Nevada Wins PAC News
Red State: Nevada Is the Perfect Political Storm and This Is Not a Drill
By Brittany Sheehan | 8:30 PM on October 12, 2022
As the nation has eyes on Nevada’s key Senate race, between incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto (D) and Republican nominee Adam Laxalt there are some nuances at play with longer implications for the Republican brand. Nevada is not just a battleground, it is a testing ground. Its demographics and dynamics are the reason Nevada is propelled to compete for first in the nation voting, while its electoral contribution is slim and its congressional influence is a mere four house members, next to our neighboring California’s 52. The Silver State is also of importance because of outsized economic hardships experienced in pandemic shutdowns, setting an all-time US record for unemployment with basically a swipe of Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak’s pen, followed by an extremely mismanaged pandemic aid program, and critical educational losses in a state ranked near-last for the last decade. It’s the wild card state, and what we are seeing now has gravity beyond 2022 midterm outcomes, which is really what is at stake in Nevada.
First, I would like to take you back to November 3, 2020. It was election night, and into the next morning, I would find myself at the Clark County Election Department as an observer, not that I could “observe” much of anything. Something had happened in America, vote counting stalled and the nation’s attention turned to the states that had not reported results, especially any state considered a swing or a battleground. I was fielding calls and messages from friends across the country asking what was going on in Clark County, Nevada. They wanted to know if they could anticipate our electoral votes going to Donald Trump, and I just happened to have a front-row seat, 20ish feet and two visual obstructions away from a small window where I could see nobody’s hands and hear nobody’s words. At least for those in close contact with me, I could put them out of the agony weeks ahead of Clark having ballot totals. I nervously laughed them off: “If America is counting on Clark County, we are screwed.”
Republicans in Nevada do not expect to win Clark County, where most of our population resides in Las Vegas. For Republicans in Clark, we don’t even feel it is our job to win the county. Our part of the effort is to keep it close, don’t let it be a blow-out. Ideally, the rurals will carry what is needed to get us past the finish line, if the second most populous county of Washoe is… a wash. If all of the counties do not do exactly that, we generally lose. There are anomalies, of course. The Democrats have the opposite playbook, win Clark bigly, something-something Washoe, lose everywhere else. So, while Clark is not a winning county for Republicans, the importance of it is for all the marbles anyway.
The biggest group of voters in Nevada is the nonpartisan or independent group. They decide the elections. If either major party turned out 100 percent of their voters (who aren’t deceased) it still wouldn’t be enough without the nonpartisan lift. This is really the crux of why Nevada is purple, while its current politics are some of the most hyper-partisan rubber stamping I have ever seen. The partisans are partisan; it’s just that the state isn’t partisan. So while I am happy to report our Republican candidates at the top of the ticket are all leading in the polls, not with margins of comfort certainly, the name of the game is voter turnout. In Clark County, that is not going well. Not for one side or the other, but on the whole, and remembering that most people sit on neither side of the aisle.
Democrats
NBC ran this headline: Nevada Democrats see signs of nightmare scenario: Latino voters staying home. Luckily, Masto didn’t take my free-of-charge observation that her all-in on abortion campaign was missing the mark, especially with Hispanic voters’ (estimated 20 percent of all voter turnout for midterms) top concern being the economy. Meanwhile, the so-called “Harry Reid Machine” is being tested in the wake of the Democratic Party juggernaut’s death. Masto can be considered Reid’s protégé, but she lost a bid to chair the state’s Democrat Party which was instead taken over by a progressive and unabashedly socialist slate. This caused some inter-party squabbles and maneuvering, and from my purview as an outsider to their party, the monies are being routed through Washoe, to circumvent the socialist takeover in party leadership. The implications of that I can only guess at, but I like to think it means their resources and think-tanking are a cool seven hours away from the most important battleground county.
In the Harry Reid coalition, the union powers and their footwork are an important ingredient. The state’s most powerful union, the Culinary Union, is canvassing for Democrats (not that I checked all of their endorsements, it’s just I don’t have to do that to know what they are about)… but with reports that 10,000 culinary union members are still out of work, about 20 percent, there are signs of being less than enthused. One sign came as Governor Sisolak made two stops to rally union members in just a few weeks. I reported on the late September stop, but he doubled down on the cringe-chanting again just a few days ago.