6th Senate District

Copening launches state senate bid.: Allison Copening, flanked by state Sens. Valerie Wiener, Maggie Carlton and Dina Titus and Clark County Democratic Chairman John Hunt, announces her campaign for Senate District 6.LAS VEGAS-With Democrats' hopes for a state senate majority resting squarely on her shoulders, Allison Copening, a 43-year-old former spokesperson for the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, officially announced her campaign to unseat Republican state Sen. Bob Beers in Senate District 6 Saturday. 

Copening, surrounded by family, friends and members of the Democratic Caucus, refrained from taking shots at Beers in brief remarks, leaving that to Nevada Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus.

"If you think about the people who are out there in office, when you think of the ones who represent, kind of, the worst that there is, the most negative attitude, the most ‘my way or no way,' the most ‘I won't listen to the people of Nevada,' the most ‘let's turn back the clock,' who do you think of?" Titus asked.

LAS VEGAS-New voter registration numbers, released yesterday by the secretary of state's office, show that state Democrats have improved on the advantages they've gained in the last several months and are now in an even stronger position to pick up seats on the assembly, state senate and congressional levels.

Democrats, who had trailed Republicans in overall voter registration as recently as March of 2007, now have 441,676 active registered voters in Nevada as compared to 396,489 Republicans. Although both parties picked up voters, the Democratic advantage has swelled to 45,187 registrations, up from slightly more than 40,000 just a month ago.

"This is just an incredible shift in voter registration," said Kirsten Searer, deputy executive director of the Nevada Democratic Party, today. "The interesting thing about this is, at this point this isn't just caucus returns. For a long time, we were getting a boost because county registrars were going through the voter registration forms from the caucus. We're beyond that and we're still seeing a huge uptick in voter registration."

LAS VEGAS—Although filing day is still five weeks away, the dirty tricks have already begun in the Democratic-targeted 6th Senate District, home to incumbent Republican state Sen. Bob Beers. 

Allison Copening, the Democrat who recently left her post as spokesperson for the Las Vegas Valley Water District in order to challenge Beers, is the subject of a Web site, allisoncopening.info, which purports to be supportive of her candidacy, but is filled with thinly-veiled mockery and sarcasm.