tuesday. The veteran Republican lawmaker beat back his first serious challenge since his initial race in 1972. (By David B. Parker -- Reno Gazette-journal Via Associated Press)

Beyond Gibbons's woes, though, Ernaut and others note that the state party has not recruited high-quality candidates the way it did in the 1990s.

"You can't get any higher than where the Republicans were in 2002," said Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Erin Neff. "They really won it all. Once they hit that level, their farm team had been pushed up. They weren't grooming anyone for office. That was going to result in an uptick for Democrats irrespective of the national scene."

In the past 40 years, Nevada has gone Republican in all but two presidential elections -- 1992 and 1996, when Ross Perot's independent candidacies helped Bill Clinton pull off upsets.

In addition to how dispirited many Republicans are, the Democrats enjoyed a huge boost in registration and fundraising from its Jan. 19 caucuses. About 116,000 Democrats took part, more than double the number of Republican participants.

Nevada GOP Chairman Sue Lowden is one of the few who say they do not see significant problems in the state party. She points to the 45,000 Republicans who participated in the Nevada caucuses as a success story, and she insisted that Gibbons has been actively campaigning and effectively fundraising on behalf of state and local GOP candidates. She also dismissed assertions by Ernaut and others that Gibbons could face a revolt from within in 2010.

She said the party's woes, if there are any, come from the broader anti-GOP mood nationally.

"The overall Republican brand doesn't seem to be as appealing," Lowden said. "But I'm optimistic that all of our incumbents are going to win. . . . If we stay a red state, I'll be a hero. If we don't, I'm not going to be happy."

The Nevada Democratic Party's executive director, Travis Brock, said his team also deserves credit for building a solid party full of appealing candidates and for taking better advantage of the early caucuses to excite the base. He's particularly pleased about the prospects of state Sen. Dina Titus, who lost to Gibbons in the 2006 governor's race, to topple three-term U.S. Rep. Jon Porter in a district where there are now 25,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. The Democratic edge was about 3,000 voters when Porter won his last reelection by fewer than 4,000 votes.

"One of the real reasons I wanted to pursue this career opportunity was that I saw an organization that was on the edge of a big sea change," said Brock, who assumed the job in April 2007 after years working for Democrats in Iowa. The Republican Party's problems, he said, were evident even then and have only grown worse since. "To say that I love it is an understatement," he said.