LAS VEGAS — Scars from the coronavirus pandemic are still visible here. Home prices skyrocketed and rents rose faster than almost anywhere in the country. About 10,000 casino employees are out of work. Gas prices, now over $5 a gallon, are higher than any other state except California.
Amid a faltering economy, the state Democrats have held out for more than a decade as the national model – registering and evicting new voters – has become the epitome of the party’s difficulties entering the 2022 midterm elections.
Democrats have long relied on workers and Latino voters to win Nevada, but the allegiances of both groups are now in question. Young voters fueling Senator Bernie Sanders’ biggest win in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries remain skeptical of President Biden. And Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat and Latina’s first senator, is one of the party’s most threatened establishment parties.
She must overcome the president’s declining ratings, dissatisfaction with the economy and her own relative anonymity. And it lacks the popularity and deep ties to Latino voters that Senator Harry M. Reid, who died in December, has used to build the state’s powerful democratic machine. The state has long been a symbol of the Democratic Party’s future by relying on a racially diverse coalition to win elections, but those past gains are now at stake.
“There is a lot of frustration on the ground that no one is listening,” said Leo Murrieta, the director of Make the Road Nevada, a liberal advocacy group. “They are not wrong. It’s hard to talk about the possibility of tomorrow when today’s is still torn apart.”
Nevada, which wore Mr. Biden in 2020, has been a linchpin for Democrats in the presidential election since 2008. But an election cycle pattern has emerged that has alarmed Democrats. The party dominates in the presidential election, but struggles during the midterms when a Democrat sits in the White House. Democratic turnout is dwindling, largely because of the state’s very temporary population, and Republicans are gaining ground.
In 2014, the last midterm election with a Democrat in the White House, state turnout fell by 46 percent compared to the previous presidential election, ushering in Republican control of the state legislature. This year, Republican victories could fire Democratic governor Steve Sisolak and the state’s three Democratic Congressmen, while also replacing Ms. Cortez Masto with a 2020 Senate election denier.
Turnout aside, a deeper problem for Democrats is that the state has gone, just a little bit, less blue. The proportion of state-registered Democrats has fallen — from 39.4 percent in 2016 to 33.6 percent in February, according to figures from the Nevada Secretary of State. At the same time, more than 28 percent of registered voters are now unaffiliated with any party, up from 20 percent in 2016. Officials said the spike in unaffiliated voters stems from an automatic voter registration system that voters in Nevada adopted in 2018 .
The state’s economy is showing signs of improvement. Unemployment in Reno is among the lowest in a century. Democrats are counting on the region, which has attracted new residents, many from California, and has become something of a tech hub. But since more than 70 percent of the state’s population lives in Clark County, the home of Las Vegas, the election will likely be decided there. In interviews with voters in Las Vegas, the economy overshadowed all other problems. Some were optimistic, but they feared that they would not have enough money for the basic necessities: rent, food, gas.
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“What I care about is opportunity and economy,” said Angel Clavijo, 23, who voted for the first time in 2020. Although he cast his vote for Mr Biden, Mr Clavijo said he was not registered with either party.
Although he was able to keep his job as a housekeeper at The Venetian Resort during the pandemic, Mr. Clavijo watched anxiously as his parents’ bills piled up. “I really can’t say I’m paying much attention to politics at the moment,” he said. “I’m not just going to vote for a party.”
Margarita Mejia, 68, a retired hotel worker, said she spent most of her life voting for Democrats but sat out the 2020 election while helping her family and friends cope with the pandemic.
“It was depressing, being alone, fighting for everything,” said Ms Mejia, who sold clothes, stuffed animals and art from her front yard last week. “I don’t know what the government is doing for us, even if they say they want to help.”
Mr. Clavijo and Ms. Mejia were unable to nominate the incumbent Nevada senator for re-election — Ms. Cortez Masto, whose seat is crucial if Democrats are to retain control of the Senate.
Despite five years in the Senate and eight years as Nevada Attorney General, Ms. Cortez Masto remains unknown to a wide swath of the Nevada electorate, due to her longstanding distaste for publicity, cautious political stance, and Nevada’s transient voters.
According to an analysis by Democratic data firm TargetSmart, nearly half of voters on Nevada’s list have registered since Ms. Cortez Masto was last on the ballot in 2016. Her own internal poll found that nearly a quarter of voters Latinos had no opinion about the race between her and Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general who is likely to be her Republican opponent in the general election.
The Cortez Masto campaign began reintroducing her to Latino audiences earlier this month with a Spanish-language television commercial that relied heavily on telling her life story as a political pioneer and her family’s military history.
It gave a generous interpretation of her biography: Her father, Manny Cortez, was one of the most powerful figures in Las Vegas while serving on the Clark County Commission and later as head of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. In that role, he adopted the ubiquitous marketing phrase in Las Vegas, “What happens here stays here.”
“He didn’t start at the top,” Mr. Reid said from the Senate floor after Mr. Cortez died in 2006, “but he got there.”
mr. Cortez, who maintained a close friendship with Mr. Reid, operated as a player behind the scenes. While that served him as a political operator, it may not help his daughter in this year’s high-profile race that will help determine control of the Senate.
“He was never one to go out and get the media’s attention,” said Jon Ralston, the longtime Nevada reporter. “She’s a bit of an exaggerated version of him in many ways.”
That aversion to seeking the limelight has left Ms. Cortez Masto essentially a generic Democrat in an interim year when a yoke with Mr. Biden is a political risk. A January poll by The Nevada Independent showed that Mr. Biden approved only 41 percent in the state.
Ms. Cortez Masto declined to be interviewed.
“No state has been hit harder than Nevada, and we’re recovering quickly as Catherine fought to get the help our hospitality industry needed, supporting the tens of thousands of workers who depend on our tourism economy,” a spokesperson, Josh Marcus-Blank , said in a statement.
Jeremy Hughes, a Republican who served as campaign adviser to Dean Heller, the former Republican senator, said Ms. Cortez Masto would have had a hard time separating from Mr. Biden and the national party’s diminished brand.
“Every data point I’ve seen indicates Hispanic voters are more open to supporting a Republican this cycle than in recent history,” Mr Hughes said. “If the economy is the number 1 problem in the minds of voters across the country, in Nevada and especially among Spanish voters, it is the number 1, 2 and 3 problem.”
But Democrats say her likely Republican opponent, Mr. Laxalt, is unlikely to win moderate voters. Mr. Laxalt, whose father and grandfather both served in the Senate, led Trump’s campaign to reverse the 2020 election results in Nevada.
Democrats are also counting on more economic improvement in Las Vegas, where the economy was hit by the abrupt closure of the Strip but is now rebounding with overcrowded casinos.
On a recent sunny afternoon in east Las Vegas, Paul Madrid and Daniel Trujillo took a break from the barbershop they’ve run for the past 20 years. Things have been going well lately and the couple described themselves as relieved that the worst was over. Yet they shudder as they see the gas price rise at the station across the street.
Mr Madrid, 52, called himself a “lifelong workers’ Democrat” and said he had tried to pay less attention to politics since former President Donald J. Trump left office. Frustrated as he is, he will likely vote for Democrats in November. But he said he felt less loyal than ever.
“Something has to change,” he said. “We have to set the country for the party. I have to stay positive. My business is back, customers are back and I just want this to be over.”