Around Las Vegas, could ‘None of These Candidates’ ballot line determine U.S. Senate control?

Posted on by November 12, 2022
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None of These Candidates

Portion of mail-in ballot in Las Vegas

Nevada elections are quirky, and that was true long before voters in the county immediately to the west of Las Vegas elected a dead pimp to the state Assembly. But two unusual provisions in Nevada election law–banning write-in candidates while affording voters the option in statewide primary and general races to formally choose “None of These Candidates”–might actually determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the U.S. Senate come next January.

That’s because (1) the Senate is now split 50-50, and (2) first-term Nevada incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto is in a surprisingly tight race with Republican Adam Laxalt. Pollsters now rate the contest a toss-up.

This is where None of These Candidates (NOTC) might come into play as the spoiler. It is an article of faith among political experts in Nevada that NOTC attracts far more upset Republican-leaning voters in general elections than it does upset Democratic-leaning voters. There even have been several contests in Nevada where NOTC has gotten more voters than all candidates. (How do you put that on the “winning” candidate’s resume?) NOTC votes are disregarded when determining the winner, but the law requires that the results for NOTC be included in every official voting tally. A public shaming, I suppose.

Think I am engaging in rank hypotheticals? In 1998, long before I became New To Las Vegas, Harry Reid, the incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator (and later majority leader) seeking a third term, won by a scant 401 votes over Republican John Ensign. NOTC received 8,011 votes, 20 times Reid’s margin of victory. Continue reading →

Las Vegas Review-Journal touts journalism awards but buries news of circulation drop

Posted on by October 12, 2022
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circulation dropThe coverage was hard to miss. “RJ sweeps top journalism awards,” screamed the headline stripped across the top of the regional news section cover of the print Las Vegas Review-Journal on Sunday, September 25. The story said the paper took “every top investigative and institutional award in the urban division” of the annual Nevada Press Foundation competition. The story jumped to two inside pages and was adorned by 29 photos of winning staffers. The pictures included Jeff German, the investigative reporter murdered just three weeks earlier allegedly by an elected official he was writing about.

But the previous Sunday’s paper had information at least equally significant about the RJ that was much, much harder to find. It was buried in a legal notice itself buried at the right-bottom corner of page 8-G of the real estate section, near classified ads for a missing parrot, taxi driver openings and the sale of “top XXX DVDs.” In effect the RJ fessed up to yet another year of paid circulation declines, leaving the count at barely a quarter of what it was when present ownership assumed control in 2015, the year before I became New To Las Vegas.

The RJ published the data, officially called the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation, only because it’s a condition of having a second-class mailing permit allowing lower postage for subscriptions. This is the same kind of government subsidy the paper’s conservative editorial pages regularly bash when offered to, say, ordinary folks in the form of entitlements. (A few years back, the paper published the annual statement so full of typos it violated the requirement that it be truthful and had to publish a corrected version a week later.) Continue reading →

Forbes 400 members in Las Vegas rise 50%–to three

Posted on by September 28, 2022
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Forbes 400 list in Las VegasWay back in 1892, the highly influential New-York Tribune published the first-ever list of the richest Americans. And what a roster it was: an astonishing unranked compilation of the 4,047 persons the paper’s editors thought were “reputed to be worth a million or more.” (Based on the per-capita share then of the total U.S. economy, that’s the equivalent now of $1.5 billion each.)

But despite its scope–1 out of every 6,300 adult Americans and more than 10 times the number of swells that Malcolm Forbes nearly a century later starting in 1982 would call the Forbes 400–the Tribune list included no one living in Nevada. Why? “The enormously valuable silver mines of Nevada have laid the foundation of a large number of private fortunes,” the Tribune explained. “But the possessors of them now live in other states, the majority in San Francisco and New York City.”

They certainly didn’t live in Las Vegas. It was not yet a city and barely a place. Eight years later at the 1900 census the total population was recorded as a mere 18 (all of whom can be viewed on this single census enumeration page). The entire state population was just 42,000.

The New-York Tribune, which never again published such a rich list, is long out of business. But Forbes magazine is still around. The 41st edition of the Forbes 400 was published yesterday. The number of folks included from the Las Vegas area rose from last year by 50%.

To all of three.

That’s a shadow of the high point in 2016, the year I became New To Las Vegas, when nine folks from the area made the famous roster. Since then, failure to keep up with other fortunes, often technology-generated, has helped to take its toll on the local count. Continue reading →

Wide coverage of reporter’s murder reflects Las Vegas reputation

Posted on by October 25, 2022
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Las Vegas reputation

The New York Times, front page, Sunday, September 11, 2022

The murder of a working journalist anywhere is big news. This is especially true when it appears the motives were anger with past investigative reporting and a desire to stop future investigative reporting.

But as I have written in this space, bad things that take place in Las Vegas often get more attention elsewhere simply because of Las Vegas’s reputation for–bad things. I think that might help explain this headline and its display yesterday about the murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, allegedly at the hands of a terribly obscure elected official, on the most prominent and prestigious media venue in the world, the front page of the Sunday edition of The New York Times:

Violent End to a Career Exposing Las Vegas Sins 

Editors, I think, love putting derivations of the word “sin” in close proximity to “Las Vegas” and then playing them up. By contrast, 45 years ago, The Times reported the June 2, 1977, bombing in Phoenix of investigative reporter Don Bolles of the Arizona Republic the next day on page 47, and his death 11 days later, equally buried on page 34. A veteran investigative reporter like German, Bolles was only investigating Mafia connections, of which Phoenix–like the Las Vegas of old–had plenty.

I don’t mean to pick just on The Times. If anything, the Las Vegas citizenry has only itself to blame for this kind of media treatment. After all, it was the publicly funded Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority that about 20 years ago came up with the wildly successful marketing slogan, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” The alluring motto all but invited external media to see what was going on here. Of course, that also meant what happens here wouldn’t stay here for too long, as I have detailed in a series of reports entitled “It Didn’t Stay Here,” a list of which can be found elsewhere on this page.

History plays a big role in imaging. In 2018 ex-UNLV teacher Jonathan Foster published a book that identified Las Vegas as a “stigma city,” which he defined as a place whose perceived qualities “reside outside of a society’s norms at a given time.” Even today, Los Vegas promotes its mobbed-up past as a tourist draw, with restaurants and monuments named for killers and the government-backed Mob Museum in the downtown area. Indeed, in my view, as someone New To Las Vegas, the locals generally remain proud of their stigma. Continue reading →

Another iffy police fundraiser in Las Vegas flouts Nevada law

Posted on by August 30, 2022
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iffy police fundraiserThe caller to the New to Las Vegas world headquarters identified himself as Brian Hill. The purpose: to solicit a contribution for National Police Support Fund PAC, which he described as an organization to bolster law enforcement.

I cut to the chase. A new Nevada law requires fundraisers in the state working on behalf of law enforcement causes to register and make filings, I said. Are you registered to solicit in Nevada?

“Hold on a sec,” the caller replied. There was a pause. “Hold on.”

Then “Brian Hill” hung up on me.

I’m using quotes around the name because Brian was not a real person. Rather, I was hearing a realistic-sounding voice generated by a computer monitored by an anonymous supervisor using what is known as soundboard technology. But the hang-up hardly surprised me. I’ve gotten calls before from “Brian Hill,” and I’ve researched NPSF, which is based in Arlington Va. It is not registered to cold-call in Nevada, according to the website of the Nevada Secretary of State. But in this minimal government state, I don’t expect authorities to do anything about that. When it comes to Carson City, what they say isn’t always what they do.

Moreover, from what I can tell from its filings, NPSF has terrible financial efficiencies, spending the overwhelming bulk of the money raised in raising it, leaving very, very little to further the stated mission. Would-be donors, of course, are not told this. There is no shortage of withering commentary on the Internet about NPSF, although not so much on financial matters. The criticism is tempered a bit by posts suggesting the outfit does actually advocate for cops, even if not a lot in my judgement given the amount of money raised.

The PAC in the name stands for political action committee, meaning NPFS is not a charity although its pitch on the phone about helping police officers might make you think it is. This accounts for some of the expressed hostility. Continue reading →