Nevada's gambling industry raises its presidential ante

Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani walked away from the Red Rock Casino with $100,000, courtesy of the owners of Station Casinos Inc., whose interests include Nevada and California gambling halls.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York gathered $320,000 in March at the Four Seasons Hotel on the Strip, the same place former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney celebrated his 60th birthday and collected $400,000, mostly from noncasino interests.

With Nevada holding early caucuses in January, such presidential hopefuls are paying unprecedented attention to the Strip. Whereas most tourists leave money here, most candidates leave here with money.

"We've had more presidential candidates here in 30 days than we had in 30 years," said Sig Rogich, a veteran Republican consultant and ad man who helped organize last month's fundraiser for McCain (R-Ariz.), held to coincide with the Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather Jr. championship fight.

Las Vegas being what it is, the hunt for campaign money has forged unlikely alliances and made for inconvenient bedfellows. It has put casino bosses in highly visible roles. And with casino ownership divided between traditional commercial interests and Native American tribes, some candidates are walking a fine line.

The casino industry has always played politics. But gambling's campaign role has grown since the 2000 election, as Indian casinos boomed, Wall Street became a big financier for the major casinos, gambling spread to 48 states, and gross U.S. wagering revenue soared to $85 billion annually.

In the 1990s, the industry accounted for $19 million in federal campaign donations. Since the beginning of 2000, the tally is $50 million, says the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks donations.

That includes funds from Indian casinos and the hotel-resort-casino mega-complexes here and elsewhere. It doesn't count other donors with a stake in gambling: Wall Street, labor unions, developers, strip club owners, restaurateurs, hoteliers and others feeding off the 39 million tourists and conventioneers lured here each year.

For political candidates, that's good fishing.