Brown Appears to Lead Pack in Nevada

LAS VEGAS â€”  Nevada Democratic officials predicted that former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. would score his second victory of the presidential race Sunday with a first-place finish in the Nevada Democratic caucuses.

With more than half of the precincts reporting, Brown was leading with 32.3%. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was second with 27.9%, followed by former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas with 19.7%.

The withdrawal of Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey--and the apparently imminent departure of Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin--created some late confusion in the Nevada campaign that was reflected in Sunday’s contest when 18.6% of the caucus-goers voted for an uncommitted slate.

With Brown’s victory Sunday, voters continued to spread their wealth among the Democratic candidates as both Clinton and Tsongas scored first-place finishes on Saturday. Clinton won a primary in South Carolina and a caucus in Wyoming while Tsongas finished first in Arizona’s caucus.

The Republicans held their caucuses last month, but their delegates are not pledged to any candidates.

For Brown, the victory capped a strong week that saw his campaign gain credibility and outlast two opponents who had entered the race with high expectations. Brown started the week by winning the Colorado primary last Tuesday--triggering Kerrey’s withdrawal--and he scored strong second-place finishes in Utah and Wyoming.

“People are just starting to get it,� said Kevin Connor, Brown’s deputy campaign manager, who watched the Nevada returns. “We have a huge volunteer corps.�

In Nevada, Brown’s campaign attributed the governor’s success to former Kerrey supporters who switched when their candidate dropped out of the race on Thursday as well as to a strong showing from the biggest union in Las Vegas.

The day he withdrew, Kerrey was set to be endorsed by Culinary Local 226, representing 30,000 food service employees in Las Vegas. Instead, the union voted to back Brown one day after the ex-governor joined a picket line of striking casino workers and blasted their employer in a televised, face-to-face shouting match on the sidewalk.

“We threw our support behind Brown because he supported us,� said Kevin Kline, a Culinary Union member who formerly backed Kerrey. “I think Nevada is going to send a strong signal that this is our guy. He cares about us.�

The union support was especially helpful in Nevada because success in a caucus often depends more on a candidate’s organization than popular support. State Democratic Party Chairman Richard Segerblom said Brown’s union endorsement had “a major impact, no question about that.�

With Harkin dropping out of the race Sunday, the remaining candidates will scramble for the strong labor support that the Iowa senator had acquired. Brown is hoping that he will become the liberal alternative to Clinton and Tsongas and, as a result, that he will inherit the labor support before the campaign moves to the delegate-rich industrial states of the Midwest later this month.

Brown, who won the Nevada caucuses when he ran for President in 1976, had been expected to do well again after he got a Western boost from Colorado and because he had already demonstrated his ability to organize a caucus in Maine, where he finished in a virtual tie with Tsongas.

The environment also is a big issue among Nevada Democrats, and Brown staked out the issue by declaring the strongest opposition of any presidential candidate to a nuclear waste dump that the Department of Energy is planning to build in Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles north of Las Vegas.

Segerblom called it the “No. 1 political issue in Nevada.� Although none of the candidates endorsed the dump, only Brown said flatly that it should not be built. Clinton, Tsongas and Kerrey each said the government’s research on the proposed site was inadequate and it should be re-examined.

Before he dropped out of the race last week, Kerrey made Nevada a key part of his strategy to become the leading candidate in the West. His campaign had the biggest organization in the state and, when it collapsed, there was a major reshuffling of support that appeared to leave Brown as the biggest beneficiary.

Kerrey had the only campaign office in Nevada, and he had key endorsements from Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones and the state’s two Democratic senators in Washington--Harry Reid and Richard Bryan.

Both Clinton--who was backed by Nevada Gov. Robert Miller--and Tsongas were in the state last fall for campaign visits. They have not been back this year, but both mailed letters to Democratic voters and solicited endorsements from elected officials.

Even before Harkin’s withdrawal, the caucus was a three-way race that remained unpredictable until the final vote count. By Saturday, six rural Nevada counties had already held their caucuses and, with 160 ballots cast, Brown, Clinton and Tsongas were locked in a dead heat with 23% each.

Although Sunday’s caucus was not a major event in the presidential campaign schedule, Nevada Democrats were happy that the state got more attention from the candidates than it has in the past.

Previously, the state’s caucus--which selects 17 delegates to the national convention--was held on a Tuesday night, and in 1988 it was completely overshadowed because it fell on Super Tuesday, when a block of states hold their contests. The party recently moved its caucus to Sunday afternoon in hopes of getting more attention from the candidates and energizing local Democrats.

“The fun thing about this year is that we’ve got to see all of them,� Segerblom said.