Taxable Talk

Do you remember 1928? Well, that was the last time Nevada had a Republican governor, a Republican State Assembly, a Republican State Senate, and Republicans holding all major statewide offices. Well, 2015 will see that. As part of the tsunami nationally, any Republican that had a chance of winning won in the Silver State.

Coincidental with that, any measure which had the appearance of increasing taxes lost. The Margins Tax, supported by the Nevada Teachers Unions, was expected to lose by a 60% no vote. It got crushed, as the no vote was 78%. Nevadans don’t like the idea of state income taxes of any sort.

There was no Nevada senator on the ballot, but Democrat Harry Reid can’t be liking the results. He’ll remain Senate Majority Leader for the rest of 2014, but he will soon be Minority Leader. The GOP will likely hold 54 Senate seats come the next Congress.

The Nevada Congressional delegation to the House was split two Democrats, two Republicans. It will now be three Republicans as Democrat Steven Horseford lost his race.

The biggest shock was the State Assembly. No one predicted that the GOP would pick that up. The thoughts were that if this was a ‘wave’ election, Republicans might get to 21 of the 42 seats. The State Assembly will have at least 25 Republicans.

There was no surprise in that Republican Governor Brian Sandoval coasted to reelection. In the primary, “None of the Above” did better than his Democratic opponent. Governor Sandoval is hugely popular here in Nevada, and he is definitely a likely future Senator. Governor Sandoval won over 70% of the vote.

The Nevada legislature only meets every-other-year, so this election will have a big impact on coming policies. Nevada does have major issues: an education system that is poor, tax revenues that do need to grow, and major water issues. In the past, partisan bickering has been at a minimum in Carson City. We’ll see if having the GOP in charge of everything in the next term changes anything.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2014 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Nevada. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.