Key Senate race in Nevada shifts to a ground game

By Emmarie Huetteman, New York Times News Service

Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016 | 2 a.m.

For all the millions of dollars spent on this election, the outcome may come down to people like Megan Blas.

A 25-year-old college student who grew up in Guam, Blas spends up to 32 hours each week knocking on doors, canvassing voters and logging responses. There are hundreds like her in Nevada, which is serving as a fierce proxy fight for the ground war between outside groups supporting Democrats and Republicans. They are using advanced analytics and old-fashioned legwork to meet the most basic of election objectives: turning out the vote.

For years outside groups have been building political organizations that target voters in highly refined segments, then make a final push to get their supporters to the polls, in many cases supplanting the role once played by political parties. It has become as much science as art, with mass accumulations of data. But in the final weeks, it is human contact from people like Blas that can make the difference in a close election like the Senate race here.

Blas works for a Democratic-aligned super PAC, For Our Future, reaching out to Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders scattered across Las Vegas. One afternoon last week, she hopped out of a charcoal gray Mazda and headed up the sidewalk past rows of identical tile-roofed condominiums, looking for the solitary dot on her cellphone map that identified a potential voter’s name, age and gender.

Republican-aligned groups have their own well-funded, grass-roots army. Marcos Lopez, 22, works for Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group financed largely by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, which has been building an extensive get-out-the-vote operation for several election cycles. “The beautiful thing about AFP I love in particular is that I never have to go against my own values and my own beliefs,” Lopez said as he knocked on doors in a tidy retirement community in the warm October sunshine, a CamelBak pack strapped to his back.

For many voters, the advertising that has saturated their television screens and filled their mailboxes for months has become almost white noise, and it is the personal touch of a conversation with a canvasser that can have a greater impact.

“At some point, it all becomes static,” said Adam Jones, Americans for Prosperity’s Nevada director, spreading a messy stack of glossy campaign mailers across his desk.

The Senate race in Nevada is among a handful of contests that could determine control of Congress.

Conservative and liberal organizations — many backed by well-known, deep-pocketed benefactors like the Kochs, Tom Steyer and George Soros — have already sunk more than $54 million into the Nevada race, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

More than 85 percent of Nevada voters live in the Las Vegas area, a sprawling city still recovering from the 2008 housing crisis that has left a transient population. Voter rolls, particularly for Latinos, who could make up 20 percent of the state’s voters, have been rendered relatively unreliable.

That has not stopped the legions of canvassers, who this weekend will begin urging voters to cast their ballots early at trailers in the parking lot of their local Home Depot or Albertsons, among other locations.

Much of the attention is focused on the Senate race. Republicans are hoping that Rep. Joe Heck will win the seat held by Sen. Harry Reid, the retiring Democratic leader. But Reid fervently wants Democrats to keep the seat he has held for 30 years and strongly supports Catherine Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general.

There are some signs that the Democrats’ ground game is prevailing. By the end of September, they led Republicans in registered voters in Nevada by more than 77,000. President Barack Obama is expected to campaign here on Sunday for Cortez Masto and his preferred successor, Hillary Clinton.

It may well be voters’ views of Donald Trump, though, that determine the outcomes.

Heck recently called on the Republican presidential nominee to withdraw from the race after the release of a recording in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women in vulgar terms.

This year many conservative groups have decided to stay out of the presidential race. In Nevada, Americans for Prosperity and the Libre Initiative, another free-market-devoted group backed by the Koch brothers, have instead focused on defeating Cortez Masto, spending more than $400,000 so far.

Other groups have spent millions running ads in Las Vegas’ expensive media market, investing in broader efforts to try to sway the race over voter turnout. The Senate Majority PAC, a group with connections to Reid that is helping Democratic Senate candidates, has spent more than $5.4 million here. Another super PAC with ties to the Koch brothers, the Freedom Partners Action Fund, has spent more than $7.6 million on the Senate race — more than either party’s campaign committee.

The appeal of outside groups is especially apparent as many Republicans struggle to reconcile their values with a presidential nominee who does not share all of theirs.

“When you invest in ideas and principles, those aren’t going to let you down,” Jones said.

Americans for Prosperity has dispatched more than 600 unpaid volunteers in Nevada in the past two months to the doors of potentially undecided voters, armed with GPS-enabled iPads loaded with voter data and talking points about Cortez Masto’s record, Jones said.

For Our Future, which is affiliated with Steyer’s NextGen Climate, the AFL-CIO and three major unions, is spending to try to keep pace, with much of the money devoted to canvassing. Last week alone, the group spent more than $52,000 in Nevada, while Americans for Prosperity spent more than $28,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Some of that money is used to pay For Our Future’s canvassers — $15 to $17 an hour, with health insurance.

For Our Future and its local partners use MiniVAN, an app used in recent elections that provides voter registration information and allows Democratic organizers to track their canvassers in real time. As Blas went from house to house, she used her cellphone to update the app, which syncs automatically to allow other canvassers to use their information and revisit people most likely to vote for Clinton and Cortez Masto.

Success is measured in “attempts,” or doors knocked. By last week, For Our Future had knocked on about 376,000 doors in Nevada, according to its state officials.

“We want quality and quantity,” Hector Rivera, a regional field director, told a group of recruits. “We don’t want people sounding like robots,” he added. “Or Marco Rubio.”

Come Election Day, canvassers will knock on the doors of those who did not cast their ballots during the 14-day early voting period to urge them to go to the polls. And while the paycheck may appeal to her, Blas, after having a door slammed in her face, said she owes much of her motivation to Trump.

“I’d want to do anything I can to make sure he doesn’t become president because he doesn’t seem to care very much for other people besides himself,” she said.