Nevada Republicans are a battered bunch.
Low on cash and plagued by infighting, the state GOP is engaged in a presidential calendar staring contest with New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner ? a contest it seems destined to lose.
Continue ReadingOn Saturday, the state GOP central committee will vote at a Las Vegas casino on whether to move the caucuses off its Jan. 14 date ? and also to determine the fate of their embattled chairwoman.
While the assumption among party elders in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., is that the party will move its caucuses to Feb. 4 to assuage New Hampshire ? as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus urged in a Thursday night letter ? each side stressed that no deal is in place.
Priebus offered nothing tangible to state GOP leaders when he visited Las Vegas this week for the debate and the Western Republican Leadership Conference, beyond a vague assurance the state can maintain its early status in 2016.
Of course, they were promised that this cycle, too.
Here is POLITICO?s guide to understanding what forces are at work in Saturday?s vote:
Cash
One reason the RNC has the sway that it does over the state party is that Nevada Republicans need the national money. State Democrats outraised them by a more than 4-1 clip in 2010, according to state campaign finance disclosure reports.
Priebus this week made the case to Nevada GOP leaders that the party can do better for itself financially and exert more influence on the process ? not to mention keep all its convention delegates ? if it moves to February.
Republican National Committeeman and former Gov. Bob List told POLITICO this week that, while he shared breakfast with Priebus, no deal was offered.
Asked if the RNC would be helping the state party raise money, List said: ?We certainly hope and expect that that will happen, but not in the context of this flap with New Hampshire. Nevada of course is a key state in the presidential election. I chair the budget committee for the RNC. I?m on executive committee there. We?re going to put money into states all across America, including Nevada.?
The cash component is no small matter.
When the executive committee, besieged with angry donors and grass-roots activists demanding to keep the third spot in line, it caved and went with the Jan. 14 date ? a date which state GOP chairwoman Amy Tarkanian openly disagreed with but was forced to defend. Then she found herself in a stare down with Gardner and is being forced to cave again. None of this is good for fundraising for a cash-poor state party.
Mitt Romney?s angle
Thinking it would win both contests and build early momentum, the Romney campaign originally wanted Nevada?s caucuses to follow the New Hampshire primary.
?Romney?s people were pushing for us to move into January so that he could get some momentum and have a rising tide going into Florida,? List told the Las Vegas Review-Journal earlier this month.
But once Gardner began playing hardball with Nevada, threatening to move his state?s primary into December if there was not one week between Jan. 10, his preferred date, and Jan. 14, a new picture emerged.
In the new, less-advantageous-to-Romney scenario, New Hampshire would vote in December, before the Iowa caucuses, which would then be followed by Nevada.
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