"You're going to have candidates begging the governor not to come into their district because he'll make things worse," Muth says.
The state's libertarian streak allows public officials leeway for personal blunders. After New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was linked to a prostitution ring, for example, publications here wondered whether a Nevada governor would resign over similar indiscretions.
"If that occurred in Nevada," wrote columnist Jane Ann Morrison in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "Spitzer might have taken his wife's advice and contended sex with a prostitute is 'personal' and doesn't affect his governing."
A laissez-faire electorate helped Gibbons secure the governorship. Just weeks before the election, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress accused him of trying to force himself on her in a parking garage; authorities declined to file charges. Dawn held the governor's hand at a news conference, where he reminded reporters, "I'm a happily married man, a father and a grandfather."
Nevadans might also have shrugged off his wife's recent allegations had his 18 months in office been less acrimonious. The Silver State is struggling with plummeting revenue and a population that has more than doubled since 1990, but it's a rare day when the governor makes headlines about policy.
He put a Yucca Mountain supporter on a commission tasked with fighting the proposed nuclear dump. He dismissed the outcry over a hepatitis C outbreak as the result of media "buffoonery," though his statements since have been sympathetic.
The FBI is investigating whether he took gifts from a defense contractor while serving in Congress. Photos of the governor on a contractor-hosted cruise show him giving a woman bunny ears and wearing a white cloth napkin as a bandanna. During the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, he belittled his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Dina Titus, as "Dina Taxes." Now critics are chastising him for refusing to consider tax hikes: The state is facing an almost $1-billion shortfall.
"He's stubbed his foot a lot, so politically this was very, very poor timing," said David Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "It seems kind of tone-deaf to file for divorce, but that's kind of his style."
Jim and Dawn, 54, met on a blind date. He was a pilot who had served in Vietnam, and she ran the Heart of Reno and Starlite wedding chapels. In two decades together, they became Nevada's top political couple. She served in the state Assembly. He spent five congressional terms representing mainly Reno, Carson City and the "cow counties."
