Claudia Lopez, 39, is worried for her children.
As her curly haired seven-year-old daughter bounced around a play area inside El Mercado, a shopping center within the Boulevard Mall in Las Vegas where the smell of arepas and tacos hovers over the shops, Lopez soaked in her day off from knocking on doors and talking to residents about the upcoming election.
For much of her life, Lopez, whose parents emigrated from Mexico to California, where she was born, didn’t care for politics. This year, that changed: since Lopez moved to Las Vegas seven years ago, rents have rocketed. In the first quarter of 2022, the Nevada State Apartment Association found that rent had soared, on average, more than 20% compared to the same period last year. That growth has since slowed, but the self-employed house cleaner worries about her children’s future: their safety, their schools, their shelter.
“I don’t care about Democrats or Republicans,” Lopez says. “I care about change. I just want change for the better. Everything’s getting worse. You see little kids like, ‘Are they going to live to my age?’”
In Nevada, the political stakes of this election are high. Latino voters are projected to account for one for every five potential voters in November, turning the state into a microcosm of the national influence voters of color will have on the election. While Nevada voted Democrat in the last election, its contests were won by slim margins. And as a voting bloc, Latinos are not monolithic: what they care about ranges from immigration to the economy and depends on where throughout the country they live.
An emerging, central, and practical concern for this group, however, rests in the rising costs of living – especially housing. The state has the steepest affordable housing shortage in the country. For every 100 renters in Nevada, there are just 18 affordable homes available to extremely low-income households, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. By comparison, Mississippi, which has the highest poverty rate in the country, has 58 homes available for every 100 renters.
“It’s a perfect storm,” said Melissa Morales, founder of Somos Votantes, a non-profit focused on encouraging Latino voter participation. “You have the state that was hardest hit by unemployment and its economy was the hardest hit by the pandemic. You have the first Latina US senator ever in American history that’s up for re-election.”
“For Latino voters, they are less interested in a blame game and much more interested in solutions,” she added. “When they’re placing the economy and these sorts of costs that are at the top of their list, they are really looking at which party is providing hard solutions to these issues.”
In the governor’s race, the Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak, who approved $500m in federal funds from the American Rescue Plan toward developing housing, plans on working with state lawmakers to curtail corporations from buying properties, reform evictions and impose rent control. He extended an eviction moratorium through last May in the midst of the pandemic.
But on his website, his opponent Republican Joe Lombardo slammed Sisolak’s administration as a “roadblock for affordable housing”, stating that Lombardo would streamline permitting and licensing for housing.
Despite political posturing, there’s concern about whether Latino voters will show up at all. That presents a vexing question for organizers attempting to cut past political rhetoric to capture Latino voters’ attention: who has the practical answers to curb America’s most pressing issues: the rising cost of living? And what will convince them that politicians will actually make good on these promises?
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Advocacy groups have taken to the pavement to try and bridge any voter education gaps.
Morales says that of their canvassing operations in Nevada, Arizona and Michigan, those in Nevada spoke the most about the rising costs of housing and healthcare.
Morales serves as president of Somos PAC, which has supported Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the US Senate, who is vying for re-election against former Nevada attorney general and Republican Adam Laxalt. While Cortez Masto’s website lauds her work to “expand affordable housing” and “combat housing discrimination”, Laxalt’s makes no mention of housing as an issue, focusing instead on the economy, crime, immigration and other issues.
A Cortez Masto campaign spokesperson pointed to a list of accomplishments by the incumbent senator during her term and her time as attorney general, including securing federal funds for affordable housing during the pandemic.
“Senator Cortez Masto has led the fight to lower housing costs for Nevadans, securing critical funding to help build more middle class housing that Adam Laxalt opposed,” the spokesperson said.
Laxalt’s press secretary Brian Freimuth responded that Masto’s party “offered nothing to fix Nevada’s housing problems.” He added: “Adam will fight for Nevadans even if it means opposing his own party.”
The Culinary Workers Union, whose membership of 60,000 hospitality workers is mostly made up of people of color, are also engaging in what they hope will be their largest canvassing operation in history, dispatching at least 350 canvassers, with more closer to election day, to neighborhoods six days a week.
With hopes of reaching 1 million households, the union’s canvassers’ focus on calling for blocking rent hikes and curtailing the cost of living, responding to a national crisis that upended the lives of voters of color in the area.
On a recent trip to a quiet neighborhood in north Las Vegas, where roughly four in 10 Latinos live, Miguel Regalado trudged from door to door under the sweltering desert heat.
A lead canvasser who has embarked on multiple campaigns since 2016, Regalado, like hundreds of others, had taken a leave of absence from his job to talk with voters. So did Rocelia Mendoza and Marcos Rivera, who joined him to stroll through the neighborhood full of nearly identical houses, with white exteriors and red roofs, Halloween decorations on their front yards.
Regalado, a utility porter at The D Casino, and Mendoza, a dining bus person at the Wynn who worked her fourth campaign since 2017, checked their tablets for the list of addresses. When knocks went unanswered, they affixed literature and endorsement guides to people’s doors.
Those who answered were largely Black and Latino residents, with Regalado and Mendoza relating to some in Spanish. They often framed their pitches around signing a petition calling for “neighborhood stability” – a collection of proposals to stop rent increases in Clark and Washoe counties, where Las Vegas and Reno are – and to support candidates, largely Democrats, who have signed on to support the cause. Those two cities represent battlegrounds for Republicans and Democrats alike as Republicans managed to persuade more Latino voters in Las Vegas since 2020 but lost ground with them in Reno.
David Damore, chair of the political science department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said that the door-knocking operations were key to encouraging turnout from Latino voters. Without door-knocking from the union, whose membership is majority people of color, “Nevada would not have shifted from red to blue,” Damore wrote in an email. “There are hard-fought wins on the line this cycle.”
Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer for the Culinary Workers Union, told the Guardian that working-class Nevada residents across racial and ethnic backgrounds have expressed concern to members about rent, the cost of inflation and rising healthcare costs.
“Our members can’t afford homes like they used to,” Pappageorge, who spent a decade as the union’s president, says. “We’re finding that folks are concerned, and they want to know what to do. And we have a plan to win.”
The canvassers themselves are dealing with the housing constraints. Before the pandemic, Regalado tried to buy a house. He made offers and felt qualified. “I got outbid every time I did it,” Regalado says. He worried about what he had heard from community members about companies that have bought properties in Las Vegas as investments and the pressure that puts on people’s lives.
“The price-gouging is making it harder for everyone to buy a house and find a place to live. They are buying up the rentals and jacking up all the prices at the same time, making it harder and harder for the community to have a decent place to live. We’ve seen eviction notices in apartment complexes, too, because of rents going up.”
Marcos Rivera, who was canvassing for the first time, noted that he too wanted to buy a house but was forced to rent an apartment. His family’s rent rose more than 40 percent. He worried about landlords lobbying to raise rents mid-year.
“If we don’t do something about it, it’s going to continue to grow. It’s absolutely insane,” Rivera says. “We should just have one job to support our family and our rent. We shouldn’t have to have two jobs to have a decent living.”
In its latest canvassing operation announcement, the union noted that its goal of 1 million door knocks in Reno and Las Vegas would reach “more than half of the Black and Latinx voters and more than a third of the Asian American Pacific Islander voters in Nevada”.
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While her daughter fiddled with food at El Mercado, Lopez, who doesn’t support abortion rights, recounted how since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, questioned what other constitutional rights would be taken away from women like her and her daughter.
Underpinning that was the anxiety that she would be unable to provide the life her parents had for her, that as the costs of living in America, she would be unable to buy a home, even as her parents owned two houses.
“As a Hispanic woman, I would love to say that we’re able to do what my parents came out to do,” Lopez says. “It’s crazy how my parents came here illegally. They own two houses. And I was born here and I’m not able to afford a house because they’re going up sky-high.”
Lopez, who canvasses for the Culinary Workers Union, registered herself and her family to vote for the first time. She understood those she had encountered who were disenchanted with politics, who faced the evictions and instability from unaffordable living situations as their jobs were upended by the pandemic. But she is determined to make sure they have a say in the state’s political future.
“Our voice does count,” Lopez told the Guardian when asked about the collective power of Latino voters. “We can make a change.”
