AP Writer Claims GOP is Avoiding 'Diverse' Nevada Electorate

Yesterday Newsbuster writer Seton Motley wrote a couple of articles about the blatant liberal bias that stinks up syndicated feeds and news reports coming out of the Associated Press.

As a testimony to the truthfulness of Motley's articles I perused the headlines from the rapidly changing AP RSS feed of their top political news and found that the tone of the teasers were less than ingratiating toward Republicans. The feeds at the time of this writing were full of adjectival editorializing that had a tendency to associate Republicans with negative phrases and words that connote a scrambling uphill path to victory. Where the Democratic race was being characterized as "tight" the Republican race was being characterized as "chaotic" and "uncertain".

Lest I read too much into AP headlines and their trite teasers I will simply illustrate with a case in point. Earlier the AP released an article that "reported" on the dust up between the Clinton campaign and the culinary workers unions in Nevada that endorsed Barack Obama. You would think that such an article would pretty much focus on the court case, having nothing to do with the GOP. But then again you'd be wrong. The AP writers are often unable to mention a controversy on the Democratic side without using it as a springboard to editorialize and infer some sort of trouble with the Republican side.

Somehow, amazingly, and obviously with the insight of a grade school child, Associated Press writer Kathleen Hennessey jumped from the issue of the Democratic lawsuit to making the claim that the GOP had all but abandoned Nevada by implying that Republican candidates have shunned the "diverse" Nevada electorate as it is an "unfamiliar electoral landscape".

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are in a statistical dead heat in polling here before Saturday's caucuses. And Nevada's sizable blocs of Hispanic, union and urban voters could provide an indicator of where the race is headed on Feb. 5, when hundreds of delegates will be awarded in states with significant minority populations.

By contrast, Republican candidates have stayed away from the diverse electorate and unfamiliar electoral landscape as Nevada voters weigh in earlier than ever before.

No major GOP candidate has set foot in the state for two months, and some Republicans are bracing for a possible surprise first-place showing by long-shot Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the only Republican to broadcast TV ads in Nevada.

The real contrast however can be seen in Kathleen Hennessey's latest report on the state of Nevada that she is now reporting as being "libertarian".

The prized position on the nominating calendar was an odd pick, organizers here soon learned.

With a transient population, a libertarian history and a work force with odd hours, Nevada is not a state prone to political enthusiasm. Just 9,000 Democrats caucused in 2004. Estimates for Saturday's turnout range from 30,000 to 100,000.

The claim that GOP candidates are avoiding Nevada out of some imagined diversity deficit is par for the course for the fact light Associate Press writers. Anybody can look at the history of Nevada politics and see that it is no stranger to GOP candidates. Nevada was a heavy GOP stronghold in its early days. A majority of the state's Governors were Republican throughout the 19th century and it switched back and forth between the GOP and Democrats often. The state has been a good landing ground for Democrats and Republicans alike. Thus, Nevada is anything but unfamiliar to the GOP.

To see how evenly divided the electorate in Nevada is we turn to real numbers. The Nevada Secretary of State has a breakdown of voter registration by party affiliation. It shows that as of December 2007 the state has 397,247 registered Democrats, 392,362 Registered Republicans and a small 5,843 registered libertarians. The bulk of Nevada's non Democrat or Republican voters are vote tilting independents that come in at 37,282 and non-partisan unaffiliated voters at a whopping 141,195 registrants. These are the people that AP writers are attempting to sway away from Republicans with their sweeping generalizations and questionable facts.

As for the AP's claim about the state's libertarian history I went back all the way to 2000 to find some indication that Nevada has some uncanny inclination to lean toward such voters. Instead I found out that Hennessey's demographic inference with the implication that Nevada's libertarian base is some sort of factor in the upcoming election is more fiction than fact. Whether or not the state leaned libertarian prior to 2000 would be of little consequence today.

Where Hennessey is getting her facts is a mystery to me. It looks as if she just needed some place to spout her anti-diverse Republican nonsense on a national platform. Who knows, perhaps she's warming up in preparation for the AP's spin in an upcoming election where every state's vote will be vitally important. But that's the AP for you. In this case I'd have to say that it's absolutely pathetic.

As a side note it's funny to see the New York Times take on GOP candidates that campaign in Nevada. Mitt Romney has decided to campaign in that state which has prompted the always open minded NYT reporters to opine that "the departure appears to signal that Mr. Romney is ceding South Carolina to three opponents." Another example of the catch 22 game of biased reporting that the mainstream media calls journalism.

Terry Trippany is the editor and publisher of Webloggin.