LAS VEGAS — Kamala Harris‘ whirlwind battleground barnstorm with her fresh vice presidential pick ended Saturday in this town so often roiled by economic uncertainty.
Her Saturday remarks nodded to the pocketbook pressures of everyday Americans and tacitly acknowledged that portions of Nevada’s majority-minority, heavily immigrant, working class population — whose wallets continue to be pinched in grocery stores and at the gas pump — remain curious about former President Donald Trump.
As excitement over her candidacy gives way to the realities of the final stretch of campaigning, Democrats are divided over whether Harris is making a clear enough case to independent voters on those issues — and that it just has yet to reach all the ears it needs to — or whether her message itself needs strengthening. Her speech in Nevada previewed her evolving economic policy platform, which she told reporters Saturday is coming next week.
“Earlier this year, right here in Vegas, we celebrated your historic contract win,” she said to a crowd that included red-shirted members of Las Vegas’ powerful Culinary Union, acknowledging the role that the state’s labor unions have played in fighting for blue-collar workers.
“It is my promise to everyone here, when I am president, we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” she continued.
Trump has promised to eliminate taxes on tips, a staple of his stump speech, appealing to the working-class voters who tend to favor him. Harris, perhaps recognizing the popularity of the issue, seems to be aiming to neutralize it by adopting it — echoing a similar move last month from the state’s two Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto.
The campaign also released an ad that will air in battleground states highlighting Harris’ middle-class upbringing working at McDonald’s for a summer while in college — a line that has made it into her speech — and promising to lower drug costs and make housing more affordable.
The euphoria and palpable optimism about Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — heard in the cheers, chants and stomps of Saturday’s crowd that the campaign pegged at 12,000 and seen in their “Kamala is brat” and affectionate “Coach Walz” signs — is tinged with varying shades of clear-eyedness and caution about the battle ahead in the coming weeks, and the work outside of the packed arenas and star-studded rallies.
For as many Democrats as Nevada has helped send to Washington in the last two decades, Democrats here argue that elections are only won through gritty determination — and often by the skin of their teeth, something Harris acknowledged in her speech.
“We know this will be a tight race until the very end, and so let’s not pay too much attention to the polls, because we have some hard work ahead of us,” she said. “But we like hard work. Hard work is good work.”
What Democrats have to do here to win working-class voters over is a microcosm of the challenges Harris faces on the short-yet-still-long road to Election Day.
“The vice president has certainly injected excitement into the race — but that just means Nevada is within the margin of error,” said Ted Pappageorge, the secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, which endorsed Harris on the eve of her Las Vegas visit. “For Democrats to win in Nevada, they’re going to have to take a very clear position on this issue of what families are dealing with at the kitchen table, on food and gas and housing.”
Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) added that “enthusiasm is great, but it’s not votes.”
The campaign also aims to use Walz to refine its economic message. The Minnesota governor has a profile more akin to the working-class voters Democrats are trying to reach than Harris, who went to an elite private college and worked as a prosecutor in San Francisco.
Walz, who was introduced by a teacher, Tilly Torres, talked about his previous career as an educator, a nod to the fact that teachers unions remain a core Democratic voting bloc.
“My dad was a teacher, my older brother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, my younger brother was a teacher, and we married teachers,” he said. “The privilege of my lifetime was spending two decades teaching in public schools.”
This week, the Harris campaign put out ads on what are widely perceived to be her two weakest issues: immigration and the economy. In addition to the economic one, the campaign released an ad in Arizona and Nevada highlighting Harris’ background as a “border state prosecutor” who “took on drug cartels” against footage of the vice president speaking alongside law enforcement officers. The ads are part of a $50 million paid media campaign ahead of the convention in Chicago later this month.
“Democrats have to get tougher on [immigration] and go back at them on this,” said Chuck Rocha, a former Bernie Sanders senior adviser and a Democratic strategist who focuses on Latino voters. “We have a lot of work to do. All this race has done now is move from a 70-30 Donald Trump that he can win to a 50-50 race.”
Rocha said both messages resonate strongly with the Latino community.
“Latino voters align with working-class Americans because they’re the new blue collar, working class, aspirational immigrant class like the Irish and the Italians were back in the day, and that’s why that message is so compelling,” Rocha said.
Those working-class issues, and specifically how they resonate with Latino voters, could be the make-or-break in the election as the Harris campaign works to cobble together the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. A push in Nebraska to change the way it awards its five Electoral College votes to a winner-take-all system, if successful, means Harris needs to win at least one so-called Sun Belt state, like Nevada, in addition to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
A new New York Times-Siena College poll out Saturday shows that Harris leads Trump by 4 percentage points in the Blue Wall, an improvement from Biden’s performance there. And Harris’ candidacy has brought those Sun Belt states that the Biden campaign had considered its second-tier priority within striking distance, with the Cook Political Report moving Arizona, Nevada and Georgia this week from “lean Republican” last month when Biden was still in the race into the “toss up” category.
While a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist found that Harris has already doubled her lead with Black voters over Trump, polling shows the vice president has yet to win Latinos back even at the rates Biden had in 2020. And at between a quarter and a third of the population in both Arizona and Nevada, Latinos could make the difference in close presidential elections like the ones the two states saw four years ago.
A battleground poll of Latino voters from Somos PAC, a Latino voter mobilization group, released earlier this week taken in the days after Biden dropped out of the race shows Harris with 55 percent support and Trump at 37 percent. In 2020, 61 percent of Latino voters cast ballots for Biden, while 36 percent voted for Donald Trump, narrower than both the 66-28 margin between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016 and the 71-27 margin between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012.
Mike Madrid, a GOP strategist who focuses on Latino voters, said the fact that Democrats are touting relatively “weak numbers” for Harris with Latinos “means that they’re going to take the undecided or momentum shifts for what they can get right now.”
“It is remarkable that they’re leaking data showing them doing worse than they did in 2020. They spent two years saying Biden didn’t do that bad when of course he did, and now they’re using that as a baseline,” he said. “This was the group that was the softest for Biden and even though they may not know Kamala they know she’s not a feeble old guy, and that counts for something. Now, how sustainable is it? I don’t know.
Still, he added, “I do believe it’s entirely possible for Kamala to not only do better than Biden but to get it down to a historical range that’s safe for Democrats.”
Harris’ allies within the Latino community are similarly realistic about where she stands today and what she needs to do to win.
“She’s still underperforming in comparison with other Democrats, so there is an opportunity for the vice president to be with the community, to educate about the policy priorities, and to make a stronger statement of where she stands on the top priorities for the Latino community in Nevada,” said Hector Sanchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, a national Latino civic engagement organization.
Here on the ground in Las Vegas, Democrats argue it’s going to take specifics to persuade working-class Latino voters. Many here work in the service industry and are being doubly squeezed by prices at the grocery store or the gas pump and by lower tips and discretionary spending.
Alicia Watson, a food server at the Golden Nugget casino in downtown Las Vegas, said it’s “very hard” to make ends meet right now as a single mom and tips are unreliable.
“You just have to be thankful for what you get. If you get $5 on a $200 tab, I say, ‘Well at least you didn’t get zero.’ That’s where we are right now. That’s the reality of it,” Watson said. “You’re just thankful every month that the bills get paid.”
Organizations that focus on the Latino electorate say voters are eager for details — they want to know how policies in Washington are going to directly impact their household budgets, rent prices and mortgage payments — and won’t be persuaded by sweeping messaging or broad promises.
“Economy is top of mind. Cost of living is top of mind. They want their leaders to focus on making life more affordable. They want wages to go up. They want prices to go down. They don’t want to hear candidates talking about the problems they’re living every single day – they want to hear about the solutions,” said Emmanuelle Leal-Santillan, national communications and media director for Somos PAC, who is based in Las Vegas. “How are you going to reduce the prices of housing? How are you going to reduce the prices of groceries?”
Joseph Garcia, vice president of public policy at the Latino-focused nonprofit Chicanos por La Causa, said it doesn’t matter if Wall Street is doing well or corporate profits are at record levels if people don’t feel it themselves.
“To them, the economy is what’s in their pocket, it’s gas and groceries. It’s, ‘Will I ever be able to afford a house?’” Garcia said.
Still, Democrats argue they’d rather be in their position than the one Republicans are in, with Harris’ record fundraising totals — from the $310 million raised in July to the $36 million haul brought in in the first 24 hours after she announced Walz as her running mate — combined with the infrastructure the Biden campaign established early on giving them the means to make their case.
It’s people like Veronica Vargas, a 43-year-old registered nonpartisan who said she’s undecided about who to vote for, they need to persuade. Vargas, standing in her driveway in a working-class East Las Vegas neighborhood Friday morning, said she likes Harris and is excited about the prospect of a female president, but is uncertain about what the vice president stands for and thinks Trump would be stronger on the economy.
“We haven’t heard from her a lot. We heard more from Michele Obama when she was First Lady than we have heard from Kamala,” Vargas said. “The economy is so low at this time, that if Trump wins, I think he will bring that up. To be honest, I don’t know what kind of proposals Kamala has.”
EMEA Tribune is not involved in this news article, it is taken from our partners and or from the News Agencies. Copyright and Credit go to the News Agencies, email news@emeatribune.com Follow our WhatsApp verified Channel
