Truemors
Barack Obama is taking it to Nevada.
This 'land of God and guns' and tradititionally Republican sympathies but with an inward immigration to the state that could see the Democrats make real inroads but only if they work hard at it.
Both Obama and Clinton are scheduled more visits to Nevada before election day and significantly to country areas that perhaps the Democrats would in the past have given up as as lost causes.
The image of candidates actually out on the stoop in unfamilliar territory has to be a good thing.
Whoever wins will have to win by showing the public that they really want their vote and will work for for it.
At Gun World and Archery on the outskirts of Elko, Farnes Williams is talking politics. At the same time, he brandishes an assault rifle of the sort John Rambo might use to single-handedly take out a Burmese military base. The weapon, he says, lies at the heart of the 2008 presidential election.
"The military call this an M16 assault rifle, but round here we call it a sporting firearm," he says. "It's used for shooting squirrels, rabbits or coyotes. But you could kill some two-legged critter with it if you wanted. So if Barack Obama wins, it'll be one of the first to get banned."
Mr Williams does not need a sign in his window telling customers to vote Republican; most of them already do. In this remote region of Nevada's high desert, where three out of four adults own firearms and weekends are spent hunting in the nearby Ruby Mountains, the right to bear arms is not so much a political issue as a local obsession.
Gun enthusiasts are not the only Republican-leaning lobby in Elko, either. The region's major industry is mining, which pays the wages of roughly one in four working adults. Mike McKenzie, the operations manager of Elko's Gold County Mining Company, says they have a healthy dislike of environmentalists and their left-leaning friends in Washington. "A lot of our work's on public land, and if Obama wins, he'll tax us more for using it. John McCain comes from a different place on environmentalism, and he's open about drilling for oil offshore. So that makes him fine by me."
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