The Nation - Nevada not feeling the 2008 campaign love - Though caucuses are in two months, candidate visits have been few.
PAHRUMP, NEV. — With the Nevada caucuses just over two months away, Mom's Diner would seem to be the perfect spot for a presidential candidate to stop and mingle for the TV cameras.
There are four booths, seven tables, country music on the radio and a welcome mat hanging on a bright yellow wall that reads, "Well butter my butt, call me a biscuit -- look who's here."
Unfortunately for diner owner Tracie Oien, no one who is running for president has been here.
More vexing for Oien, a Republican, is the fact that no GOP presidential candidate has shown up to campaign in this conservative enclave an hour north of Las Vegas -- but three Democratic contenders have.
All of this has Oien concerned that the Jan. 19 caucuses could turn out to be a bust, and that the state could go to the Democrats in the 2008 general election.
"It's really galling me," Oien said during a lull between the breakfast and lunch crowds. "As angry as people are with the president, you'd think the Republicans would be pushing [their candidates]. But it seems like they're laying back in the weeds."
When the Nevada Democratic and Republican parties decided to move their caucuses to Jan. 19, they gambled that the major presidential contenders would have to campaign in the West, where voters were believed to be concerned about such regional issues as water rights, management of federal lands and a proposal to bury nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain.
But it hasn't worked out that way. Polls show that Nevadans are most concerned about the same problems as the rest of the country -- the war in Iraq, healthcare, national security and immigration reform.
And even with today's Democratic debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas -- the third Democratic forum in the state; the GOP has held none -- candidate visits have been few compared with other sanctioned early-voting states. According to the Washington Post's Campaign Tracker, candidates have visited Nevada 162 times this year, compared with Iowa's 1,654, New Hampshire's 806 and South Carolina's 349.
And in delegate- and cash-rich California, candidates have visited 297 times, and the state doesn't vote until Feb. 5.
Still, the Democratic candidates have been paying more attention to Nevada than the Republicans, including campaigning in the Republican-dominated "rurals" like Nye County.
