The saga of the state Senate recall elections continues in the Silver State: Election officials just announced that the petition to recall a second Democrat, state Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro, exceeded the required number of signatures (albeit by margin of just 43), meaning the recall process will move forward. That follows the petition against Democratic Sen. Joyce Woodhouse, which was ruled sufficient in early November. Democrats had previously sued to challenge that signature count, and they will likely follow suit with Cannizzaro.
But now we also know a fun fact about these Republican efforts to force capricious elections: They’re being bankrolled well into the six figures by a D.C. campaign committee.
The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) works to elect GOP candidates to state offices, including legislatures. Typically the committee confines its efforts to actual scheduled elections, but now we know it’s heavily invested in gathering the thousands signatures required to recall three women state senators in Nevada.
Two of these senators, Woodhouse and Cannizzaro, are Democrats, while Sen. Patricia Farley left the GOP and began caucusing with Democrats this year. Both Woodhouse and Cannizzaro won their election last fall and shouldn’t be on the ballot again until 2020, while Farley is retiring and not running for re-election in 2018.
Republicans are understandably worried about flipping the chamber back from its effective 12-9 Democratic majority in November 2018. Only three of the 10 seats that will be up next year are held by Democrats, and all three went decisively blue in 2014. At the same time, of the six Republicans up in 2018, one represents a Clinton seat (51-43 percent), making it tough turf to defend.
So, faced with a brutal midterm map, Republicans are pushing for recalls. Of course, they aren’t arguing that any of these recalls are necessary because of high crimes, misdemeanors, or any other malfeasance or misconduct on the part of their targets. They’re doing this for purely partisan purposes, because they know they can’t win a Senate majority in the 2018 general election.
Fortunately, one of these recall schemes has already failed. The RSLC was the sole donor to the effort to recall Farley, to the tune of $160,000. That petition didn’t get anywhere near the 7,342 signatures it needed, so Republicans shifted $118,000 from the Farley gambit to the recall efforts for Woodhouse and Cannizzaro. (The RSLC may have also contributed directly to the Woodhouse and Cannizzaro efforts, but we won’t know until those recall committees file finance reports.)
While both of those recalls currently appear to be moving forward, they both face procedural and legal challenges. If these recalls do indeed proceed, elections will likely be held by the spring. The RSLC’s involvement belies recall supporters’ assertions that these recalls are about Nevadans and the issues that impact them. These recalls are a clear top-down, GOP-engineered effort to hijack a Senate majority they know they can’t win honestly in November.