After a well-needed rest yesterday, I’m back to say a few things about what transpired on November 7th, 2006. Most of you already know that Nevada’s Question 7, the Regulation of Marijuana Initiative, for which I spearheaded the Internet campaign, did not pass. The final breakdown was 44% for, 56% against. Let me say a few things about this.

First, the good news: we did 5 points better than the similar initiative that failed in 2002 with only 39% of the vote – that equates to about 100,000 55,000 more votes for ending marijuana prohibition in Nevada over four years, although some of that number naturally comes from the population growth in the past few years. But because the actual percentage went up, we clearly won over a new group of voters. Unlike in 2002, we outright won a county with 53% of the vote (the libertarian-oriented Storey County, home of Virginia City) and nearly won Washoe County, home of Reno and the second-biggest county in the state, with 48%. Washoe, incidentally, is considered a more conservative county than Clark County, the home of Las Vegas; it has more Republicans registered than Democrats, the opposite of Clark. Washoe also had a higher turnout rate than Clark County.

Some good news also came by way of the exit polling results, although, being a statistical sampling, they can’t be considered entirely reliable. In any case, the exit polls showed us winning among the Latino population, which I imagine will only get bigger in the upcoming years. We also won outright among Democrats and Independents, taking all of our losses among Republicans (which, I admit, doesn’t exactly jive with Washoe’s results). We broke about even with union members (even though almost every union publicly came out against us), and easily won the 18-29 age group.

Now let’s look at the not-so-good news: we only got 44% in Clark County, seeing nary a difference from the state results in this heavily Democratic county. Incidentally, turnout was the lowest in the state in Clark County, meaning that despite our herculean efforts, we couldn’t get out the transient population as much as we would’ve liked. Clearly, we didn’t do so well in the rest of the rural counties, which make up about 1/6th of the state’s population. Moving over to the exit polls, we received only 40% of the African-American vote. (The White vote was similar to the final results.) We did 3 points better among men than among women. And while we ran a close race in every age group above 29 and below 60, we got killed by the elderly population in Nevada. In fact, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that we lost the campaign essentially because we couldn’t convince the elderly population that the harms of prohibition are worse than the harms of marijuana.

And really, while I’m not happy about it, that result makes sense. We’re talking about the generations of people older than the Baby Boomers who never lived in a culture – even as youths – where marijuana use was common and accepted. This World War II generation generally looked down upon the late-60’s culture. They never smoked marijuana in dorm rooms while listening to Sinatra and, from what I’ve seen in movies, preferred the poison served in highballs than from the cannabis plant. It seems fairly obvious to me that when the Baby Boomers become the predominant elderly population, marijuana prohibition will be on its last legs.

The last thing I want to mention is what a damn good campaign we ran. Every single member of the senior staff was not only competent, but passionate about the cause and creative in their ideas. We had no major missteps, and quite a few breakthroughs that impressed the media, both local and national. Our campaign manager Neal was anal about our messaging, but it’s clear from the end results that our commercials paid off handsomely. And I do feel that, with my colleague Sean (and with the ideas of the entire staff, especially Neal’s initial vision), we put together one of the most Internet-savvy statewide campaigns I’ve ever seen. Because all of our phone banking and data entry tools were written for the web, the hundreds of thousands of calls and data entries made (with the help of bar scanners) were all done on Linux computers, except for those done over the web by our volunteers. Our blog had over 600 posts during the campaign, thanks to our Communications staff, and our message board was sometimes too popular. We put over 80 videos up on YouTube and received nearly cumulative 100,000 views of those videos. We had over 6,000 MySpace friends. During the 15 days of voting, we used the Google Map API to allow any voter in Washoe and Clark counties to find and get directions to their nearest voting locations. And we text messaged thousands of voters and volunteers with voting locations and information about how they could help. We did a lot more than that for our internal politicking, but I won’t get into it here.

On a final note, I should say that while Question 7’s loss was hard for all of us at the campaign, Wednesday was still a great day to wake up to. I, of course, was thrilled to hear that American voters finally decided to show their displeasure with the Republican party, sweeping in a Democratic House and Senate and sweeping out Donald Rumsfeld. I was happy that South Dakota voted down the abortion ban (but alas, medical marijuana failed there with 48% of the vote) and that Arizona voted down a gay marriage ban. Unfortunately, the Democratic wave that hit the country must have been blocked by the very same mountains that divide Nevada from the verdant valleys of California. The Democratic candidate governor got about the same percentage of the vote as Question 7, even after her Republican opponent was caught up in three scandals, one sexual, one financial, and the third hypocritical. While some of the higher offices such as attorney general and treasurer went Democratic, the Republicans held onto the one Senate seat up for grabs and the two competitive House seats. However, on a what is to me a cosmically hilarious note, the heavily-funded attempt by casinos to confuse voters from implementing a smoking ban failed – which means the Nevada of chain-smoking marathons of video poker in grocery stores and 7-11’s will be gone within a month. I’ll say more on this later, but let me end with this: the greatest trick that Nevada ever pulled was convincing the world that it is libertarian.