You'll probably get as many answers to this question as people you ask. This particular answer is solely the opinion of Huntington Press Senior Editor Deke Castleman, who tends to combine a mostly historical perspective with a somewhat libertarian take on this issue. His answer doesn't necessarily reflect the opinions of company management. For their answers to this question, you'll have to ask each of them.
The main political force that affects the gaming industry, in my opinion, is the age-old belief that gambling is a sin. The religious stigma that gambling has carried down through the ages has created all kinds of opposition, primarily from moral crusaders who enlist the political process to ban gambling, based on the "costs" to the social order, such as the fact that it promotes idleness, greed, intoxication, gluttony, and wantonness, while undermining devotion to the ideals of piety, charity, and honest labor.
Other social "costs" of gambling cited by moralists, reformers, religious leaders, pandering politicians, and sore losers include compulsive gambling and bankruptcies, organized crime, street crime, underage gambling, prostitution, and the like.
As far as the political parties are concerned, it breaks down in terms of liberal and conservative gambling environments. Liberals believe that the government should stay the heck out of people’s personal lives, but should insinuate itself into their business lives. Conversely, conservatives believe that the G should stay the heck out of people’s business lives, but insinuate itself into their personal lives. (Full-blown statists -- socialists, communists, fascists, etc., and ordinary thugs who wrest political power for their personal gain -- believe that government should control people’s personal and business lives, while libertarians believe that the G should stay the heck out of both.)
So, liberals see gambling strictly as a business issue. It’s all about the money: raising government "revenues" through casino taxes. And the casino tax, like those on alcohol and cigarettes, can be exorbitant, because it’s considered a "sin" tax (in which liberals take a page from the conservative playbook). Liberals, of necessity, are sensitive to the points at which citizens start to suffer from serious tax fatigue, especially when they have to pony up taxes directly. So they allow casinos to collect taxes for them indirectly. (In fact, I recently heard a news report about a state with a budget shortfall, in which the legislature was trying to decide whether "to raise taxes or expand casino gambling.")
Conservatives, on the other hand, view gambling as a personal, social, moral issue. Gambling is bad, wrong, sinful. Therefore, the government needs to protect people against the weakness in their character that compels them to gamble on slots, blackjack, craps, sporting events, the horses, whatever. So they criminalize gambling, especially casino gambling. Once that happens, it's a legal situation in which law enforcement, the courts, and prisons exact societal revenge against gamblers.
Obviously, right now we’re in the midst of a highly liberalized gambling environment. Gambling around the world is at the possible peak of an expansion cycle in which the most expensive resort destinations on Earth are being built by the greatest transfer of wealth over gaming tables ever witnessed in history.
However, it’s clear that, as always, the conservatives are nipping at gambling’s heels. This is especially true of online gambling, which is under serious threat from the current administration. Still, it’s taken decades for this expansion cycle to reach its feverish pitch and it’ll probably take decades more (or a huge crash in the economy, from which casinos might be among the first to suffer) for it to start to contract again. But contract it will. A contraction always follows an expansion. Gambling is one of the great heartbeats of civilization.
Finally, as to whether regulators are subject to political influences, the answer, in a word, is: Are you out of your mind? Of course regulators are subject to political influences. All bureaucrats are. They know what side of their bread is buttered -- and by whom. After all, most of them are appointed by the current ruling politicians. And they're all political animals themselves. They do the politically expedient thing first. If they consider their own beliefs in the process, I'd be surprised. After all, many so-called regulators come from the industry they're supposedly regulating. And many who don't wind up working for the industry they start out regulating. Can you say "compromised"? How about "co-opted"? Certainly, this is a broad generalization, but the exceptions, in my experience, prove the rule.
