SILVER STATE SLUGFEST — Nevada is the smallest of the battleground states in terms of Electoral College votes, but you’d hardly know it. It’s been inundated by roughly $250 million in ad spending this election cycle, and the two presidential tickets have made a combined 16 visits since March alone. With just 6 electoral votes, Nevada isn’t necessarily essential to either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. But in a race this close, in an election that will be decided by just seven closely contested states, neither campaign can afford to overlook any state that’s within reach. At the moment, the FiveThirtyEight polling average reports Nevada is essentially a dead heat — Kamala Harris is ahead of Donald Trump by a mere 0.5 percentage points. As part of Nightly’s efforts to illuminate the battleground states that will decide the presidency, tonight we’ll hear from Megan Messerly, who spent nearly seven years covering politics in Nevada, at the Las Vegas Sun and the Nevada Independent, before coming to POLITICO. While she is a native of neighboring California, she considers Nevada her adopted home. She can sing the Nevada state anthem — “Home Means Nevada” — by heart, knows Oct. 31 is so much more than just Halloween and rightfully acknowledges the orange traffic cone as Nevada’s state flower. What issues are dominating the political debate in Nevada this year? Are they different than in any of the other battleground states? Yucca Mountain! Just kidding. It’s the economy. Ask anyone in Nevada about economic ups and downs and they’ll tell you, “When the rest of the country catches a cold, Nevada catches the flu.” Not only are Nevadans feeling the same pinch on their wallets that the rest of Americans are, but many are still recovering from the pandemic, which forced casinos to shutter for more than two months and sent unemployment rates soaring to 30 percent. (I remember driving down the Strip during the early pandemic days: It was eerily apocalyptic.) Plus, as of August, Nevada had the highest unemployment rate of any state, at 5.5 percent, according to federal data. And data show inflation has hit the Mountain West particularly hard. It’s been 20 years since a Republican presidential nominee carried Nevada. What makes it so close this year? To start, the last two presidential elections in Nevada were very close: Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton both won the state by 2.4 percentage points in 2020 and 2016, respectively. Democrats here have been able to take close races and eke out victories on the ground because of their fabled Harry Reid turnout machine. But talking to folks when I was on the ground in Las Vegas last week, I heard a lot of trepidation among Democrats — and, conversely, excitement among Republicans — about Latino and working-class voters. These two groups have been the bread-and-butter targets of the Reid machine, but we’ve seen both groups in Nevada and nationally drift away from the Democratic Party amid the GOP’s populist tack under Donald Trump and a broader disillusionment with the left. That’s going to make Democrats’ work even harder this year. Close to 90 percent of the Nevada vote was cast in just two counties in 2020: Clark and Washoe counties. Can you briefly describe their distinctive features? When you hear Clark County, think Las Vegas; when you hear Washoe, think Reno. Clark, which sits at the southernmost tip of the state, is by far Nevada’s largest county, home to more than 2.2 million people in a state of 3.1 million. It’s a very working class, low educational attainment county — largely owing to Las Vegas’s tourism-based economy — and has voted reliably Democratic in recent years. Washoe, up north, is home to about a half million people and has seen significant changes in recent years, particularly as tech companies have opened up offices there. Both counties have seen significant growth, including an influx in Californians, in recent years. The longtime strategy for Democrats in Nevada was to run up the score as high as possible in Clark, tie in Washoe, and lose by as little as possible in the rural counties. In 2020, Democrats slipped slightly in Clark County while gaining a slight edge in Washoe, which was enough to overcome the GOP advantage in the ruby red rural counties. What does Donald Trump’s path to victory look like in Nevada? What about Kamala Harris? It really all comes down to those Latino and working class voters I talked about. If Harris can’t get enough of them to the polls — either because they’re voting for Trump or staying home — it’s going to be really hard for her to win. It took days for Nevada to count 100 percent of the vote in the 2020 presidential election, leading to much mockery on social media. The state’s slow vote counting once again drew national notice in 2022. It’s one of the smaller states in terms of population, so what the heck takes so long? Nevada is great at in-person early voting. But there have been some, er, shall we say growing pains with a pandemic-era change — later made permanent — to send mail ballots to all registered voters in the state. In the last two elections, counties haven’t had the technology or staff needed to process mail ballots quickly enough. There are also extra checks required with mail ballots, like making sure the signature on it matches the one on file. (If there are any issues, voters are given a chance to “cure” their ballots by proving their identity.) And mail ballots in Nevada are valid as long as they’re postmarked on Election Day and received within four days. All of that has prolonged the ballot-counting process, making it very difficult to call close races. In 2022, GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo won by about 15,000 votes, and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto won her reelection by just under 8,000. New changes this year, including allowing counties to start counting mail ballots two weeks before and to tabulate Election Day votes as they come in, are expected to speed up the process. And counties have more machines and staff that should help, too. If not, we can certainly expect more Zootopia sloth memes. Lightning round question: Name one place, issue or thing we should be watching in Nevada in the campaign homestretch. My old boss Jon Ralston’s early voting blog in the Nevada Independent. Because, as all Nevadans know… #WeMatter. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie.
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