Nevada appears to be on the precipice of electing a Republican to the White House for the first time in two decades.
“I feel so happy right now, I feel fantastic,” said Yolanda Wright, 47, beaming as state after state lit up red on the big screen at the Republican watch party in Las Vegas. Like many voters in this swing state, Wright voted with the GOP for the first time this year.
“I’ve been a Democrat my whole life,” she said. “And I haven’t seen any benefit from it.”
The Associated Press has yet to project Donald Trump as the winner of the presidential race in the Silver state, and it could take days before all the state’s mail-in ballots are counted and a true tally of votes is revealed. Regardless of the final results, the former president’s political gains in this deeply diverse state are emblematic of a national political realignment.
“Here it’s clear that what we knew as true in politics, a lot of the normal rules we had, those are dead and gone,” said Mike Noble, an independent pollster who has been studying the electorate in Nevada, Arizona and Utah. “Now we have new rules, a new game to play.”
In a state with one of the largest proportions of working-class voters and blue-collar workers, where the economy is dominated by the service and entertainment, as well as mining and construction, a populist message seems to have overcome prior political allegiances. Voters who felt trapped in a dark economic rut chose the person they thought would bring the most change.
Exit polls indicate that more than half of white and Asian voters, and about half of Hispanic/Latino voters cast ballots for Trump. Both the NBC and Washington Post exit polls found that majorities of white women and white men without a college degree backed Trump, and polls suggest he had also gained support among non-white voters without college degrees. Overwhelming majorities of those who voted for Trump said the economy was doing poorly.
And though the economy overall is growing and inflation is coming down, for many Nevadans the economy really is bad. The unemployment rate here is the highest in the US, and wages have stagnated. And the state’s chief economist last winter warned that Nevada’s wage growth rate ranked it 49th out of 51 states and territories.
Childcare in Nevada is more expensive than elsewhere, and other basic expenses in the state remain, for some, unattainably high. The median home price in the Las Vegas area, for example, has far outpaced national averages, and the average rent increased by nearly a third between 2020 and 2022.
“At the end of the day, if you’re not able to put food on the table or make a living, you’re going to vote in your self-interest,” said Noble. It’s not that voters didn’t care about immigration or reproductive rights – in fact they voted to approve a ballot measure to enshrine the right to abortions in the state constitution. It’s not that they weren’t concerned about Trump’s character, his comments deriding immigrants and other minority groups, Noble noted – it’s just that those issues weren’t a deciding factor in the presidential election.
It hadn’t helped that Kamala Harris and Democrats overall seemed to move to the right on a number of key issues for the state’s Latino residents, who make up one in five voters in the state. “They leaned into the right on immigration, into the promise of militarising the border,” said Leo Murritata, director of the progressive group Make the Road Action Nevada, which focuses on turning out Black and brown voters.
It left Latinos, Asian Americans and other people of colour feeling let down by both parties on the issue, and wondering if all else was equal – why not vote for the candidate who was promising them economic prosperity? “People were left to their own devices, with all this misinformation Trump was putting out there that the economy was better under him,” Murietta said. “And meanwhile Democrats just walked away from key issues and key voting blocs, telling them they should either fall in line or fall behind. It didn’t work.”
Meanwhile, groups such as the conservative Libre Initiative, which sought to reach many of the same voters as groups like Make the Road, ran an enormous anti-“Bidenomics” campaign across the state, which asked Hispanic voters the question if they were really any better off under Democrats. “There’s a disillusionment and distrust among Hispanics with the Democrats,” Wadi Gaitan, a communications director for Libre, said in the weeks prior to election day. “For example, under Obama, deportations were at a high.”
Even if voters may not expect any better from Trump, Gaitan said, “they feel they can trust him on the economy.”
“The Democrats just aren’t who they used to be” affirmed Kidany Perez, 32, an asphalt worker and longtime Democrat who voted for Trump this year. The administration is sending billions to fund wars abroad, he said – while Americans were struggling to make ends meet. “That’s our taxpayer money. And we’re getting chump change.”
Maedot Apthayas, a 38-year-old customer service representative, agreed. “The economy is so bad,” she said. “Trump is going to change it. He’s going to cut taxes, he will bring relief.”
Democrats, meanwhile, seemed to have failed to realize that simply turning out voters like Perez and Apthayas – middle- and working-class people of color – no longer guaranteed them a victory.
In Nevada, canvassers not only from the Democratic party but also from a range of progressive groups and unions knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors, while the Trump campaign relied on outside groups to knock on doors.
“I think that [Democrats] did turn out who they thought were their voters,” said Jon Ralston, Nevada’s preeminent political oracle and cofounder of the Nevada Independent, during a post-election panel discussion. “What happened around the country is that these voters turned out not to be their voters.”
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