Republicans hope to flip Nevada seats, testing Democrats’ ‘Reid machine’

LAS VEGAS — Karla Pike calls herself liberal and opposed the end of Roe v. Wade. But she blames Democrats for the rising costs now stretching her retirement budget, and she singled out one for criticism: Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

“I hate to admit it because I didn’t care for them before, but … things were cheaper when the Republicans were in office,” Pike, a former flight attendant in her 70s, said on her way to a grocery store, echoing many others in the state who were dismayed at the economy. She compared her vote this fall to flipping a coin.

Here in Nevada, a crucial midterm battlefront where Republicans haven’t won a Senate race in a decade and have come up short in other key races, economic woes have raised the GOP’s hopes of flipping seats throughout the ballot, according to interviews with voters, candidates and strategists, as well as a review of polling. The financial strains are testing Democrats’ ability to retain and turn out the minority, working-class voters who have long helped power them to victory.

Nevada has one of the highest inflation rates in the country; gas prices still hover above $5.50 per gallon, sometimes surpassed only by California. High costs and economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic have hit communities Democrats hope to get to the polls hard, adding to the challenges of a lower-turnout midterm year. Republicans say they see a chance to make inroads in this diverse state, where a high proportion of residents do not have college degrees.

The GOP’s ability to harness frustrations could help determine control of the Senate as well as the outcome of competitive contests for governor, the House and secretary of state, a post overseeing elections in a 2024 battleground.

Democrats have long braced for tough reelection fights in a state where President Biden won by just over two percentage points. They have a formidable line of defense: the “Reid machine,” a sprawling get-out-the-vote operation that is named for the late Senate majority leader who helped create it, Harry M. Reid, and includes the powerful Culinary Workers Union.

But some recent polling shows GOP candidates here chipping away at Democrats’ lead with Latino voters. The state has replaced the jobs it lost as the pandemic shuttered Nevada’s tourism industry, state officials say, but nearly 1 in 5 members of the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union have yet to get their old jobs back. At a recent gubernatorial debate, a panel of voters included a Culinary Workers Union member who was undecided and said her top issue was inflation.

“To the extent that there ever was a time when Democrats might lose some of their base, this would be that election,” said Tick Segerblom, a Democrat who is seeking reelection as a commissioner for Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. If Democrats can pull through this year — “I think we can” — that should give them confidence for years to come, he added.

The Senate race pits Cortez Masto, who became the first Latina senator after her 2016 win, against former state attorney general Adam Laxalt. The governor’s race features incumbent Steve Sisolak, Nevada’s first Democratic governor in 20 years, against Republican Joe Lombardo, the sheriff of Clark County. Republicans in both races have focused on economic issues and crime, while Democrats have touted their efforts to bring down costs and vowed to protect abortion access.

At the same grocery store where Pike shopped this month, Lindsey Ugale, a Filipino American nurse, said she used to automatically vote for Democrats. But this year, she said — largely because of the economy — she wants to learn more about all the candidates. At another market, a Latino man, who declined to give his name, said he voted against Donald Trump in 2020 but didn’t see much reason to cast a ballot this year.

Canvassing for the Culinary Workers Union in the hills outside Las Vegas late last month, 63-year-old Jean-Marc Polleveys found some supporters of Cortez Masto and Sisolak but no new converts. One woman, who didn’t know whether she would vote, cracked her door open just long enough to take a pamphlet. “We’ll be back,” Polleveys said.

The hotel banquet chef had more luck getting people to sign a petition for rent control.

“Everything is going up,” he said.

Republicans in Nevada say Democrats for drove up prices with government spending and kept businesses and schools closed too far into the coronavirus pandemic.

“What’s going on is absolutely unsustainable, and it is crushing the Las Vegas Valley, and it’s crushing the working class and the middle class — the groups that the Democrats pretend that their policies are supporting,” Laxalt said at a recent event.

Democratic candidates say they are working to cut costs and will fight corporate interests such as Big Oil. Cortez Masto stands by her vote for big aid packages during the pandemic, saying people needed relief, and reminds people that she helped pass legislation lowering prescription drug prices and funding affordable housing in Nevada.

A letter signed by 14 of Laxalt’s relatives, released this week, said Cortez Masto “clearly identifies with the world of the Nevada worker,” noting that she and her sister were the first in their family to graduate from college. (Laxalt dismissed the letter as unsurprising and said most of the signers are Democrats).

Sisolak, defending his handling of the pandemic, said during a gubernatorial debate that he prioritized saving lives: “The economy came back. Those lives we could never regain.”

That message has convinced some voters such as Enrique Barboza, who was laid off from a casino on the Las Vegas Strip during the pandemic. Waiting to pick up food from a strip mall, he said Democrats “do more for us” and were trying to protect people from the coronavirus.

“Within a year and a half, I lost more people than in 30 years,” he said, counting 11 relatives who died.

With four weeks left until Election Day, Nevada’s importance this year has only grown as GOP Senate nominees in other battleground states have struggled. Party operatives searching for the net gain of one seat they need to win back the Senate agree the Silver State is key.

“Nevada is Republicans’ number one pickup opportunity map-wide,” said John Ashbrook, a former top aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is working on Laxalt’s race. “Full stop.” A CNN poll released last week found Laxalt leading with likely voters by two percentage points, within the margin of error.

Nevada had both a Democratic and a Republican senator for most of the 2000s, as well as a Republican governor from 1999 to 2019. But its voters have favored the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 2008, when Barack Obama swept the state by more than 12 percentage points. Disappointed at their losses in 2018, some Republicans declared Nevada a “blue state.”

“When the Democrats are motivated to vote, it will be tough for any Republican to win,” said Danny Tarkanian, who lost that year to now-Rep. Susie Lee (D).

This year, Lee is in a tough reelection battle, as are Democratic Reps. Steven Horsford and Dina Titus, newly vulnerable after redistricting.

“If we win here in Nevada, it’s going to be because of us,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union.

The most closely watched races this fall are all toss-ups.

Sitting in his Las Vegas office, Pappageorge turned around briefly to point out a 2010 election-night photo of his predecessor with Reid, who grew up poor in Nevada and helped harness the Culinary Workers Union’s organizing power while representing the Silver State in the Senate for 30 years. Reid died late last year, leaving some to wonder whether his political machine’s power would wane without his ability to marshal donors and strong-arm as needed.

A dramatic rift in the state Democratic Party also threatened to disrupt midterm preparations after new liberal leadership triggered mass resignations early in 2021. Allies of Reid launched a new group, Nevada Democratic Victory, to run a separate operation. That group — which all the top-tier candidates have chosen to work with — did not get access to the state party’s precious voter data until early this year. Local Democrats say they have powered through the rocky period.

The Culinary Workers Union is in the midst of its largest election-year effort ever, leaders said, on track to knock on the doors of more than half the Black and Latino voters in the state, plus more than a third of the Asian American voters.

“It’s a pretty straightforward message: ‘Who do you think is actually going to take on these issues? Who has more credibility?’ ” Pappageorge said.

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira once predicted in the 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” that Nevada could become “dependably Democratic in the next decade,” in part because of its growing Latino population. Now he says the results in Nevada could underscore a national problem for the Democratic Party.

Teixeira said he listened in on a Democratic-led focus group of Hispanic voters in Nevada where people expressed concerns about the economy and in some cases criticized Democrats’ immigration policy.

“I think both parties have a job to do if they want to be the party of the working class, but recent trends look good for the Republicans,” Teixeira said, noting the high proportion of working-class Latino voters.

Democrats have defended their outreach to Latino voters. Veronica Yoo, a spokeswoman for the Senate Majority PAC, noted that Laxalt has promoted a Spanish-language website and Spanish-language radio ad as part of an “unprecedented” effort. Meanwhile, the Democratic side had been doing that “cycle after cycle after cycle,” Yoo said. Cortez Masto’s campaign has been airing Spanish-language ads since March, emphasizing her support for workers and small businesses.

Recent Nevada polling has shown Democrats leading among Latino voters but with a slimmer advantage than when exit polls showed Biden outpacing Trump among the state’s Hispanic voters by 26 points in 2020. In some instances the polling had a high margin of error, and many Democrats said they were not convinced that Latino support is eroding in Nevada and would withhold judgment until the election.

Operación Vamos, a GOP initiative to reach Latino voters, is on track to contact more than 100,000 Nevadans this election cycle. Helder Toste, a field and coalitions director with National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the top three issues people raise at their doors in Nevada are inflation, gas and jobs — in other words, “the economy, the economy, the economy.” Republicans also hope to make inroads with Asian Americans, a fast-growing group that makes up more than 10 percent of the Nevada electorate.

Republican consultants have long discussed a “magic number” for Latino support that they believe would lock up the race for Laxalt: 37 percent, according to a GOP strategist familiar with the Senate race who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the race more candidly. The CNN poll had Laxalt at 33 percent among registered voters.

“That Senate race has the first and only Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate,” said Jon Ralston, a top political journalist in the state. “And if she can’t win by an overwhelming margin among Hispanics and that helps Adam Laxalt become a U.S. senator, that is going to be an indicator of really bad news for Democrats across the country.”

Democrats have also made abortion access central to their campaigns in a state where citizens voted decisively in 1990 to guarantee the right. Some voters in Las Vegas said they knew little about this year’s candidates beyond the slew of ads highlighting Laxalt’s criticisms of Roe v. Wade — the decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion and was struck down by the Supreme Court this past summer — and warning that he could restrict abortion at the federal level.

Laxalt has said he would support a Nevada referendum to limit abortion after 13 weeks of pregnancy but in an op-ed denied that he would back a federal ban in the Senate. He has said he wants to “return the issue to the people” and states, echoing other Republicans.

Parked out back at the recent gubernatorial debate: a giant truck bearing the words “JOE LOMBARDO IS ANTIABORTION.”

“I support anything that the people approve,” Lombardo said as Ralston, the debate moderator, pressed him on his shifting positions on the issue. With Trump set to campaign soon after with what he called “the entire Nevada Trump ticket,” Lombardo also distanced himself: “I wouldn’t use that adjective,” he said when asked if Trump was a great president. He said the 2020 election was not stolen — a position at odds with Trump’s false claims.

Trump had only praise for Lombardo at his rally this past weekend in Minden, Nev., however, calling him “tough on crime” and “strong on border security and election integrity.”

Democrats have seized on Trump’s tours to battleground states, hoping such involvement from the former president will alienate moderate voters. Cortez Masto last month started airing her first ad attacking Laxalt for promoting Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

Polling suggests a Republican sweep of Nevada’s races this fall could include Jim Marchant, the GOP nominee for secretary of state who has campaigned on Trump’s baseless election grievances and said he would not have certified the 2020 results. He and several like-minded secretary of state nominees around the country have stoked fears of Trump allies interfering with future contests.

Many Nevadans said they did not know of Marchant but planned to vote a straight Republican ticket. “Any Republican, dead or alive,” said Pat Kalbaugh, 78, on her way out from a country club where Laxalt joined former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley for an event called “Winning Back Nevada.”

Donna Coleman, 71, another attendee, had some reservations when a reporter told her about Marchant’s calls to reject the 2020 vote. “He needs to get over that,” she said.

“I mean, I’m [still] voting for him,” she added.