It’s Time to Talk About the Clark County Republican Party
TL;DR. This is a long one, folks. But one that matters a lot to me. I try to keep New Media as sane as possible but this piece is a difficult one for me, because it is so close to home. My county’s Republican Party is in shambles and it is keeping the entire state of Nevada from being successful. Looking for some simple solutions? Click here.
My mother, Sally, along with a cadre of good, solid patriots have poured over a decade of their lives into this organization. Excellent Republicans who have dedicated their blood, sweat and tears are seeing their invaluable work on it overshadowed by the terrible decisions of a few folks with delusions of grandeur or something worse. This article is about the Clark County Republican Party.
Even the name brings eye rolls to even the staunchest Republican in Las Vegas, Nevada. Since I was 18, I’ve attended meetings on and off, enjoyed some of them, but, like many, hated most of them. As far back as I can remember it has been a place that has been racked by petty scandal, inaction, or ineptitude. Very often, all three.
The worst part? It could be spectacular. In some of the bluest states, (which Nevada is, temporarily) you can find some of the strongest Republican organizations. Southern Nevada could be much more purple and even partially red if it had even remotely competent leadership. We have many inspiring elected officials, tons of potential donors, and a chance to be a competitive part of the country in some of our state assembly and senate districts. Every year we dither, thousands of Californian families come to Nevada hoping to find a place to find work, raise their families, and enjoy life but instead find no Republican welcoming party offering solutions, ideas, and a legitimate alternative to what they just left.
So, without any coordination, money is wasted, people are wasted, and the Democrats who have a decades-long head start effortlessly dunk on us at every chance. Even with the recent kerfuffle within the Nevada Democratic Party, I’m not convinced this provides some magic opening for us without serious change in our operations and leadership. The CCRP is a mess not because of the well-meaning conservatives who attend the meetings each month or the lack of enough determined Republicans in the County. It is a mess because of who is in charge.
There are rumblings of a turning point with the announcement of respected Nevada State Senator, educator, and school choice advocate Carrie Buck entering the race to be the next Chairwoman of the organization. This is no silver bullet and there may yet be more candidates to enter that race, but as you’ll see from some of my information below, she would be a welcome, necessary change.
Before we cheer her for the thankless, difficult folly she is hoping to embark on, I wanted to give a parting wave to some of the current leadership’s greatest hits.
The Ill-Planned, Ill-Advised, Ill-Executed Attempt to Unseat Michele Fiore
One of the shining examples of the political acumen of the CCRP was an odd attempt to get Michele Fiore, Clark County’s highest-ranking elected Republican and our best chance at winning the mayorship of Nevada’s largest city, in trouble by releasing a pre-emptive statement WITHOUT releasing an exact video or transcript of a racially charged remark she made at our last County Convention. No one would argue that Michele is our most status quo legislator, and no one is advocating to shield her from criticism for her words. But the attack and disavowal was premature and incomplete. While I always want Republicans to decry true racism and injustice in our society, this poorly planned statement from the CCRP did more harm than good for the organization and obviously helped scare off any legitimate elected official from lending their voice to CCRP proceedings for the near future. I, to this day, don’t understand what the goal was, and don’t think they do either. I highly doubt it was the brainchild of Chairman David Sajdak alone but rather the work of his unelected Chief of Staff, Richard Maclean.
Richard Maclean Might Be the Smoking Gun
Dave Sajdak’s incorrigible personality aside, the real issue with the CCRP might be Richard Maclean, a nice enough guy who fancies himself a political animal because he helped Douglas County Commissioner Danny Tarkanian (not trying to besmirch Danny here) win a few primaries.
But, Richard, honestly, might be the smartest of all of us! He was able to, according to state and federal campaign expenditure reports, convince Chairman Sajdak to funnel over $13,000 of CCRP donor money into his privately owned company, Antares Data, to provide data and phone services to the organization.
Grifts like this are normal for organizations with so little influence. Sadly, the CCRP used those services to only make 100,000 phone calls, ((I have since spoken with Richard Maclean and admit that this may not be a correct number. Richard says this was 100,000 contacts, not phone calls.)) knock zero doors, and send out a mailer to Clark voters that had Washoe County’s address and contact information on it that also was missing a Republican candidate AND included Democrat candidates on it!
Now, they have defended the Democrats they supported by saying that their third-party system gave those Democrats a higher ‘voter affinity score’ than the Republicans on the ballot. Maybe they should have just left those races off the ballot like they did Assembly District 10 on the mailer in question. (Let’s be clear, there are some Democrats I like and definitely voted for in these judicial offices, but I’m allowed to do that as a private citizen, not as a Party who solicited donations from Republicans to funnel to them.)
Assembly District 10 is missing.
Enjoy the endorsements, Democrat friends!
This was sent and paid for by the Washoe County Republican Party.
But Dave and Richard have done great work for those Democrats who did end up winning. They will be able to go on to legislate like Democrats from the bench, and possibly decide to pull a Brian Sandoval (or a reverse Ozzie Fumo!), and use their new positions of power to run for legislative office in Nevada, and can partially thank the Clark County Republican Party for some of their victory. Great job, team!
The Constant, Incessant Blaming of the Nevada Republican Party
You will not be able to communicate with the current Chairman without hearing him blame the Nevada Republican Party for not sending resources or funding or help in Clark County. I’ll explain below why this is incorrect but can we agree that this is a terrible example of leadership? Imagine being in charge and blaming your own failures on some magical lack of help from a body that has its own goals and issues to work out. Yet the Chairman has taken this out every chance he can get. It’s played out, it’s weak, and yet so many good activists in the County still believe him and expect nothing out of him. Former President Trump would be (and probably is with NRP Chairman Mike McDonald in his ear) ashamed.
Of course the unnecessary feud between Dave Sajdak and Michael McDonald was an utterly embarrassing waste of everyone’s time, on both sides, but Sajdak did everything he could to export as much blame as possible up north without any proof of non-collaboration. If that didn’t work, COVID worked well, too. But Trump events were happening in Clark County, yard signs were readily available for supporters if they wanted them (just not the way Sajdak wanted them, I suppose?), and volunteers and paid staffers were waiting in the wings to work for Clark County efforts. The CCRP leadership did everything they could to shift the blame from their own inaction to the NRP that was focused on electing the President in a state they deemed winnable.
Instead of doing their best to work together, the County bafflingly wasted thousands of dollars to create its own federal PAC; a hair-brained scheme that some dude in Washoe County told them would be a good idea. Federal PACs require professional compliance work and are only effective when you have so much money and have already covered all of your local target races that you need a place to funnel donor money into as a last resort. With the CCRP, this was far from the case. Federal records show them raising $6,000 and spending $3,500 in all of 2019 and 2020. While gains were made in Southern Nevada assembly and Senate races, virtually none of the CCRP’s money was spent on those races. In fact, the Federal PAC was another great chance for the CCRP to send some money to Richard Maclean, with about $1,500 being spent on “walk and call apps.”
Chairman Sajdak and his leadership team have repeatedly claimed the NRP withheld data from them and wouldn’t let them have control of the voter groups they want to contact. They did this in rooms with conservative bystanders and had to awkwardly be corrected by NRP paid staffers who were in attendance. The CCRP was also repeatedly ensured by the NRP that they would have total control of the data they accrued by their efforts.
As someone who has used the institutional systems like Advantage and VoterVault offered by the RNC, their essentially free systems are admittedly flawed but, trust me, there is NO perfect voter contact system on planet Earth and they all basically do the same thing. President Trump and his campaign strongly encouraged Republican entities to use their singular system for voter contact efforts in 2020 to help build the institutional resources of the party entities. The CCRP thought they were smarter than the President, apparently.
But, alas, there is a reason for this. The CCRP decided instead to rent their own system with ‘better’ data for over $13,000 from one person: Richard Maclean. I’ll talk below about my brief weeks on the board but once I looked all of this up, it helped me truly understand why Richard was unmovable on working with the RNC on data. That $13,000 might have been useful for a party in charge of the largest county in a swing state because it only raised $1,500 in Q4 2020. Although that $1,500 raised was probably used on legal fees to defend themselves in a lawsuit they could have avoided. They refused to kick out their friend who was selling counterfeit Trump merchandise at CCRP meetings and someone called them on it.
The Alienation of Our ONE Donor
Not many people know that due to a tirade and overstepping of his boundaries, Chairman Sajdak alienated and burned a bridge with Don Ahern, a patriot who bailed out the CCRP by allowing them to host a mask-optional (well, I was masked lol) Convention in mid-2020 despite an ever-interested Governor trying to get it shut down. Sajdak is reportedly banned from all Ahern properties and Don is no longer taking his calls. With Sands leaving town, Wynn out of the picture, and Ahern on the outs, what do we have left in ways of top donors? The Chairman has literally one job.
Zero Social Media Presence
In the months leading up to the 2020 election, the CCRP posted to Facebook every week or so with grammatical and spelling error-riddled posts, sometimes even asking for money for out of state candidates like Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“The CCRP did not post a single status about the State Assembly and State Senate candidates in Clark County during the entire months of October and November 2020. They also haven’t posted a single thing about them in December 2020, or January and February 2021. ”
Their Twitter account is locked and hasn’t tweeted in 2019. Their Instagram has three photos and under 100 followers. Maybe they did some good work on Parler?
As well, sources tell me only two people are allowed to post and most of the time you can tell who it is: one poster makes numerous proofreading errors, and the other replaces errors with politically out of line, weirdly worded posts like this one about unity from January 2021.
Maybe take some of the $13,000 in data services and pay an intern to post to social media?
Freezing Out Anyone Who Isn’t a Loyalist
Not to paint myself as some saint in all this, but I tried helping the CCRP as much as possible. I may seem antagonistic now, but I’ve done everything I can to be constructive. In May 2020, I asked the Chairman to be a part of the board and was able to join as a Precinct Director for a few short weeks.
During my time, gracious friends of mine from my time working for a Nevada political consulting firm were able to help me secure the esteemed Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah to speak at the Lincoln Day Dinner with zero cost to CCRP. I was so happy to make a positive impact in such a short time. I also spent hours of my time trying to build a volunteer and precinct operation and presented a wide-spanning 20-page overarching political plan in June 2020 (You can read it by clicking here. Please note it also includes some data and details from Richard Maclean, as well.) that included some prickly recommendations about our current data services operation and to make nice with the NRP. I had a small group of people who were ready to start making calls and the Chief of Staff decided June was too early for political activism and asked me to wait and call off my volunteers who wanted to help elect President Trump to a second term.
I later found out the call center he hoped to build started in late September, surrendered hearts and minds of Clark County to the Democrats for 6 long months of the pandemic when we should have been talking to voters. We’ll also never know if a single door was knocked…. while the NRP was out making over 8 million phone calls and 2.5 million door knocks, our leaders hid behind coronavirus restrictions when it helped them to do virtually nothing. On the latest virtual conference, the CCRP claims to have made 100,000 phone calls. With an average connect rate of most auto dialer apps being 2%, that means that at $13,000, we paid $6.50 per connected call. What a bargain. For Richard. Texting voters runs about $.04 per text on the high end and is far more effective but Antares might not have that as an offering yet. ((This claim is in dispute by Richard Maclean who I have since spoken with to clarify that it is 100,000 contacts not calls. He and I will have a video conference at a future date to talk through this.))
So, shortly thereafter, the Chairman called me to tell me that I could no longer be on the Board and he had no other position for me in the organization. I felt used and disappointed and feel my dissenting voice had something to do with my ejection.
Chairman Sajdak consistently told me his hands were tied and that bylaws prevented him from allowing me to move forward but then was happy to bend a bylaw that allowed Stephen Silberkraus to run for Vice Chair recently even though he did not follow the exact bylaw recommendations to become a member. But the Chairman was happy to say that he extended membership privileges to his ally and that it was what the CCRP has always done. This is untrue. The CCRP only grants ex officio status to sitting elected officials, not candidates, who Stephen was at the time.
So, the second I showed that I wasn’t a company man, I was summarily kicked off the Board. This decision to somehow retroactively revoke my Delegate credentials from the Convention and membership in the Central Committee has far spanning consequences. I was not allowed to vote in the Officer elections held later in 2020 and, most importantly, run in them. I was stonewalled by the Chief of Staff when I presented these facts at the last meeting and when someone wanted to raise a concern about the membership at that meeting, the Chair shouted him down and did not allow him to present evidence to support his claim and kicked him out for being unruly.
This is another bad leadership trait. Most of the CCRP’s detractors would be much more silent if they weren’t given so much ammo or reason to dislike the leaders. I certainly would have accepted another position on the Board after being removed and people would care so much less about the proceedings of the organization if they just allowed dissent to be heard. They would probably win more times than not! But, instead, in some desire to be faultless, they consistently empower loyalists and silence detractors. There is simply a much easier way to run an organization of this size.
So here we are, in limbo. Many have attended one meeting and there are no others scheduled. This month’s meeting was cancelled. But elected officers were able to be part of an exclusive invite-only event recently that was not livestreamed for some reason. Heaven forbid we have an in-person meeting! They will hide behind coronavirus restrictions, hide behind bylaw interpretations that are only favorable to them and apply them when they want to. They claim that the bylaws preclude them from holding digital meetings but that has never stopped them from ignoring the rules before!
And yet, the folks in that room continue to support the Chair’s efforts to do whatever he wants, which in most cases, is virtually nothing.
What’s Next?
So, what should we do about it? Welp, there isn’t much. The leadership has conveniently not allowed a second meeting for anyone outside of the Convention attendees to gain their membership back or to contact the membership. Our latest rumors place the first in-person meeting in May 2021. The long-delayed, long-anticipated 4 hour long Snyder cut of Justice League will have been out for two months by the time we meet again!
Does the Board really think the CCRP membership would have had a problem with holding a meeting virtually? All they had to do was add an emergency agenda item to legalize the meeting by amending the bylaws. Do they truly think freezing the membership out for months on end would be preferable than explaining the need for an emergency rule change? It’s bonkers thinking.
In conclusion, my advice is worth about as much as you’re paying for it but I cannot emphasize enough the dire circumstances that Clark County Republicans find ourselves in. In 2020 Republicans in Nevada clawed back a few assembly seats and a senate seat from the Democrats. I have no doubt we could gain more seats in two years with some heavy steps toward unity, and a singular focus on becoming effective, functioning and sustainable. It doesn’t happen all at once and will be as bumpy as we can imagine, but if we are to keep Nevada the low tax, pro-individual, unique place we know it to be, we’ve got a lot of work to do in the next few years. And for better or worse, it all starts with moving on from the current leadership of the Clark County Republican Party. We can only hope Senator Buck, who has a bright mind, great listening and leadership skills, and boundless energy, can take a crack at righting this ship in the upcoming Chair election.