Democrat:
530,752
IAP/NP:
280,147
These voter registration numbers prove that the Nevada Republican Party slogan has to be much more
than words on a page – we have to live it. When we get our entire team pulling together, we’re still
100,000 voters behind. That’s why every time we’ve practiced the politics of
division we’ve lost, badly.
I’ve seen people in every faction of this party behave
badly from time to time over the past several years. Many of us have
offended others, and almost all of us have been offended by somebody. Our greatest strength as a party is that we think independently, yet if we're not careful this can also be our greatest weakness. Its up to all of us to treat our fellow Republicans with civility and respect, regardless of whether or not we agree on a particular issue.
We’ll never agree 100% on everything, but we
have core values that unite us all, regardless of factions. It’s time to focus
on our similarities, rather than our differences, and elect a majority of legislators that will back these principles. We cannot affect policy until we have a majority, and having a majority does no good if those in the majority don't support the right principles. The good news is that the same candidates that we need to gain a majority are the same ones that will govern best once they're in office.
The 2013 NPRI legislative ranking shows the alternatives. 75% of our Republican legislators scored above 50%, the line that divides those fighting for economic liberty from those that want to expand government's interference in our lives. The alternative to this team was the Democrats, all but one of whom scored below 50%. Does the overall score of our legislature need improvement? Absolutely - but we do it by recruiting more people for our team that will follow the example set by our top ten: Assemblymen Michele Fiore, Jim Wheeler, John Ellison, Wes Duncan, Pete Livermore, John Hambrick and Ira Hansen, as well as Senators Don Gustavson, Barbara Cegavske and James Settelmeyer. We cannot win by letting more Democrats slide into office while we're distracted by fighting each other.
That doesn't mean that the "Big Tent" should be nothing more than a bunch of people in a tent with
nothing in common. We should never abandon our core principles – in fact, Republicans raising taxes and growing the size of government has driven thousands of grassroots Republicans from the party over the last decade. In that time, the non-partisan share of the pie has grown at the expense of the GOP. The Democrat share has stayed very constant, as has the share of the GOP and IAP/NP combined. How many of these disaffected IAP and Non-Partisan voters can we get back on the team if we’ll just follow Governor Scott Walker’s example and stand firm on core principles?
Will you join me in building a culture of unity in the
Nevada GOP, so that we can play with a full team and win in 2014 and beyond?
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