"I like what Ron Paul says about healthcare, breaking it up so it's affordable for everyone. Now I'm an independent contractor, it can be quite expensive to find good health insurance," Brooke Taylor explains, as she waits in her workplace lounge a few miles east of the Nevada state capital of Carson City for a new client to arrive. "He's for bringing the troops home. Those are my peers. I want them home. These men and women are experiencing things nobody should have to. I like what he has to say about education."

Brooke - along with the owner of the company she works for and several of her colleagues - has begun campaigning for Texas congressman Ron Paul, the maverick libertarian Republican presidential candidate. They have even been offering two-for-one specials to clients who go onto their computer, access Paul's website and donate money.

And if Paul wasn't running? Well, then Taylor, who has a degree in music therapy and whose best friend is a political science graduate, would revert to her usual pattern - voting Democrat, hopefully, she says, for Obama.

Brooke's colleague, Max, disagrees. She's a Hillary Clinton supporter, hoping that if she made it to the White House the Bill Clinton magic would return. Why doesn't she like Bush? I ask, on a day the stock market has fallen by 300 points. "The economy. My income was drastically different seven or eight years ago. People are much more aware of what they're spending, and what they not going to spend now."

Just your everyday political discussion in the run-up to the Nevada caucus this Saturday. Except for the fact that Brooke, Max, and the dozens of other young women milling around the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, at the end of a road with a historical marker for the old Pony Express and a ramshackle car repair shop, in various degrees of lingerie are prostitutes. They are working in an upscale brothel in the only state in the union with legalized prostitution.

The Bunny Ranch's owner, Dennis Hof, has - to the embarrassment of Ron Paul - been touting his support for the congressman for a few months now. Above the lounge fireplace is a sign (photographed above): "We pound for Paul". Just inside the entrance is another pithy banner: "Pimpin' for Paul".

For decades, the Republicans have cobbled together a somewhat improbable national electoral majority, based in large part on a marriage of convenience between libertarian-minded, live-and-let-live westerners in states like Nevada, and Southern fundamentalists. Reagan worked the coalition to perfection; Bush used it to eke out two narrow election victories. In the current election cycle, however, with growing national unhappiness over Bush's tenure, that coalition seems to be breaking down.

While Ron Paul isn't going to go anywhere, even in a quirky state like Nevada, for a Republican candidate to take the White House in November they are going to have to be able to woo voters in Nevada - who support legalized prostitution, forty-plus percent of whom voted to legalize marijuana in 2006, high numbers of whom identify themselves not as Republicans but as libertarians, and many of whom rely on the gambling industry for their livelihoods - as well as deeply conservative evangelical voters in states like South Carolina.

With the stock market tanking, the housing market at a standstill - one in 60 home in Nevada is under foreclosure - inflation clawing away at Americans' real income, tens of millions lacking health insurance and too many not being able to feed their families without the aid of food banks and churches, fewer voters are willing to give the fundamentalist-libertarian coalition the benefit of the doubt.

From conservatives there's anger because all the scapegoating, all the deflected rage, hasn't actually worked. We've gotten tough on addicts and terrorists and welfare cheats, we're getting tough on illegals, and yet we're still in a mess. The answers Kansans looked for, as written about in by Thomas Frank, in What's the Matter With Kansas? haven't panned out. A GOP administration that promised endless tax cuts and funded wars and pork barrel spending and kick-backs to favored companies based on the notion America could endlessly borrow and run trade deficits like no other country with no negative consequences, has run aground against basic economic realities.

From progressives, there's some hope amid the rising gloom because, like in 1932, the economic hurt, the bursting of bubbles, is opening up room for new liberal voices to emerge; there's room for a radical reinvention of the social contract, the creation of a better, fairer system. Until recently, I feared the GOP just might be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and eke out a presidential victory in November. With the current economic data, I'm betting that's not going to happen. Like in 1992, "it's the economy stupid." Except the economic legacy of this Bush is worse than that of his father.

That new social compact will ultimately be a creature of the American West - not of Dennis Hof's weird vision, but of a West that has a live-and-let-live attitude on social issues combined with a progressive approach to the environment, to healthcare, to the minimum wage and other big-picture economic issues. It will give much power to the states and cities to create experimental policies around expanded health care, environmental clean-up, anti-global warming strategies, and ways of integrating millions of illegal immigrants into the broader society, but it will be backed up by a more regulation-minded federal system.

Even if the Republicans, however implausibly, manage to reinvent themselves as economic saviors for the downtrodden, for the millions who have lost their homes and the tens of millions who can't access medical care and rely on charities to feed their families, they still won't be able to win much of the West. The glue binding religious conservatives has lost its force - the GOP caucus-goers in Iowa who handed Huckabee his victory, the Bible-thumpers of the South who have voted Republican since the Democrats embraced civil rights back in the 1960s - to the socially libertarian but economically conservative voters who have voted Republican in states like Nevada in almost every presidential election since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 has lost its stickiness.

That's why there's no clear GOP frontrunner. The various parts of the alliance are vying for supremacy, and none of them are powerful enough to enforce allegiance from the others.

On Saturday, South Carolina and Nevada both vote. They are as culturally distinct as, say, Amsterdam and rural Poland.

Of course, Dennis Hof and his "girls" aren't representative of Nevada as a whole; but there is widespread tolerance for institutions such as Hof's, and there is widespread distaste for in-your-face morals politics of the sort that has come to define much of the Republican Party in recent years. South Carolina, by contrast, is solidly evangelical, the conservative edge of its politics laced with the legacy of segregation, the "morals" issues of abortion, pornography, gay marriage and so on always high up in voters' concerns.

Squaring this particular circle, winning Nevada as well as the South, might just prove one trick too hard for the Republican candidates to pull off.

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