One Last Thing: Weird factors make Nevada voting special

LAS VEGAS - By now, you know the results of the Nevada caucus. Lucky you. At the time of this writing, I didn't. But it's worth reviewing some background to understand why this first-in-the-West Democratic caucus was such a profoundly weird event.

Nevada is simply a very strange state. But it's not without its harbingers for the rest of the country. Some of these include an increasingly complex demography, the home-foreclosure fiasco, union politics, and the domination of one particular free-market industry as wicked as sin. If you can't say Nevada is a microcosm of America, you can say it's America through the fun-house mirror.

To begin with, the state has a strange population structure. Nevada covers about 110,000 square miles, but holds just 2.5 million people; 2 million of them live in the Las Vegas metro area. Only 59 percent of Nevadans are white. African Americans make up 7.2 percent of the population, Asians 5.8 percent and Hispanics 24.2 percent. In a Democratic contest, those minorities will probably make up a disproportionately larger part of the vote.

Nevada has other quirks. There are the gambling and the prostitution, of course. But Nevada has its own pet political issues, too - its versions of Iowa's ethanol obsession. Yucca Mountain, the site of the proposed U.S. spent-nuclear-fuel repository, is the longest-standing.

The second is of a more recent vintage - home foreclosures. Las Vegas grew the biggest housing bubble in the country during the last decade. Between 2004 and 2005, for instance, homes appreciated at well above 25 percent in year-on-year terms every single month. Think your bubble was bad? Between May 2003 and May 2004, prices in the Las Vegas metro area jumped 55 percent. By late 2006, the bubble was bursting. Proposed building projects disappeared, condos already under construction were switching to rentals, and prices were plummeting. As a result, Nevada led the nation in foreclosure rates through most of 2007, and the number of foreclosures is expected to keep rising.

That might be why, faced with a surging Barack Obama in the final days of Iowa, Hillary Rodham Clinton introduced a plan to put a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and a five-year freeze on adjustable mortgage rates. Perhaps she was reconciling herself to a long fight and wanted to seed the ground here.

And then there's one other tiny thing: gambling. To get a sense of how important gambling - excuse me, "gaming" - is to Nevada, all you have to do is look around at the infrastructure. Roads are perfectly maintained; most of the big public projects, such as stadiums and the airport, look like they were built yesterday.

The casinos are staffed by members of the Culinary Workers Union, which has 60,000 members in Nevada. Here's why that number matters: In 2004, Nevada's caucus was held after the nomination had already been decided for John Kerry. So only 9,000 voters came out to caucus. But this year, Nevada jumped up on the calendar to a spot of some importance, and as of midweek Democratic Party officials were thinking that 45,000 people might caucus. The Culinary Workers were expected to be a gigantic part of that vote. And they endorsed Obama.

The culinary union is so powerful that when the state Democratic Party was planning its caucus, it agreed to place nine of the caucus sites, which officials figured would account for 10 percent of the total vote, in casinos. The move was designed to help culinary workers get to the midday caucus. That's right: Stroll right past the slots at the Bellagio and into democracy!

When the casino caucus sites were first designated, the Clinton campaign was foursquare in favor of them because it presumed that Clinton would get the culinary union's endorsement. When the endorsement went to Obama, forces tangentially aligned with Clinton tried to get a court to shut the casino caucuses down - a fight that went on for most of last week before the suit failed. That's Nevada politics.

There was one other huge factor in this Wild West caucus: no worthwhile advance polling. The major pollsters stayed far away from Nevada because the prospect of a 500 percent increase in turnout - with new caucus locations - meant it was nearly impossible to construct a model of "likely voters."

So even though Clinton and Obama contested Nevada pretty seriously, they were without the benefit of even good internal numbers, making it a bit like boxers swinging at each other in the dark.

As I said at the top: You already know how this story ends. I don't. Ultimately, Nevada neither makes nor breaks anyone's candidacy. But to get a sense of what really happened, look at the exit-poll numbers and pay special attention to three cross-tabs: (1) college-educated women; (2) incomes under $50,000; and (3) the Hispanic split. Those numbers will tell you a lot more about Clinton's and Obama's chances going forward than the straight-up winner/loser result will.

Next stop: South Carolina.