Saeed Rahbaran / The New York Times
Sen. Catherine Cortez Mastro, D-Nev., shown Oct. 8, 2022, in Las Vegas, is widely considered the most endangered Democratic Senate incumbent in the nation. The senator, who is finishing her first term and running for reelection, is battling for survival in a race that may determine the Senate majority.
Friday, Oct. 28, 2022 | 2 a.m.
In a crowded living room at a house party in the Las Vegas suburbs on a recent scorching Saturday, one of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s supporters approached her with a warning.
“You have accomplished a lot through your office — quite a lot,” Sanje Sedera, a health care executive and former local Democratic official, told her. “But that messaging part is not there. Most people ask the question, ‘What has the senator done?’ We’ve got to get that message ramped up.”
It is the central question facing Cortez Masto, who is widely considered the most politically endangered Democratic incumbent in a year when her party is battling intense headwinds to maintain control of Congress. And it is one reason that Cortez Masto, after six years in the Senate, is having to reintroduce herself to voters with only two weeks until Election Day.
Since she was elected, Cortez Masto has struggled to carve out a brand for herself. The task is challenging for any elected official in Nevada, where the population is transient. But it has been particularly difficult for Cortez Masto, who tends to shun the spotlight and speak carefully, often in policy-heavy discourses.
“I think if you were to go to somebody on the street and say, ‘What kind of person do you think Bernie Sanders is?’ They’d say, ‘angry grandpa’ or something like that, right? You can’t really say that about CCM,” said Chris Roberts, the chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, referring to the senator by her initials.
“It hurts her, because people need to know that she’s genuine, that she is hardworking and that she’s out here fighting for us,” said Roberts, whose county is home to Las Vegas and more than 70% of Nevada’s population. “We’re doing everything we can to spread that message and make sure people know that, but I can certainly understand why folks would feel a little distant from her.”
In another year, Cortez Masto, who is the only Latina senator and who played a central role in bringing home pandemic relief for the state’s hospitality industry, would seem to be in a good position to hold onto her seat. Her Republican rival Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general, was one of the leaders of former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Nevada.
But Cortez Masto is operating on difficult terrain. As Republicans pummel Democrats for soaring inflation, the issue carries an especially acute sting in Nevada, where rent and gas costs have risen faster than almost anywhere else in the country.
Control of the Senate, currently divided 50-50, could be at stake in her race. Republicans see winning what is widely expected to be a neck-and-neck slog in Nevada, paired with a victory in Georgia, as their surest path to recapturing the majority.
“What I know about Nevada is, you just don’t take anything for granted,” Cortez Masto said in a recent interview at the Culinary Workers Union hall in Las Vegas, in a conference room plastered with posters from strikes of the past.
A former two-term attorney general, Cortez Masto became the first Latina senator in 2016, when she was elected by a margin of 2.5 percentage points. She was the hand-picked successor of Harry Reid, a former Senate majority leader, who leaned on his powerful home state political machine to help turn out the voters who propelled her to victory.
After Reid’s death last year, the enduring strength of that juggernaut has been called into question, and Nevada Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot this year.
Cortez Masto has sought to portray Laxalt, whose father and grandfather served in the Senate, as a fortunate son and extremist. Some of her most aired television advertisements attacking Laxalt focus on his work on behalf of the former president’s campaign and his opposition to abortion rights, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact.
Cognizant of voter discontent with gas prices lingering above $5 a gallon, Cortez Masto also has tried to turn the tables, attempting to tie Laxalt to “Big Oil,” referring to an amicus brief he led in 2016 as attorney general denouncing an inquiry into ExxonMobil’s role in downplaying climate change.
And she has emphasized the relief she helped deliver to workers hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic after the state’s hospitality industry was devastated, as well as provisions in Democrats’ landmark climate change, health and tax law that capped monthly costs for insulin. She has also sought to play up her own biography, often recounting stories of her family — especially her grandfather, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico — and their ties to the Las Vegas labor unions.
“To me, this is about being a Nevadan and knowing what their challenges are and just showing up and having conversations with them,” Cortez Masto said in the interview. “I do think it is important, as somebody who is asking for their votes and who is representing them, that I represent everyone, no matter whether you voted for me or not. It’s about what’s good for Nevada.”
To win in Nevada, Democrats have traditionally had to run up overwhelming margins in Clark and Washoe counties, two urban areas anchored by Las Vegas and Reno and buoyed by Latino and working-class voters. Every indication so far, from a range of polls and the comments that canvassers bring back from doors, points to an extremely competitive race that will remain close until the end.
“We’re hearing the same thing everywhere: that it’s going to be slim margins,” said Judith Whitmer, the chair of the state’s Democratic Party.
Laxalt appears to be betting that he can repeat history. In 2014, he became the first candidate in decades to prevail statewide while losing Clark and Washoe counties. He did so by keeping his margins down in urban counties and winning big in rural areas. Laxalt appeared this month with Trump at a rally in Minden, a town of 3,000 about an hour south of Reno.
Laxalt has insulated himself almost entirely from the mainstream news media, sparing himself the risk of a last-minute gaffe and avoiding the kinds of public relations disasters that have tarnished some of his Republican colleagues running for competitive Senate seats across the country. Requests to shadow Laxalt on the campaign trail in Nevada went unanswered.
Cortez Masto has been furiously pounding the campaign trail, venturing to rural areas of the state where she must stay competitive and cities she must claim by double digits to save her seat. In a recent three-day stretch, she attended Sunday services at two Black churches in Las Vegas, sipped brews with LGBTQ rights activists, canvassed an Asian American night market and appeared flanked by law enforcement officers to rail against her opponent’s embrace of election denialism.
There were signs of enthusiasm for the senator as she rallied with the politically powerful Culinary Workers Union. A long line of workers prepared to knock on voters’ doors snaked through the union hall waiting to take selfies with Cortez Masto after she roared out to the predominantly Latino crowd: “Si se puede!”
Jean-Marc Polleveys, a chef at The Cosmopolitan, said he had feared he would lose health insurance coverage for himself and his four children when the pandemic put him out of work. He attributed his continued coverage to the work of “this wonderful lady — the senator over there,” he said in an interview, gesturing to Cortez Masto.
Some Democrats like Melissa Morales, the founder of the Somos political action committee, an organization aimed at engaging Latino voters, continue to worry about turnout. Morales’ group has had canvassers knocking doors in Nevada since this past spring.
“It’s a midterm year; it’s generally low turnout for Latino voters,” Morales said. “People are just less aware than they were in 2020. Less awareness that there’s an election this year, questions about who is up, what is this election for.”
She said she was relieved to hear canvassers report that when they knocked on the doors of Latino voters, there was far less curiosity about voting for a Republican this year than there had been in 2020. But that does not necessarily translate into votes for Cortez Masto; some voters who answered the doors did not know the senator’s name and had to be shown a picture on a flyer to recall who she was.
“When they see her picture, they recognize her,” Morales said. “They’ve seen her in their community.”
Cortez Masto’s campaign is aware of the challenge. An advertisement released last week that was filmed at her grandmother’s house delves into the senator’s personal history, leaning heavily on her identity as a third-generation Mexican American. In a Twitter post circulating the ad, she recalled growing up around her grandparents’ kitchen table hearing family stories from her “cousins and tias.”
“I’m Catherine Cortez Masto,” the senator says to the camera, which shows her seated near a statue of Jesus and a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. “And I’ll never forget where I come from.”
