(Chuck Muth) – Greetings from cold and snowy Lake Tahoe, where I’m attending a conference of conservative state leaders hosted by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.
And interestingly enough, it’s being held at the same resort where the infamous Donald Trump/Stormy Daniels brouhaha took place! Only in Nevada.
OK, before getting into the meat of the disaster that was the GOP’s failed effort to pick up seats in the state Assembly, I forgot to mention in the last newsletter two huge victories on ballot questions.
Question 3 – Rigged Choice Voting – went down in flames and is now dead, dead, dead. Question 7 – requiring photo ID to vote – was passed overwhelmingly. It needs to pass again in 2026, and the Left will come after it big time. But I have confidence it will pass again.
Now, on with the show…
In the State Assembly, Republicans needed to flip one seat – while holding two GOP seats the D’s targeted with a pair of Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager’s scam PACs – to get out of their super-minority.
They held the two easily and flipped Assembly District 35. So in that regard, mission accomplished. But here are the nine other “battleground” seats that Republicans SHOULD have flipped…
- Assembly District 8
- Assembly District 9
- Assembly District 12
- Assembly District 21
- Assembly District 25 (Washoe)
- Assembly District 29
- Assembly District 34
- Assembly District 37
- Assembly District 41
If they had, Republicans would have won the MAJORITY in the Assembly, 24-18. Heck, even if they’d only won 6 of the 9, they’d have still be in a 21-21 tie.
Now before proceeding, let me explode a pair of myths when it comes to campaigns…
1.) You do NOT have to match the Democrat opponent dollar-for-dollar. You just need enough money to have the right message delivered to the right audience at the right time.
Note: Kamala Harris outraised Donald Trump by a factor of better than 2-1.
2.) Armchair “experts” who look at the viability of races based solely on voter registration numbers have no idea what they’re talking about.
It’s FAR more important to look at likely turnout numbers and what non-partisans – who now make up about a third of the battleground districts – are likely to do or can be persuaded to do.
OK, with that out of the way, let’s look at how the GOP candidates did in these battleground Assembly races.
These races were generally split into two tiers by the political establishment based on the perception of which ones had the best chances of being flipped – alas, based mostly on the voter registration numbers (see #2 above).
Tier 1 races got fundraising assistance, opposition research, polling, endorsements, ground support, and independent expenditures. That level of support was not provided to the Tier 2 candidates.
And with the exception of the lone race that was won, Rebecca Edgeworth in Assembly District 35, the Tier 1 candidates were all assigned the same campaign manager and forced to use that campaign manager’s vendors for mail, digital advertising, etc.
It’s the Golden Rule of politics: He who has the gold, makes the rules. So the Tier 1 candidates who got substantial funding weren’t allowed to work with their own consultants or advisors.
OK, so here are the battleground districts, the Republican candidates, and the percentage of the vote each got…
- Assembly District 8 (Tier 2): Kelly Chapman: 46.42%
- Assembly District 25 (Tier 1): Diana Sande: 46.49%
- Assembly District 34 (Tier 2): Brandon Davis: 46.75%
- Assembly District 29 (Tier 1): Annette Dawson Owens: 47.85%
- Assembly District 37 (Tier 1): David Brog: 48.69%
- Assembly District 9 (Tier 2): Erica Neely: 48.89%
- Assembly District 21 (Tier 1): April Arndt: 49.27%
- Assembly District 12 (Tier 2): Nan Roecker: 49.56%
- Assembly District 41 (Tier 1): Rafael Arroyo: 49.64%
Just look at those numbers. All three-and-a-half percentage points or less. So much for the “experts” who said some of these seats were “plus 5” and “plus-7” districts that couldn’t be won.
NONE of these candidates had ever run for a general election legislative seat before, yet they still came within a whisker of pulling off an upset.
ALL of these races should have been Tier 1 races. Or if there were going to be Tier 2 races, they should have at least been given SOME support, even if not as much as the Tier 1 races.
Now, are you ready to get really p*ssed off?
Take a look at the fundraising numbers. Here’s how much money, in order, each campaign raised, including in-kind donations, through September 30, 2024, per their Campaign and Expense (C&E) reports filed with the Secretary of State…
TIER 1
Diana Sande: $413,712
David Brog: $282,466
Annette Dawson Owens: $186,270
April Arndt: $182,005
Rafael Arroyo: $121,903
And that doesn’t include the tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of dollars that were spent on the Tier 1 races through independent expenditures.
The donors who were directed to give to those campaigns did not get a very good return on investment. They should be furious.
TIER 2
Nan Roecker: $76,604
Brandon Davis: $61,543
Kelly Chapman: $34,179
Erica Neely: $29,098
This is just unbelievable.
Chapman raised only around $34,000 and got 46.42% of the vote, while Sande raised almost $414,000 and got 46.49% of the vote…a difference of only 0.07%!!! And Neely, with just $29,000, did a little better than Brog with over $282,000.
While Brog lost by 1,064 votes, Erica lost by only 775. And she was running against the ASSEMBLY SPEAKER.
Arroyo raised six figures and was the least funded of the Tier 1 candidates. Yet he came within just 257 stinking votes of knocking off the Democrat Assembly MAJORITY LEADER!
So don’t even try to tell me these races weren’t winnable. Every single one of them was.
But again, this was NOT the candidates’ fault.
All of the Tier 1 candidates raised over $100,000 going into the final month of the campaign. That should have been more than enough. They did their jobs.
But they had little to no control over the management of their own campaigns because of the Golden Rule.
The GOP party establishment – and I’m particularly talking about the Assembly Republican Caucus, which didn’t officially endorse the four Tier 2 candidates until THREE MONTHS after the June primary – should have directed donors to put at least a little money into the Tier 2 races.
I have no doubt – when looking at how differently the Tier 2 candidates ran their races from the Tier 1 races – that all four of them would have won if each had gotten just an additional $25,000.
So if it wasn’t the candidates’ fault, whose was it?
To answer that question, I’ll refer you to the three Muth’s Truths I teach at the beginning of my Campaign Boot Camps…
- Muth’s Truths #1: It’s not the best candidate who wins, but the best campaign.
- Muth’s Truths #2: Campaigns aren’t about politics; they’re about marketing.
- Muth’s Truths #3: There is more incompetence in the field of political consulting than in any field other than TV psychiatry.
Every one of these “battleground” candidates was a good candidate. Exceptional, really.
But the campaign strategy and messaging set by the Tier 1 campaign consultants was clearly off. You just can’t run a state Assembly race like a congressional race or a statewide race. Local issues matter.
And you have to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. That clearly didn’t happen in the Tier 1 races – except for Edgeworth.
And that’s also not the candidates’ fault. They were just following the direction set for them by their assigned campaign consultant. Ugh.
I want to close this out by exploding one more myth often peddled by some consultants, campaign managers, and well-intentioned but ill-informed activists.
They have an old saying: “You walk, you win. You don’t, you won’t.”
This “bumper sticker” conventional wisdom sounds good, but is pure BS. This is 2024, not 1974. There’s a reason people don’t sell pots and pans and vacuum cleaners and magazines door-to-door any longer.
Walking and knocking on doors simply for the sake of walking and knocking on doors as a substitute for other campaign “advertising” ain’t gonna cut it.
And I know most of these candidates walked their butts off. Hours upon hours, almost every day, for months. And they STILL lost races which obviously were winnable.
Simply knocking on a lot of doors is NOT an indicator of a candidate or campaign’s viability. It just isn’t.
In addition, we’re killing our candidates by pressuring them to walk eight hours a day, seven days a week, when they could be/should be doing things that are far more effective.
Anybody ever heard of the Internet, podcasting, and social media? Donald Trump sure has!
I’ve managed two recent Assembly races where the candidates didn’t/couldn’t walk. One didn’t knock on a single door because of a bad knee. The other was only able to walk on a very limited basis because of COVID.
And both won against well-funded incumbent opponents. In fact, the one with the bad knee won with over 60% of the vote – even though he DIED three weeks before the election!
I’m not saying walking is “bad” or that it can’t be helpful. But it has to be done strategically at the right time to the right audience with the right message.
I hope the candidates who ran in these nine battleground Assembly districts decide to run again in 2026. As veteran political strategist Roger Stone wrote in his book, Stone’s Rules…
“First-time candidates, if they are smart, are much more effective in their second bid for public office. … Running a losing effort teaches a candidate how the political system and the media work and prepare them to be a better candidate.
“Losing sharpens a candidate’s skills. … A candidate who bounces back from a first-race loss and returns to the field a more skilled candidate, hungry enough to put themselves through another campaign grind, is the next best thing to an incumbent running either for reelection or for another public office.”
The Tier 2 candidates would just need a little more support. Not a lot more. Just enough to tilt the balance.
The Tier 1 candidates just need better campaign strategy, management, messaging, and advertising than what they got this time out.
If Donald Trump could come back and win the presidency despite everything that was thrown at him, ANYTHING is possible.
So any campaign “professional” or political “expert” who tells you Republicans can’t win the majority in the Assembly in 2026 should sit down, shut up, and get the hell out of the way.
Or as George Bernard Shaw more nicely put it, “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”
Mr. Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, publisher of Nevada News & Views and blogs at MuthsTruths.com. His views are his own.