Harris allies say history in Nevada gives her the chance to snatch state back from Trump

While former President Donald Trump holds a firm lead in Nevada, the swing state’s Democrats have faith that Vice President Kamala Harris can pull off a victory this November. 

Harris has campaigned long and hard in Nevada, a battleground state critical to her chances of winning the White House in just 98 days. 

“We’re first cousins,” the presumed Democratic presidential nominee and California native told Nevada voters in 2019 when she was stumping through the state seeking the presidential nomination. It’s a relationship she’s fought for, visiting the Western state 14 times since becoming vice president and six times since the beginning of 2024. 

Democrats across the state have high hopes and glowing words for President Joe Biden’s heir apparent. 

“I’ve seen her talk to constituents from every background, from every community — from hospitality workers to nurses to teachers to first responders to business leaders,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) told the Nevada Independent. “I’m confident that with her at the forefront, we are going to do very well up and down the ballot in Nevada.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who’s known Harris for more than 15 years, said she believes the vice president holds a real shot at winning her state. 

“One thing I know about Kamala Harris is that she understands what Nevada working families need because of her relationship with Nevada over the years and her involvement working not just with me, but understanding the uniqueness about the two Western states,” she said. 

Republican critics disagree. Jeremy Hughes was the Pacific regional director for the Trump campaign in 2020. He’s not sure that Harris is the winning candidate Democrats have cracked her up to be. 

“It doesn’t matter one bit,” he said, commenting on the glowing words of praise Nevada’s Democrats had for the presumptive Democratic nominee. “They could have picked anybody and all the Democrats would have got up onstage and said, ‘This is the greatest person of all time.’”

Nevada Democrats fell quickly in line with Harris’s candidacy after Biden dropped his reelection bid. Last week, the state’s delegates unanimously voted to pledge their votes to her at the Democratic National Convention. 

Carolyn Salvador Avila is a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, student, the national president of College Democrats of America, and the youngest delegate for the Nevada Democratic Party. She told the Nevadan that Harris is “opening the door not just for women, but for people of color to get involved and have their voices heard as well on the issues that they care about.” 

“She — who’s grown up as a person of color, who’s grown up as a woman in this world, and who’s also grown up in a generation where I think they did start to see the effects of things like climate and all of that in her time — [it] brings her just that much closer to understanding the way that we feel about certain issues,” Salvador Avila said last week. 

Hughes agrees that the Harris campaign could play up to voters concerned about age, race, and ethnic factors this election cycle. 

“Everyone is making the broad assumptions that [because] she’s younger, she’s a woman of color, that she will do better with younger voters and people of color,” the former Trump strategist told the Nevada Independent. “I don’t think that’s a wrong assumption.”

While Harris can play the diversity cards with Democratic voters, the challenge for her campaign will likely be flipping Trump’s momentum with fewer than 100 days to go until Nov. 5. 

The former president has made strides in the state since losing Nevada by 2 points in the 2020 election. The latest polling shows Trump beating Biden in the swing state by nearly 6%. 

Trump has rallied voters multiple times in the Silver State this year, holding his most recent MAGA event in June.

Ahead of his Las Vegas rally last month, a source close to Trump told CNN, “Some of us believe that we might be better positioned in Nevada [this cycle] than we are even in Georgia.”