Beneath the primary’s ‘anti-tax victories’

By Jon Ralston

Friday, Aug. 15, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

The cry has gone out across the land, at least on the right side of the map: The conservative, anti-tax movement is ascendant in the Nevada GOP.

Tuesday’s erasure of three Republican assemblymen has the right wing soaring, with declarations that anyone who doesn’t hew to the anti-tax orthodoxy will crash and burn. But has anyone stopped to consider that these just might be flights of fancy?

Before the conservative editorialists, bloggers and politicians whip themselves into a frenzy, allow some facts to get in the way of their good story.

Francis Allen, Bob Beers and John Marvel lost for very different reasons in very different districts and anti-tax mania is responsible for only a part of their defeats. State Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, arguably as moderate or more so than those three, survived despite having voted for the largest tax increase in history, despite being challenged by a well-known anti-tax movement leader (Sharron Angle) and despite having been endorsed by the bete noire of the right, the state teachers union.

In politics, as in life, things rarely are as simple as they look. Concluding that trio lost because they were not anti-tax enough is the same kind of one-dimensional thinking that might lead a tunnel-vision-impaired leftie to believe that Gov. Jim Gibbons, whose policy vocabulary contains three words, has a 30 percent approval rating because all he can say is “no new taxes.” There might be, ahem, a few other reasons.

Each Assembly race had its own dynamic.

Yes, Marvel also voted for that 2003 tax increase, so the tax issue was a significant factor in his loss. But his opponent, Don Gustavson, is a former assemblyman who benefited from running against a man who had served three decades in the year that term limits became a huge issue. And by focusing on the populous urban area of the district, Gustavson was able to pummel Marvel outside his base.

So now Marvel’s entire career is tarnished because a one-note candidate, a former backbencher who makes Angle look like Margaret Thatcher, erases all of his good works. Perhaps he should have retired voluntarily, but it is sad nonetheless.

In the two races down here, Allen and Beers were done in less by not passing any conservative litmus test than they were by their own amplified idiosyncrasies. Neither Allen nor Beers had much support, outside of boilerplate rhetoric, from the party’s leaders, who implicitly condoned insiders helping the challengers.

Allen was beset by problems, most of them self-inflicted, including that sensational fracas with her husband. Beers was a classic accident of history, a man who used the familiar name of a state senator to win office two years ago and then proceeded to marginalize himself upon his arrival in Carson City.

Another factor that can’t be ignored is that the turnout was so low Tuesday that to draw any conclusions applicable to the general election is silly. Do I believe that 20 percent or so of GOP voters care only about a no-tax pledge and are led like sheep to the polls if the mail and robocalls tell them what to do? Sure. Just as a small percentage of the extreme left is narrow-minded and easy to motivate.

But it is the inflexible and ideological voters who turn out in primaries, and they ended the political lives of Marvel, Allen and Beers. The only way to combat that phenomenon is money, which explains why Raggio survived against Angle, who is a former assemblywoman, erstwhile congressional hopeful and property tax revolt leader. Raggio raised 10 times as much campaign cash as Angle and that allowed him to retain Billy Rogers’ microtargeting operation, which drove up turnout and saved him.

Nevertheless, we did have to witness the grotesquerie of a legendary legislator begging for votes by declaring he won’t raise taxes — the same man who said he would never sign silly no-tax pledges. That goes to show that a minority, if vocal, can scare anyone, especially in unpredictable primaries.

The general election, though, is a different animal. The turnout likely will quintuple with the presidential race driving voters to the polls and diluting the impact of those who ousted the Assembly trio. That doesn’t mean the extremes on either side can be ignored, but they will not be the dominant part of the electorate, as they were Tuesday.

Most voters are less susceptible to button-pushing than those who cast ballots this week, so I am sure candidates will provide more thoughtful solutions for a state in crisis when they campaign during the next 80 days. Or is that just a flight of fancy, too?