Early voting in the swing state runs from Oct. 19 to Nov. 1, and Trump aims to turn it red for the first time since 2004. The focus will be on Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Henderson, where the majority of the state’s residents live. As of Oct. 1, nearly 1.73 million of Clark County’s 2.34 million residents are registered to vote. Democrats have an advantage of nearly 140,000 registered voters over Republicans in Clark County, but they are outnumbered by 90,000 registered GOP voters outside the Las Vegas area. The biggest bloc of voters in Clark County and statewide is nonpartisan, with more than 1 million of Nevada’s 2.4 million registered voters potentially up for grabs. The key strategies for winning any race in Nevada include galvanizing turnout for early in-person voting and encouraging mail-in ballots. Former President Barack Obama will rally Democrats in Las Vegas on the first day of early voting. Nevada’s six electoral college votes and U.S. Senate and House races are at stake, with both parties aggressively seeking to secure their base votes.
That difference could be pivotal in Trump winning a state he lost by less than 2.4 percentage points four years ago with just 35 percent of the Latino vote.
Harris did a national Univision Town Hall in Las Vegas on Oct. 10 and two days later, Trump did a Hispanic roundtable in Henderson.
Many of the state’s Latino voters, and many who have come to the fast-growing state to work in the gaming and hospitality industry, are among Nevada’s 825,000 nonpartisan voters.
Many were registered to vote automatically when they got driver’s licenses or ID cards at the DMV. They did not register with a party and thus were auto-registered as nonpartisan.
The 65 percent 2020 nonpartisan/third-party turnout was 20-to-25 percent higher than what is typical for a constituency that is often not politically engaged.
And these voters will determine who wins the Nov. 5 elections in Nevada.
That is why Obama will be in town to kick-start the early vote drive Democrats need, not only to fire up the party’s base but to galvanize its ground game in Las Vegas to ferret out nonpartisan voters and get them to the polls or cast their mail-in ballots.
The former president rallied for Cortez Masto and the three Democratic House incumbents in November 2022 and for Biden in 2020.
Obama’s swing through western battleground states is part of a broader Harris campaign effort that will see former President Bill Clinton stumping in Georgia Oct. 20–21 before embarking on a North Carolina bus tour.
