Las Vegas
On October 19, a thousand people or so packed into Stoney’s Rockin’ Country, a cavernous music venue not far from the Las Vegas airport, to watch the final televised confrontation between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The party was hosted by the Trump-boosting Great America PAC, and before the main event, Larry Elder took to the stage to warm up the crowd. Elder, a black conservative radio host who calls himself “the Sage of South Central,” excoriated the “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only) who refuse to support Trump’s candidacy.
“They say he’s too ‘vulgar,’ ” he said dismissively.
From the back of the room came a shout: “F— that!”
The room exploded in laughter, and many in the multiethnic crowd—including a group of young Chinese Americans, who carried signs sporting pro-Trump messages in simplified Chinese characters—turned around to applaud the twentysomething woman sporting a red “Make America Great Again” hat who had voiced that impolitic interjection.
One of the reasons Donald Trump’s path to the White House looks increasingly perilous is that he’s woefully underperforming Mitt Romney in several key swing states. If the state polls are correct, Trump is unlikely to match the 2012 Republican nominee’s performance in New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina, to name a few. But there are a few notable exceptions, namely Iowa, Ohio, and Nevada, where Trump has held his own. Trump needs to carry all three if he wants to make it to the White House.
The affinity of the first two for Trump is fairly easily explained: Iowa and Ohio are filled with the kinds of downscale white voters who have powered the real estate mogul from the beginning of his candidacy, and they are less ethnically diverse than the nation as a whole. But Nevada, on the face of it, should be more hostile. Obama won the state twice, by 13 points in 2008 and 7 in 2012. And if “demographics are destiny,” as the cliché has it, then the Silver State should be tough territory for Trump. For one, at 6.3 percent LDS, it’s the fourth-most Mormon state in the country, and Mormons have been notably cool to Trump’s candidacy. (Trump may even achieve the impossible and manage to lose Utah.) More troubling, it might seem, for Trump: Nearly 30 percent of Nevadans are Hispanic. Trump’s taste for taco bowls notwithstanding, Hispanics are reputed to be extremely hostile to his candidacy.
Yet despite those factors, the number-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight give Trump a 30 percent chance of carrying Nevada versus, say, an 8 percent chance of winning Virginia and a 13 percent chance of taking New Hampshire. (Back before the release of that now-notorious “locker-room talk” video, the site pegged Trump as the favorite in Nevada.) The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the state’s largest newspaper, recently endorsed Trump, becoming the country’s only major paper to do so. And let’s not forget that Trump won an absolute landslide in the GOP caucus here, taking 46 percent of the vote at a time when there were still 11 candidates on the ballot and besting the next closest contender, Marco Rubio, by more than 20 percentage points. Clearly there’s something, well, Trumpian about the state.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, (UNLV) professor Ted Jelen, a long-time political observer of his state, has a few theories on this. “First, the possibility of an Hispanic electoral mobilization (prompted by Trump’s very explicit anti-immigrant stance) may have triggered a counter-mobilization among older, non-college whites,” he tells me. “Second, Trump’s core constituency is in fact older, noncollege-educated white males. We have a lot of those here in Nevada (average education is considerably below the U.S. average) and Trump seems more popular than Romney among those voters.”
Indeed, according to the Census Bureau, Nevada is 45th in college educational attainment; only 22 percent of the state’s population has even a bachelor’s degree. (By comparison, swing state Colorado is number three and Virginia number six in bachelor’s degrees.) Jelen also points out that Nevada is fertile ground for third-party candidates and that the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson has been doing well here, hurting Clinton.
Trump, moreover, is actually faring better among Nevada Hispanics than Mitt Romney did in 2012; a CNN/ORC poll has him pulling in 33 percent versus the 25 percent of Nevada Hispanics who backed Romney in 2012. That may be because Hispanics have long had a presence in the state; they don’t have the kind of profound ethnic consciousness that first- and second-generation immigrants tend to have. David Damore, another UNLV professor, tells me that only 35 percent of Nevada Hispanics are “Spanish-dominant,” which points to the long and established history of Latinos in the state. Needless to say, immigration isn’t as pressing an issue for a fourth- or fifth-generation American as it is for a recent arrival.
Back at Stoney’s, the locals have their own theory for why Trump is doing relatively well here: Voting for The Donald gives Nevadans a way to punish Harry Reid. “It’s all about giving a ‘f— you’ to Harry Reid,” one middle-aged small-business owner tells me. (He too appears unruffled by Trump’s vulgarity.) A similarly aged woman—a Democrat who tells me she is supporting Trump, the first time she’ll ever vote for a Republican—nods in agreement. The retiring Senate minority leader, who polling indicates is the fifth-least-popular senator in his home state, opted to retire rather than face humiliation at the polls. Voting for Trump is at least one way to express displeasure at Reid’s tenure. The presence of Reid, of course, is a double-edged sword: His formidable political machine is hard at work getting the vote out for Hillary Clinton.
And then there are the cultural affinities between Trump and Nevada. UNLV’s Jelen says that “the political culture of Nevada is very libertarian and antistatist. Trump’s antiestablishment appeal seems pretty strong here, in a way which neither McCain nor Romney could exploit.” (In Lionel Shriver’s new novel The Mandibles, which envisages a totalitarian United States several decades from now, it is the state of Nevada that secedes and strikes out on its own as an independent libertarian country.) Trump’s personal abstemiousness notwithstanding, a state with legalized prostitution, bars filled with cigarette smoke, and 24-hour gambling seems more in line with him than with Romney—or Clinton.
Even the aesthetics are right. The Trump International Hotel, a 64-story gold behemoth that looms over the Las Vegas strip, looks right at home in a town renowned for its gaudy architecture. Las Vegas is the kind of city where there’s nothing strange about a person eating a bucket of KFC with gold-leaf flatware, as Trump famously does. Indeed, that combination of chintz and luxury is classic Vegas.
That’s why it’s a bad sign for the Republican nominee that, after leading the polls here for a period, Trump has lately fallen slightly behind. On November 8, what happens in Vegas probably won’t stay in Vegas.
Ethan Epstein is associate editor of The Weekly Standard.
