Gov. Jim Gibbons (R)

Republican Jim Gibbons was elected governor of Nevada in 2006, the first from northern Nevada since Republican Robert List won election in 1978 and the first Nevada-born governor since Republican Paul Laxalt in 1966. Gibbons grew up in Sparks, next door to Reno, and like Bush strategist Karl Rove, was a graduate of Sparks High School. He graduated from the University of Nevada and served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. He went to law school and practiced law, but was also a mining geologist, a hydrologist, a pilot for Delta and Western airlines and vice commander of the Nevada Air National Guard. In 1988, he was elected to the Nevada Assembly and, two years later, was called up to active duty in the Gulf War. While he was flying unarmed air reconnaissance missions of enemy targets in Kuwait, his wife, Dawn Gibbons, took his place in the Legislature. After his celebrated return, he proposed a ballot initiative to require a two-thirds supermajority to raise any state tax; it passed with more than 70% of the votes in 1994. However, the law was suspended in 2003 when the state Supreme Court required the Legislature to pass Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn’s tax increase by a majority vote. In 1994, Gibbons ran for governor. He beat Secretary of State Cheryl Lau 52%-32% in the primary, but lost the general election to Democratic incumbent Bob Miller, 53%-41%. In 1996, after Republican Rep. Barbara Vucanovich retired, Gibbons ran for the 2nd District House seat and won, 59%-35%.

He served five terms, representing the sprawling and heavily Republican district, which covers most of the state’s land area and a small part of Las Vegas’s Clark County. He opposed federal intrusion on local rights, the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain and the proposed temporary storage at the Nevada Test Site. He showed an independent streak that placed him toward the center of the House on cultural issues. In August 2005, he announced he would run for governor to replace term-limited Guinn in 2006. He appeared to be the front-runner, but Dawn Gibbons sparked controversy by running to replace her husband in the House, raising objections that she would not be able to fulfill her duties as Nevada’s first lady. She lost the Republican primary.

In the contest for governor, Gibbons had to first prevail in the Republican primary, up against state Sen. Bob Beers, Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt and adult-movie star Melody Damayo. Beers ran a hard-hitting campaign with an anti-tax focus. Hunt spent nearly $800,000 of her own money. Damayo, using her stage name Mimi Miyagi, posted a racy campaign website. Gibbons campaigned as a fiscal conservative promising to make education a priority and won with 48% of the vote. Beers finished second with 29%, followed by Hunt, who had 18%. Damayo won 1%.

The Democratic nominee was state Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, a political science professor who represented the Las Vegas Strip and who had defeated Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, 54%-36%, in the primary. In Titus and Gibbons, the governor’s race featured approximate versions of the two Nevadas: Gibbons a native of northern Nevada, Titus a Southern-born migrant to Las Vegas. Titus sought to portray Gibbons as an “inconsequential” Washington backbencher and ran on a theme of the five “E’s”: economic development, education, energy, environment and ethics. She criticized Gibbons’s support for the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind education law and said full-day kindergarten would be one of her first priorities in office. Gibbons advocated merit pay for teachers and called Titus a tax-and-spend liberal, dubbing her “Dina Taxes.” He ran ads on Reno television saying, “Dina Titus called Washoe County a sponge and called us rascals who want handouts. Jim Gibbons calls Washoe County home and calls us neighbors and friends.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Gibbons suffered through a stretch of publicity so negative it is a wonder he won. In mid-October, a casino cocktail waitress filed a complaint alleging that he had propositioned and threatened to sexually assault her in a parking garage after an evening of drinking at a restaurant. Gibbons denied her account, contending that he merely caught her when she tripped. He called for the release of tapes from video cameras at the garage, but the videotapes failed to show either of them in the garage. In early December, the Las Vegas police recommended that no charges be filed. He also confronted disclosures that he had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny in the late 1980s. The Gibbons campaign accused Titus of instigating the release of embarrassing information. Then, less than one week before Election Day, The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2005 Gibbons took a weeklong Caribbean cruise that was paid for by entrepreneur Warren Trepp, a contributor whom the congressman had helped to win federal software contracts.

As a result of the negative bombardment, Gibbons’s lead in the polls dwindled. But he still managed to win, 48%-44%, outspending Titus $5.7 million to $3.6 million. He lost Las Vegas’s Clark County, where he trailed by 23,000 votes, but won everywhere else. He received enough votes in the capital of Carson City, in Reno’s Washoe County, and in fast-growing Douglas County to overcome Titus’s advantage in southern Nevada. She failed to break 41% anywhere outside of Clark County. Titus, who was later reelected as Senate minority leader, did not take defeat well. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he got indicted while in office,” she told The Las Vegas Sun.

Gibbons had a rocky start as governor. Citing unspecified homeland-security concerns, he was sworn in 12 seconds after midnight on January 1, a move widely viewed as an attempt to prevent outgoing Gov. Guinn from making an appointment to the Gaming Control Board. Early in 2007, The Wall Street Journal reported that a federal corruption inquiry into his relations with Trepp had been opened. Gibbons publicly speculated that the newspaper had been paid by Democrats to write the damaging stories. In March, The Journal reported that Dawn Gibbons had been paid $35,000 in consulting fees by a Sparks company that her husband was helping win contracts. In April, she filed for divorce and Gibbons sought a court order to remove her from the governor’s mansion. In June, it was reported that Gibbons had sent 867 text messages to another woman over his state-owned cellphone. Then it was reported that Gibbons and a state tax official had pressured the Elko County assessor to change the designation of a vacant parcel of land he owned from residential to agricultural, reducing his property taxes from about $5,000 to $15.

Gibbons’s job ratings fell, and so did the economy of what has been the nation’s fastest-growing state. It turned out that developers had overbuilt, and Nevada clocked the nation’s highest home-foreclosure rate. Gibbons, who had vowed not to raise taxes, asked legislators in November 2007 to find ways to cut $285 million in state spending. He was criticized for holding secret budget sessions in an effort to find more cuts. The chancellor of the state university system refused to submit lists of possible budget cuts, and Gibbons was booed at commencement ceremonies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The estimated revenue shortfall had ballooned to $800 million by March 2008. Gibbons ordered a 4.5% across-the-board cut in spending, and postponed the expansion of all-day kindergarten.

Gibbons also did himself no favors with Nevadans in July 2007, when he concurred with the state engineer’s decision to let the U.S. Department of Energy continue to use Nevada water for 30 more days to collect samples of data needed for licensing the enormously unpopular nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain. By mid-2008, Gibbons had become nearly radioactive himself, at least politically, and the John McCain presidential campaign made sure he was not present at its campaign events around the state. In early 2009, his re-election prospects were dimming.