Just in case you’ve had enough of the caucus!

• Billionaire Strip casinos titans compare the relative sizes of their … buildings, here and here. Yawn.
  
• Yes, just how did a New York investment company buy up nearly a third of Sierra Pacific Resources? That is something we should probably take a look at, no?
  
• Suspended Judge Elizabeth Halverson hopes that not a single Clark County resident has picked up a newspaper in, say, the last six months or so.
  
• Oh, now that’s just bad luck. On the top of the Review-Journal’s business section front page on Friday, a story about how Nevada casinos posted their highest net income ever in fiscal year 2007: $2.3 billion. And right below it: A bunch of casino-enablers arguing that now, clearly, is no time to raise the gambling tax.
  
• Hey, you know what would be funny? If the teachers union totally took that page and made it into a flier supporting its initiative to raise the gambling tax!
  
• "These are negligent proposals by unqualified interest groups and I strongly believe they threaten the health and economic balance in our state." — Deutsche Bank gambling analyst Bill Lerner, on the teachers union’s initiative. But hey, you know what’s a totally  responsible proposal? Shitty schools. Those do wonders for the health and economic balance in our state.
  
• Who says the monorail people aren’t learning? In their latest statement about how they still are not making a profit, Vice President Ingrid Reisman avoiding using the term "marketing" to promise future successes, like she’s done for the past several years. This time, she said "promote."
• Mark our words: If the Clark County Commission doesn’t demand that Republic Services either pay for the cleanup of the Sunrise landfill OR surrender its franchise agreement (expiring in 2035), there should be recalls.
  

There were a few miscellaneous things about Nevada’s caucus that bear noting. Let’s do it, in our patent-pending Quick Hits format!

• The only real glaring error in the Las Vegas Sun’s coverage of the caucus was in a story Friday that noted blogger Hugh Jackson had endorsed former U.S. Sen. John Edwards for president, but failed to say where that endorsement had been rendered. It was in CityLife! 
• How many people can endorse U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton in a single newspaper? We’re not sure, but when we saw Janie Greenspun Gale’s column, we knew the Sun had found them all.
  
• And Brian Greenspun finally, after all these years of being perhaps the the most frustrated Republican in the history of the party, changed his voter registration so he could caucus for Clinton. What’s really amazing: He was a Republican through seven years of Bush?
  
• Mormons vote! And they vote for other Mormons! But according to our colleague Anjeanette Damon, evangelical Christians also voted for Mormon and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, although by not as large a margin. See? We told you Christians are just as willing to throw principle out the window in a fit of victorylust.
  
• Everybody is beating up on the Culinary Union Local 226, for endorsing U.S. Sen. Barack Obama and then engaging in a high-stakes, hard-fought battle to get its members to caucus for him on Saturday. Sure, the union lost (including at most of those Strip caucus sites that were so controversial). Sure, it’s a serious blow to the Culinary’s clout and political street cred. But how would Obama have fared without the union’s nod, better or worse?
  
• Then again, this doesn’t help: "The ability to move the knowledge of Sen. Obama through our membership was challenged due to the time element." — D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary, on the late endorsement of Obama. But couldn’t the Culinary have given Obama its backing weeks, if not months, ago?
  
• In order to recover the lost clout, says one anonymous Democrat, the Culinary needs to flex its muscles and show it can still turn out its members for a cause. Hey, Culinary, there’s a couple of state senators that Dina Titus needs to knock off to become majority leaders, see, and…
• OK, everybody. If you think that the Culinary, the SEIU, and the Nevada State Education Association are all going to play nice now that the caucus is over, raise your hand. Yeah, we didn’t think so…

It’s probably the one thing you won’t see written about in either the Review-Journal or the Sun this week, but the media war that played out over the caucus coverage was fascinating to watch. And, we are forced to say, it was won handily by the Sun.

(By way of full disclosure, we should report that we were formerly employed at the Sun from 1993-1997, and still have some friends over there. We also worked for the R-J, from 2000-2005 as the newspaper’s political columnist, and there’s a debate to this day over which paper is more sorry for having employed us. This blog, and the newspaper we now edit, CityLife, is owned by Stephens Media LLC, which also owns the R-J.)

Why do we say the Sun won? First, the newspaper flooded the zone with reporters, and good ones. These are journalists who’d been specializing in covering politics in general, and these candidates in particular, for a long time, including trips to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Second, the tone and texture of the stories clearly showed the expertise of the people writing them. The Culinary Union Local 226’s endorsement, and desperate quest, to make U.S. Sen. Barack Obama the winner of the caucus was examined in detail. The Sun got reporters into the Hillary Clinton campaign, to work on a strategy story to be published after the caucus was over, and that provided an inside view unavailable anywhere else. Conventional wisdom was kept to a minimum.

Third, the caucus came shortly after the Sun launched its redesigned, multi-media heavy, website, which proved invaluable in covering the race. It wasn’t just text and photos, but video and audio as well. The blogs gave reporters a chance to opine and break news, and readers a chance to reply.

It’s not to say the R-J didn’t put out a massive effort; the volume of the coverage was impressive, and there were angles in the R-J coverage that the Sun didn’t have. But overall, the Sun clearly has the more politically savvy crew. And it’s got something else: Freedom to ignore things the "paper of record" R-J still feels an obligation to cover. That and an obvious commitment to new media innovation set the Sun’s coverage apart from the R-J’s.

And another thing: The Sun was not was self-conscious. What was with the story at the top of the front page of the R-J’s Nevada section today, "Pollsters got it right this time"? There we read a justification of the Mason-Dixon poll published by the R-J on Friday predicting the outcome.

Yes, Mason-Dixon predicted the winners, Clinton for the Democrats and Republican Mitt Romney on the GOP side. But how can you call these results, as the R-J did, "pretty close"?

Clinton: The poll said she’d get 41 percent; she won 51 percent, off by 10 points.

Obama: The poll said he’d win 32 percent; he won 45 percent, off by 13 points.

John Edwards: The poll said he’d win 14 percent; he won 4 percent, off by 10 points.

Romney: The poll said he’d win 34 percent, he won 51 percent, off by 17 points.

Ron Paul: The poll said he’d win 7 percent, he won 14 percent, off by 7 points.

John McCain: The poll said he’d win 19 percent, he won 13 percent, off by 6 points.

Mike Huckabee: The poll said he’d win 13 percent, he won 8 percent, off by 5 points.

The poll’s margin of error? It was 4.5 percent. So "pretty close" might cover Huckabee, and McCain if you stretch it, but not of the rest.

The point of the story might have been to give Mason-Dixon pollster Brad Coker a chance to get this justification in: In a caucus, you poll the raw field, but can’t really predict the outcome, because people will switch sides when their candidate doesn’t become viable.

Notably, that caveat wasn’t included in Friday’s poll story, where it was reported that Mason-Dixon had been polling for the R-J since the early 1990s with "…a good record of accuracy in predicting election results." Instead of saying he might be off, Coker said this: "It certainly presents some interesting challenges, but I don’t think it’s impossible to do. It took a lot of work, but I think I figured it out. I’m pretty comfortable with the way we did it."

Well, which is it? Pretty comfortable, or subject to being wrong by, in at least one race, 3.7 times the margin of error?

Oh, the R-J also noted the Reno Gazette-Journal published a survey showing Obama ahead of Clinton 32-30, with 27 percent going to Edwards, clearly incorrect. Everybody makes mistakes, right? (We sure did.) But we suppose not everybody feels the need to justify those mistakes.

We already took full responsibility for our way-wrong predictions, printed in CityLife, on the Nevada caucus. But a few other notes are necessary before we can move on.

First, our apologies to U.S. Sen. Harry Reid. We were among those who laughed at him when he said 100,000 people would turn out for the Democratic caucus. When state Sen. Steven Horsford did that (way back in 2006!), party officials distanced themselves from him almost immediately. The figure was way too high, and they didn’t want a lesser turnout to be counted as a failure. Even Horsford was never heard to say it again.

So when Reid repeated that number on Nov. 13, the party again got nervous. What was Reid saying? They’d breathed a sigh of relief that everybody had forgotten the Horsford prediction, and here Reid was repeating it on a conference call with reporters! What was he thinking?

Reid was widely panned. But at the end of the day, he was the only one who knew what he was talking about. (Final turnout, according to a party news release: 116,000.)

About that news release, however. Party Deputy Executive Director Kirsten Searer wrote this: "The turnout of more than 116,000 Nevada Democrats is more than double the highest estimates, and almost 75 percent of Nevadans who caucused yesterday voiced their support for a Democrat. It is more than 12 times the turnout of 2004, when 9,000 Democrats attended the caucus."

More than double the highest estimates? But Reid’s estimate was 100,000, and double that would have been 200,000. Was this a sign that the party still dismissed what Reid said? Why were officials not counting his — and before him, Horsford’s — estimate?

We put the question to Searer in an e-mail Sunday and a phone call today, but thus far, no reply.

Not to take anything away from Searer and the rest of the crew working the Democratic caucus, however. They did a fantastic job, mostly behind the scenes. We were our usual skeptical, cynical selves, believing the contest wouldn’t generate the interest, the candidate attention or the public support that it did. And boy were we wrong, thanks to a combination of the split decisions in Iowa and New Hampshire; the MSNBC debate scheduled the week before the caucus; the battle of the unions between the Nevada State Education Association and the Culinary Local 226; and some outstanding organization by party staff and volunteers all across Nevada.

We’ll try not to make that mistake again.

UPDATE: Searer sent out a news release Jan. 24 announcing the final tally for the caucus was 117,599 Democrats, "about 30 percent of the registered Democrats in Nevada and 12 times more than the 9,000 Democrats who participated in 2004." The second release didn’t use the "more than double the highest estimates" language, but did contain some praise from eggheads saying the show of strength proves Nevada is now an early political player.