Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Trump in trouble in Nevada, say experts on UNLV panel

Trump

Evan Vucci / AP

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Monday, Oct. 10, 2016, in Ambridge, Pa.

Take away the “Access Hollywood” hot-microphone scandal, the ranting performance in the first presidential debate and all of Donald Trump’s other self-inflicted wounds, and he still would have faced an uphill battle in Nevada, said one of three experts taking part in a panel discussion about the 2016 election today at UNLV.

John Hudak, a Brookings Institution visiting scholar, said one of Trump’s biggest challenges in Nevada would have been shared by any Republican candidate — trying to convince voters that President Obama had wrecked the economy and that drastic steps were needed to fix it.

“No state in this country has had more economic success under Barack Obama than Nevada,” Hudak said during the discussion, “The 2016 Election: Why Las Vegas Matters,” hosted by Brookings Mountain West. “The recovery has been significant. So this is the same difficulty Jeb Bush would have had, or John Kasich or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. It’s very hard to scream about the damage this president has done to the economy and have it resonate in a state like this.”

What’s more, Hudak said, a large number of voters were likely to see a GOP candidate as a threat to their economic well-being, given that a Republican would upend Obama’s policies and knock the recovery off-track.

Hudak’s conclusion: Trump won’t carry Nevada, “unless there’s a contagion that kills all the Democrats and all the moderate voters.”

A loss in Nevada would be significant for Trump in light of an analysis presented by panelist Robert Lang, co-director of Brookings Mountain West. Using electoral vote counts dating to 1992, Lang showed that the Mountain West region had become increasingly critical in determining the outcome of presidential elections..

Combining the outcomes in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, the majority of the region’s electoral votes went to Democrats four times and Republicans twice since 1992. Each time, the majority went to the winning candidate — Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Had John Kerry not been swept in the region in 2004, Lang pointed out, he would have been president.

“In the past, the Midwest was where the presidency was won or lost,” he said. “This year, Secretary (of State Hillary) Clinton would like to win Ohio — she wouldn’t throw it away — but if she doesn’t win Ohio, she could still win the presidency.”

The final piece of Lang’s analysis was a projection based on survey results from polling aggregation website fivethirtyeight.com. It showed that if the election were held today, Clinton would receive 31 of the region’s 37 electoral votes.

If the projections hold up, Lang said, “There would be virtually no chance that Donald Trump could win the presidency.”

Panelist David Damore, a UNLV political science professor, said it was likely that the candidate who wins the popular vote in Nevada this year would draw less than 50 percent of the vote. Support here is fractured by urban-rural fault lines, while an older and largely white population that would tend to vote Republican is being replaced by a younger and more ethnically diverse population that would lean Democrat. In addition, Nevada offers a “none of the above” balloting option that could draw a large number of voters who’ve been turned off by the rancorous tone of the election.

Looking beyond the top of the ticket, Hudak said Senate candidate Joe Heck and other Republicans had been damaged by the recent turmoil surrounding Trump. Hudak said voters once tended not to associate Trump with Republicans elsewhere on the ballot, considering him an outsider.

“But they’re now so worried about Trump, they’re worried about what will happen if they give Republicans votes,” he said. “Heck now is running a much more aggressive campaign, and he’s starting to squirm. His political reaction in the past couple of weeks tells you his internals (polling numbers) are tanking.”

Heck withdrew his endorsement for Trump last weekend, which Hudak said "might be just enough to let him limp across the finish line, where he should have been sprinting across the finish line."

The discussion was held at the Greenspun Hall Auditorium before a crowd consisting largely of students. It came less than a week before the third presidential debate Wednesday at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Hudak told students they were going to “hate everything presidential debate-related” by then — road closures, security checks and so forth — but hoped they were excited that the event was happening on their campus.

“This has an opportunity to be one of the handful of presidential debates that we reference repeatedly every four years when we talk about whether a debate can be meaningful … and whether a debate can hurt or help a candidate,” he said.

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