Democrats hope polls are wrong in Nevada — and that it will help them

Democrats behind in the polls in Nevada are hoping that this year’s results mirror past big elections in the state in which Democrats trailed before Election Day only to come out ahead when the votes were counted.

According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Republican challenger Adam Laxalt leads Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto by 1.7 percentage points in a race that could determine the Senate majority. Cortez Masto is the only incumbent Democratic senator behind in the polls.

In another statewide race in Nevada, Republican gubernatorial challenger Joe Lombardo leads Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak by 1.8 percentage points.

Those numbers, particularly in the Cotez Masto race, have added to a generally gloomy mood in Democratic circles in recent days as midterm momentum has shifted toward the GOP.

But while Democrats are paranoid about polls showing their candidates ahead in various other states, they are more optimistic when it comes to Nevada.

In 2018, Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen outperformed her polling average by 5 percentage points and won election, while Sisolak outperformed polls by 4.7 percent on the way to a victory over Laxalt.

In 2010, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) outperformed the polls by a whopping 8.3 percentage points to win reelection in a terrible midterm year for Democrats.

In 2020, President Biden was favored to win by 2.4 percentage points in the polling average and slightly outperformed that prediction, ultimately winning the state by a 2.7 percentage point margin. In 2012, President Barack Obama also outperformed polls by nearly 4 percentage points.

In all of those elections, Hispanic voters, who are harder to poll and more likely to swing toward Democrats, have been the pivotal factor.

There are some logical reasons for the discrepancies.

Polling in Nevada is generally made more difficult because a larger proportion of people work during off hours in places like Las Vegas – a situation that’s especially prevalent among the state’s Hispanics.

And many pollsters don’t interview in English and Spanish, or rely on home internet connections for online polls, leaving out many voters who rely on landlines or mobile for their communications.

Jon Ralston, CEO of the Nevada Independent, told The Hill the 2010 Reid election is a good yardstick for this year’s contests, because it was a midterm election that heavily favored Republicans with a Democratic incumbent running for the Senate in Nevada.

Reid pulled off a victory by pivoting on immigration and aligning with the state’s powerful labor unions, laying the groundwork for what became known as the Reid Machine.

“Cortez Masto and Gov. Steve Sisolak are the inheritors of the Reid Machine,” said Ralston.

Most of that coalition remains strong, with the powerful Culinary Union vowing to contact more voters than in any previous election. But since Reid’s death last year, fissures have grown between the machine and Democratic ranks.

Demographics are also changing, along with voter registration patterns.

“2010 was a long time ago,” said Ralston.

Although Democrats still dominate the state’s registrations, the electorate is politically split, with 718,424 registered Democrats, 637,530 Republicans and 640,961 independents.

In 2017, the state had 578,630 registered Democrats, 487,691 Republicans, and 323,080 independents.

Republicans, who in previous years had mainly focused their campaign efforts on the rural, whiter areas of the state, also have instituted a national push to reach out to Latinos.

Hispanic voters tend to participate less in midterms, and before the Reid Machine, they were usually edged out of political participation in Nevada.

But in 2010, Reid proved Nevada Hispanics could put Democrats over the top, and in 2020 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) focused his statewide efforts on Hispanic voters to win the Nevada caucuses in the presidential primaries.

This year, there are still doubts as to how many Latinos will come out and vote.

“We shouldn’t be in the conversation we’re having about whether or not Latinos are going to get out to vote, right? We should have been in the community before the election cycle started,” said Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state. 

While Nevada Democrats face the same challenges addressing inflation as the rest of the country, they are benefitting from greater acceptance among Latinos on a series of secondary issues.

Immigration remains an identity issue for Hispanics in Nevada, many of whom are recent arrivals.

Laxalt’s political history makes immigration a winning issue for him in the rural north of the state, and generally a losing issue among Hispanics.

As attorney general, Laxalt was one of the most vocal opponents of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and his stance on immigration contains some of the most restrictive proposals put forth by the GOP.

Both Cortez Masto and Laxalt have immigrant roots: Cortez Masto is of Mexican and Italian descent, and Laxalt is of Italian descent through his birth father, former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.).

Laxalt’s positions on strict immigration enforcement conflict with his birth father’s public support for immigration reform. Domenici in 2006 said he backed immigration reform because his own mother had been arrested in the 1940s by federal agents for not having proper paperwork.

Neither Laxalt nor Cortez Masto responded to requests for comment on this story.

Democrats also have an advantage on gun control and abortion, two issues on which Hispanics have consistently sided with Democrats in the polls.

A partisan poll released by Everytown For Gun Safety on Wednesday showed Nevada Democratic Latinos ranked commonsense gun safety restrictions and reproductive rights among their top issues when choosing candidates.

Still, the state’s tight races have not received the sort of national attention as races in Georgia, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, despite Nevada being a key swing state in the last two presidential elections.

For Aguilar, the lack of national attention to the state mirrors how politicians and pollsters sometimes overlook Nevada’s Latinos.

“When you think about the history of Nevada, Latinos built the Strip, and they continue to hold it up on a daily basis,” said Aguilar. “And it makes me so angry that nobody understands how critical and how important that is, to the general economy as a whole of our state. And I think we need to understand … we forget how hard people are working to allow us to live the life that we live.”