Is Nevada just another brick in the blue wall?

By Ric Anderson

Monday, Nov. 21, 2016 | 2 a.m.

It might be difficult for Nevadans to believe, but there were places where Americans could watch TV for hours on end this fall without seeing ads for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

One was right next door.

“I have friends in California who would ask me, ‘What are the presidential ads like?’ ” UNLV history professor Michael Green said.

The difference between the neighboring states was that the race’s outcome was a foregone conclusion in California, a longtime lock for the Democrats, while Nevada was seen as a battleground because it has backed both Republican and Democrat nominees.

But after choosing Democrats in three consecutive elections, how much longer will Nevada be considered a swing state?

That was among the questions examined by Green and three fellow panelists during a recent analysis of the 2016 election, focusing on Nevada and the Mountain West region.

The answer was that only time would tell, but this year’s results could indicate that Nevada’s swing-state status is on shaky ground. Not only did Nevadans not vote for a Republican presidential winner, a rarity in a state that had failed to support the winning candidate only once since 1912, but population projections call for an ongoing increase in minorities, which tend to vote Democratic.

Robert Lang, director of Brookings Mountain West and executive director of the Lincy Institute, said Nevada might be on a course to join a list of “blue wall” states that includes Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia.

“So if the Democrats keep losing, Nevada’s going to be on the wrong side of several elections, which is to say it’s not much of a swing state anymore (at that point),” he said.

Among other key points from the analysis:

• One of the storylines after the election was that Trump’s support among Hispanic voters was better than that of 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney and on par with that of 2008 GOP nominee John McCain. But was that true? Not according to David Damore, UNLV political science professor and Brookings Mountain West fellow, who said the statistics were based on badly flawed exit polls. Not only were few interviews conducted in Spanish, but the exit polls were conducted on Election Day, well after many Hispanic voters had taken advantage of early voting. In polling conducted by Latino Decisions, Trump’s numbers among Nevada voters were abysmal — as low as 4 percent among first-time voters. The upshot? There was far more backlash to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric than the exit polls suggested.

• In the Senate race between Catherine Cortez Masto and Joe Heck, which came down to about 25,000 votes, the stretch run may have made the difference.

“During the last three weeks, when Cortez Masto got the momentum, she was everywhere (making campaign appearances),” Damore said. “Joe Heck did not have a public event during the last two weeks of the election, which I thought was stunning.”

Green said a factor may have been that Heck endorsed Trump, then withdrew the endorsement, then said it was a private matter whether he would vote for him.

“You wonder how much of his not being in public had to do with the Republican reaction to that,” Green said.

• As turnout goes — especially in Clark County — so goes Nevada. In 2014, Damore said, voter registration plunged from the previous election, and Republicans did well. Registration shot back up this year, notably among Hispanic residents in Clark County, and the Democrats triumphed.