PolitickerNV Profile: Kirsten Searer

LAS VEGAS-If you've been paying any attention to Nevada politics in the last year or so, you've certainly read a lucid quote by one-time Nevada Democratic communications director, now deputy executive director Kirsten Searer. Searer, 28, has been the voice of the party through the 2006 election and now the record-breaking 2008 caucuses, a job she couldn't have imagined holding a decade ago.

"I started studying journalism in high school and decided that was what I really wanted to do," said Searer. "My first exposé was on the cleanliness of our high school bathrooms."

After graduation (and winning the Arizona Student Journalist of the Year award in the fall of 1995), Searer attended Northwestern University in Chicago where she participated in a combination Bachelor's and Master's degree program at the Medill School of Journalism. Coming from a western Libertarian household, she found an interest in liberal politics while studying under Medill investigative journalism professor David Protess, who has made headlines in recent years investigating instances of people facing the death penalty who are wrongfully convicted.

"Taking that wrongful conviction class was probably the closest I got to really getting political, because I just became so anti-death penalty," said Searer. "Just having that experience, you know, we worked with guys who were in jail and we researched the case and we realized they didn't do it. They didn't do it and they were sitting in prison for twenty-five years. The incredible injustice of that really touched me."

As a student, Searer worked several internships for papers across the country, at one time serving as Washington D.C. correspondent for a number of small Montana newspapers. As part of her studies, Searer was in West Palm Beach around the chaotic days following the 2000 election, time she describes as "insane."

"I was there during the election and then I hung around the courthouse for a few days when we were just kind of starting to realize what a mess it was," said Searer. "It was the kind of thing where you look around and you see people rioting, basically, and you wonder to yourself ‘is this how we elect a president?'"

"That was the experience that really solidified my experience in politics, because watching that I realized how much is at stake with every election."

Upon graduation, Searer returned home to Phoenix where she became a reporter for the East Valley Tribune, covering Mesa County public schools.

"It was the beginning of test-mania," said Searer. "I remember we were doing a story about testing and they were talking about how they had just started testing first-graders and they had to bring a throw-up bag in because one kid was so nervous about taking the test, he started throwing up."

After a time reporting on politics for the East Valley Tribune, Searer learned of a job opening at the Las Vegas Sun and moved here in time to cover the 2004 election.

"It was a great opportunity because Nevada was so important on the presidential scene," said Searer. "I got to interview John Kerry three or four times. I didn't get to interview Bush; he didn't give anybody an interview, I don't think. I did interview Laura Bush. That was fun, actually. She walked right in and offered me coffee and poured it for me, and started talking about how she was just talking to ‘George' in Crawford."

"I actually liked Karl Rove when I met him too. He's a nice guy, he's from Nevada."

A year and a half after starting at the Sun, Searer accepted a position as communications director with the state Democratic Party, a difficult transition from a practical standpoint, but one that was philosophically easy.

"I've always been, sort of what I see as a western Democrat. As limited government as you can have, if people want to have guns, as long as they're responsible, it's fine by me," said Searer. "Going from the mind of a reporter to the mind of a communications director is very different. People sometimes tease me ‘you're still too much of a reporter.' As a reporter, you try to draw that line between yourself and people who are trying to spin you, so crossing that line was interesting."

Having faced a number of rough elections, in 2006 Nevada Democrats found themselves in the midst of one of their most competitive election cycles, and Searer played a role with both a competitive gubernatorial race and two heated congressionals.

"We knew we were building something and it was really exhilarating," said Searer. "Election work is not glamorous and we worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. It was exhausting."

Immediately following the disappointments of that year, Searer was hard at work preparing for the early caucuses of this year.

"The first few months of 2007, nobody had heard of the caucus and they didn't care at that point," said Searer. "We did road trips, going to itty-bitty casinos in the middle of nowhere. I remember going to Hawthorne and we got this front page story in the Hawthorne newspaper about how we were going to have this mock caucus. We showed up and there was nobody there. I was standing outside this casino in Hawthorne, harassing every poor person who walked by and finally got, like, two people to come in. I don't think it was until the candidates started coming by regularly that people really started engaging."

Following that record-breaking caucus, Searer found herself promoted to deputy executive director and is now working daily to "turn Nevada blue."

"Nevada's been really good to us," said Searer, referring to herself and husband Adam Candee, now a staffer for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "We like the west. I really do consider myself a western philosophy Democrat, so I expect we'll be here for a while."