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I watched and fact-checked Debra March’s ad so you wouldn't have to

David Colborne
David Colborne
Opinion
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Primary season is upon us. 

Turn off your televisions. Disconnect your wireless routers. Caulk your doors. Apply at least two layers of aluminum foil to all windows. Unplug your doorbells. Check the expiration dates on your canned goods. Stock at least 15 bandages per resident in your household. Collect and store at least one gallon of water per household member per day. Bury, cremate, or dissolve your mailbox via alkaline hydrolysis. Place your mobile computing device in a bag of rice and microwave both for three to five minutes. Burn any wheat and wheat byproducts. 

Primary season is upon us.

I don’t wish to alarm you, dear reader, but we have entered that ever-expanding period in American political discourse during which candidates from each political party scream to all foolish enough to listen. They shriek about how loyal they are to ingroup members like you. They vent about how perfidious members of the outgroup are. They moan about how, unlike you and them, so many members of the ingroup secretly yearn to join the outgroup. They boast about how, once elected, they shall banish all members of all outgroups to Outer Darkness, where the banished shall be denied the warm, soft glow of civilization’s light.

Then, as soon as the primaries are over and the votes from all ingroups have been tallied, the winners of the primary elections will suddenly be afflicted with a curious form of amnesia. Ingroups? Outgroups? Outer Darkness? Look, when they promised to separate the demonic Morlocks from the beatific Eloi, they didn’t mean it like that — what they meant was…

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. General election season is soon, yes, but it’s not upon us just yet. No need to borrow trouble. For now, while we do our level best to insulate ourselves from the madness of the primaries, let us amuse ourselves by carefully analyzing a campaign advertisement. 

The chief point to understand about campaign advertisements is that a candidate takes less than five seconds to lie — exposing each lie and explaining why it’s a lie, however, takes at least five minutes. It is, in other words, a videotaped Gish Gallop, during which campaigns make as many claims as they can, whether they’re true or otherwise, and leave the exhausting job of checking their work to their viewers. Fewer than 100 words of advertising copy, then, can require more than 2,000 words to rebut (this, readers, is called foreshadowing).

As this is an opinion column, it won’t be a bloodless fact-checking — there will be opinion and snar) as well. Unlike those who make campaign ads, however, I will be citing my sources and showing my work so you know exactly where everything went horribly, horribly wrong.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

***

It’s rare for incumbents to be threatened by meaningful primary challenges. Consequently, as most elected officials in Nevada are Democrats this year, there aren’t many meaningful primary challenges coming from that side of the aisle.

One exception, however, is the race for lieutenant governor, where the current incumbent, Lisa Cano Burkhead, only raised a bit more than half of what Henderson Mayor Debra March raised last quarter and is well behind several Republican candidates in cash on hand. A possible source of Burkhead’s struggles are perhaps because she was appointed, not elected, to the position — Kate Marshall, the originally elected incumbent, accepted an appointment as the senior advisor to governors in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs within the Biden administration last summer. Four months later, Gov. Sisolak appointed a replacement — but not before March announced her run for lieutenant governor and received an endorsement from the chair of the Nevada State Democratic Party.

Even so, the amount of money either Democratic candidate has been able to raise so far is miniscule compared to the money being raised in higher profile federal races. The slightly less than $140,000 raised by Cano Burkhead and the $257,000 raised by March in the last quarter both pale in comparison to the $1.1 million raised by Sam Brown during the same time period in his senatorial campaign. His fundraising totals, in turn, are substantially lower than those enjoyed by both his primary and likely general election opponent, should he find some daylight around Adam Laxalt. 

Consequently, neither lieutenant governor candidate has much money for flashy media spending.

Still, it’s the closest thing to a contested primary election Democrats are likely to experience in Nevada this cycle, so let’s see what the challenger has to say when there’s a camera in front of her face.

On her recently launched campaign site, March has a video, which you can watch directly here. Let’s break down what it has to say:

Mayor Debra March is the only qualified candidate to be our next lieutenant governor. 

Pedantically speaking, this is factually incorrect. Article 5, Section 17 of the Nevada Constitution specifies that the qualifications of the office match those of the governor. The governor’s qualifications, in turn, are defined in Article 5, Section 3: Candidates must be registered to vote; must be at least twenty five years old; must live in Nevada for two years preceding the election; and must not be elected as governor more than twice, nor have served more than one term as an elected governor and more than two years of an additional term as an acting governor.

In other words, current UNR president Brian Sandoval would not be a qualified candidate to run for lieutenant governor because he’s already been elected as governor more than twice — but he’s not running. All of the candidates who have actually filed with the secretary of state’s office to run for lieutenant governor (there are 14 of them) meet the constitutional qualifications to serve as lieutenant governor.

As stated previously, however, this is an opinion column, not a strictly journalistic fact-checking exercise. Consequently, I’m under no obligation to embrace my inner Neil deGrasse Tyson, satisfying as it might be at the moment, and “well, actually” her statement away. We can instead assume March was speaking figuratively and approach her claim as intended.

To discuss the practical qualifications for the job of lieutenant governor, we first need to discuss what the office does. Here’s a video explaining the duties of the office in detail.

More seriously, as I’ve discussed in the past, the lieutenant governor’s formal role is to serve as the state’s donut spare in case something unfortunate happens to the governor. Like the compact spare tire hiding under your car’s trunk, the lieutenant governor is largely kept out of sight and out of mind. Constitutionally and statutorily, the lieutenant governor is assigned to serve as the president of the state Senate — casting the occasional tie-breaking vote there as they come — and serve on a few boards and commissions.

Informally, however, the lieutenant governor’s office has at least some ceremonial power, much like the Queen of England or a mayor in a weak-mayor or council-manager system. For reference, Henderson — the city Debra March was elected mayor of — has a council-manager form of government, in which the mayor serves as a member of the city council and presides over its meetings but has no veto or administrative power. Administrative power is instead delegated to the city manager (the “manager” in “council-manager”), with the mayor’s role being primarily ceremonial, though Henderson’s city charter does allow the mayor to perform emergency duties “as may be necessary for the general health, welfare and safety of the City.”

A council-manager mayor’s job description still sounds more involved than the lieutenant governor’s. March, as mayor, is a member of Henderson’s city council and consequently gets to vote on ordinances every bit as often as her colleagues; the lieutenant governor, meanwhile, can only cast a vote in the event of a tie. Even so, the gap between the publicly perceived power of a mayor and the paper powers assigned to many of Nevada’s mayors, Henderson’s included, bears some similarity to the roles and limitations of the lieutenant governor’s office. 

Serving as a mayor of a council-manager governed city, then, does arguably provide experience with both the powers and limitations of an office like the lieutenant governor’s, and serves as a positive qualification for the lieutenant governor’s office.

You know what else serves as a positive qualification for the lieutenant governor’s office? Serving as a lieutenant governor, something only one candidate — Lisa Cano Burkhead — has any experience doing, even if that experience is only months long.

Given all of that, I’ll freely concede that March is a qualified candidate to be our next lieutenant governor, based on her years of service as a mayor of a council-manager governed city — but she’s not the only qualified candidate, either factually or figuratively.

A planning commissioner, city councilwoman, now mayor of Nevada’s second-largest city, and currently chairwoman of the regional transportation commission, Mayor Debra March has the experience and leadership that matters.

Well, actually, according to the 2020 U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer Files, Nevada’s second-largest city, with an area of 155.534 square miles, is Carson City. Debra March is consequently not the mayor of Nevada’s second-largest city at all — she’s instead the mayor of Nevada’s second most-populous city. Geographically, Henderson is even smaller than Reno.

The rest of this statement, however — at least where it makes falsifiable claims — is factually true. March served on the Henderson planning commission from 2004 to 2009, served as city councilwoman from 2009 (originally appointed, then reelected in 2011) until 2017, and then was elected mayor. She is also the current chairwoman of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada. It’s also true, as previously discussed, that her experience is both constitutionally sufficient and maps reasonably well to the light and ceremonial duties assigned to the lieutenant governor’s position. 

Since she brought it up, however, March’s leadership record is a bit more mixed. 

When she first ran for reelection to the Henderson city council in 2011, her role in approving Ascaya — a still-unfinished planned community literally carved into the hills south of Henderson — as a planning commissioner came under scrutiny after she attempted to attack one of her opponents for being a consultant on the project.

More recently, after March was elected mayor, she was given probation and ordered to undergo training by the state ethics commission for failing to disclose her relationship with the Henderson Community Foundation (she’s a member of their board) while she cast votes related to the foundation. To her credit, she completed her portion of the deferral agreement without incident.

Another recent example of her leadership involved the use of COVID-19 relief funds. Henderson, flush with a few million in federally-funded cash, briefly decided to spend $2 million of CARES Act funding to expand the entrance of City Hall. That, however, didn’t go over well, especially since it was twice as much money as the city planned to spend on its business relief program — consequently, a few days later, the city hastily and noisily changed its mind.

Over the next year, I plan to reach out and talk to Nevadans throughout the state, to attract new businesses for high paying jobs, and help to diversify our economy. 

Over the next year, she plans to reach out and talk to Nevadans throughout the state because she’ll be running for office. The only new businesses she’s likely to attract in the process will be campaign and political consulting firms (or perhaps city hall renovation contractors). Assuming she’s elected, she won’t be sworn in until after this year is complete.

Since Nevada’s a swing state, however, we tend to raise and spend more than our fair share of campaign dollars spent here. According to OpenSecrets, Nevada ranked ninth overall in total contributions in 2020, with residents and businesses in the state raising over $325 million for federal candidates, PACs, parties, and outside spending groups. That, however, was a presidential year — in 2018, Nevada ranked eighth, with over $158 million in contributions.

During that same year, Kate Marshall reported less than $850,000 in contributions — roughly half of a percent of the total contributions raised for federal races in Nevada — during her victorious race for lieutenant governor.

Assuming Debra March raises and spends at roughly the same scale as her predecessor, and assuming federal campaigns remain as flush as they have in the past, it’s extremely unlikely her campaign will have any statistically significant effect on Nevada’s existing economy of political consultants and advertisers, much less the broader state economy.

That’s why I’m running to be your next lieutenant governor.

Well, that and she legally can’t run for reelection as Henderson’s mayor because she’s being term-limited out of office.

***

March’s campaign ad, as far as such ads go, wasn’t egregiously bad. It wasn’t an ad by an incumbent accusing his opposition of being politicians. Nobody’s accusing anyone of creating “sanctuary cities” or trying to pin a series of murders in Northern Nevada on the sheriff of a county over three hundred miles away. Nobody raced their truck on the playa or shot anything. Nobody tried to fake a Texan accent. Not a single stunt double rode a single bull.

It was, in a word, anodyne. It was also demonstrably false from start to finish. 

If even the most anodyne of campaign ads for the most anodyne and pointless of elected offices get this much wrong, what should that tell you about the truth value of any other campaign ad?

The next time an ad comes on, remember, businesses are legally required to have some truth in their advertising. Politicians aren’t.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected]

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