Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Politics:

Trump, Clinton concentrate efforts on crucial Nevada

Trump

John Locher / AP

A Culinary Union member holds up a sign during a rally in front of the Trump International Hotel, Friday, Aug. 26, 2016, in Las Vegas.

RENO — Politically, Nevada is the anti-California.

The GOP runs both houses of the Legislature. Brian Sandoval, the state’s popular governor, is a Republican. Just like California, one party holds every state constitutional office, only in Nevada, it’s the GOP that ran the table.

And in Nevada, there’s also an actual presidential race.

In California, the RealClearPolitics average of polls has Democrat Hillary Clinton burying GOP nominee Donald Trump by 52 to 30 percentage points. But the former secretary of state holds just a three-point lead in Nevada, putting California’s eastern neighbor near the top of the fall battleground list.

The travel schedule of the two campaigns shows just how important Nevada and its six electoral votes are to the candidates, who need 270 nationwide to become president.

When Clinton looked to dominate the news cycle Thursday by slamming Trump’s campaign as driven by “prejudice and paranoia,” she came to Reno to do it. Although Trump canceled a rally set for Friday afternoon in Las Vegas, he met with Hispanic supporters at his Trump International in Las Vegas and then flew north later Friday to Lake Tahoe for a Nevada Republican Party fundraiser.

Their running mates also have been spending time in the state, with Republican Mike Pence holding a town hall meeting Aug. 17 in Henderson and Democrat Tim Kaine visiting Las Vegas early last week for a labor convention.

“Nevada is a competitive state, and it always has been,” said Sara Sendek, a Nevada spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. “All the candidates have been here, and they’ll be coming back.”

The prospect of a presidential donnybrook next door in Nevada isn’t lost on Californians looking to jump in.

“I live in California, but I come to Nevada to work for Hillary in a battleground state,” said Donna Caravelli of Tahoe City, who was in Reno for Clinton’s speech.

Even California labor unions are sending their members to Nevada to knock on doors for Democratic candidates there. Steve Smith of the California Labor Federation said hundreds of union members would be doing political work in Nevada between now and Election Day.

Labor “has important priorities in California, with ballot measures and other elections,” he said. “But given the importance of this election, we wanted to engage at the top of the ticket,” which for the presidential race means on-the-ground campaigning in Nevada, not California.

Most of the action is in Democratic-leaning Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County, where nearly 70 percent of the state’s voters live. Reno, the state’s only other major city, and surrounding Washoe County account for just under 18 percent of voters, and are evenly split between the two major parties.

Nearly all of Nevada’s land is cowboy country, but almost no one lives there. The voters who do are overwhelmingly Republican.

It’s a state that President Barack Obama won in 2012, but where Democratic officeholders were swept aside by the “red wave” of the midterm elections two years later. It’s also a place where voters turned to Obama and the Democrats in 2008, in the depths of the recession.

Trump and the Republicans figure that a slow-motion recovery that has yet to reach many Nevadans gives them a shot at winning the state in November. The memory of days when jobs were disappearing and subdivisions in Reno, Sparks and Las Vegas featured block after block of foreclosed homes hasn’t gone away.

“The housing crisis, the economic slowdown is still part of everyday life here,” said Stewart Boss, a spokesman for the Nevada State Democratic Party. “Things are better, but Nevada is still hurting. There’s no place in the country that’s more scared of going back into another sustained recession than Las Vegas.”

A recent Suffolk University poll found jobs and the economy as the top concern for Nevada voters, with those surveyed almost evenly split between Clinton and Trump.

That tight race could be good news for Trump, who hasn’t started running an all-out campaign in Nevada, said Cory Christensen, a GOP political strategist in the state. While the Republican Party has been putting together a ground effort in Nevada, Trump’s statewide headquarters in Las Vegas didn’t open until Saturday.

“That’s a pretty bad sign for Hillary Clinton, who I would have thought would be up more, just from her campaign’s activity level,” he said. “I’d be pretty freaking worried if I was running Hillary Clinton’s campaign and saw she was tied.”

Nevada is also the type of low-education state that supported Trump during the primaries. About 22 percent of the state’s residents have bachelor’s degrees, 45th in the United States. The 7.6 percent of residents with advanced degrees puts Nevada 41st in that category.

Clinton hasn’t inspired the same passionate support from Democrats that Obama had in 2008 and 2012, Christensen added, which could be important come Election Day, especially if Trump is seen as the unknown factor.

“Why should people vote for Trump even if they don’t love him?” Christensen said. “Well, you might not be 100 percent sure you’ll like what Trump will do, but you’re 100 percent sure you won’t like what Hillary will do.”

For Democrats, the job is to turn the focus on Trump and show independent and moderate Republican voters exactly why they can’t stand with the GOP candidate. That’s why, in her Reno speech Thursday, Clinton praised Republicans like former President George W. Bush and former presidential nominees Bob Dole and John McCain for their efforts to push back any suggestion of racial discrimination.

“We need that kind of leadership again,” she said.

The Latino vote, commonly thought to be strongly anti-Trump, is the wild card in Nevada. While Latinos typically back Democrats, they often don’t turn out.

“We hear it every presidential cycle about how this will be the year Latino voters make a difference ... but they’ve been underperforming (at the polls) for years,” said Christensen, the GOP strategist. “I don’t see it will be different this year.”

Still, nearly 30 percent of Nevada residents are Latino. Trump’s call for a wall across the Mexican border and his hard-line but ever-shifting proposal to deport anyone in the country without proper papers has made an impact among them, said Yvanna Cancela, political director of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 57,000 hotel and casino workers in Las Vegas and Reno.

“Our union is about 53 percent Latino, and they’ve raised their involvement in the election to levels I’ve never seen before,” she said. “Permanent residents now want to become citizens so they can vote, and citizens are not only going to vote themselves, but urging their friends and family members to vote, too.”

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