Nevada is one of those states, common in but not exclusive to the West, where conventional partisan politics often have more to do with local loyalties than political ideology. In broad terms, you can see this in returns from prior elections: even in relatively good years for the Democrats, looking back at county-level elections shows even sparsely-populated Mineral County returning better results than than urban Storey and Washoe Counties, and Clark voting for the Democrat come hell or high water.

In this election, this shifted massively; while Obama only did marginally better at the polls in Clark than John Kerry or Al Gore, even having one of the country’s strongest rates of urban growth couldn’t account for the 14-point blowout in what would normally be an intensely divided state – a state which had favored McCain in the polls for most of the year and which had never been more than five points out of reach.

It has been common to suggest that the Republicans stayed home or refused to stand by McCain, but did not actively support Obama. This, too, is seriously difficult to defend: states like Nevada and Montana (which saw a similarly dramatic shift this year without actually changing colors) would be a natural lock for the Barr campaign – especially Nevada, where Paul came in second to Romney in the Republican caucus well before Romney reinvented himself as Reagan Junior. But the third-party vote was minuscule.

What has happened in Nevada is twofold:

1. The fall of the house of Bush
Nevada is, with the exception of a few issues like gun control and taxes, extremely middle-of-the-road politically. This has created an enormous problem for the local Republican party, which lacks the tradition of local independence that kept the GOP alive in New England a generation after its time. Between that and the uniquely distant relationship the local theocrats have with the national religious right (oppose Utah, where the local Republicans are strong enough and have enough power over politics that they could push the electorate to vote for Jack Chick), the last four years have been absolutely brutal on the state Republican machine.

2. The Generational Swing
As far as I’m concerned, the factor in John McCain’s loss of the Reno metro is the incoming generation. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they were born and raised in a Reno which played cultural and economic second fiddle to Vegas. The Faustian pact with the largely rural, right-wing and Mormon east no longer had the gravity that got it formed in the first place; Reno’s movers and shakers, who have been faced for the whole of their generation with the binary choice between fleeing the Carson City ship or going down with it, have accepted that the Democrats are much more likely to benefit them as members of the urban middle-class.

Between these factors, we saw not just a slight uptick in Clark’s Democratic margin, but a violent, sudden shift by Washoe and Story to the blue. What remains to be seen is whether a new coalition will form, producing a state governed by an urban cordillera in competition with its exurbs and rural hinterland – or whether this election is a fluke. In the latter case, a good Republican candidate might just get Nevada close; in the former case, it might just be as accessible to the GOP as Vermont.