Nevada is in a deep economic crisis. Her working-class voters could swing the election – Incl

Gonzalez — like many workers on the strip — has struggled to keep up with rising costs in recent years. While the U.S. economy has generally recovered from the pandemic, Nevada is lagging behind. Nearly a quarter of jobs here are in recreation or hospitality, and although the Las Vegas Strip, where Gonzalez works, is booming again with tourists, Nevada’s unemployment rate remains the highest of any US state.

And working-class voters are grappling with one big question: Which candidate will help them get out of a deep economic rut?

Their decision will help decide the election. Nevada is one of seven US swing states that are helping to determine the outcome of the presidential race. With its six electoral votes, Nevada has gone Democratic in every presidential vote since 2008 — but the winning candidates have escaped by slim margins. This year, the outcome may come down to working-class voters who are exhausted by low wages and ever-higher costs.

“Nevada is a blue state, but it’s a very, very, very light blue state,” said David Byler, head of research at polling firm Noble Predictive Insights. “It won’t take much of a swing to turn either of these into a functional tie or a Republican win.”

Both presidential campaigns offer solutions that—at least at first glance—seem almost identical.

Trump raised the idea of ​​ending tip taxes at a campaign rally in June. Harris came up with a plan to do so in August and combined it with a promise to end the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which is $2.13 an hour.

JD Vance, Trump’s vice president, floated the idea of ​​expanding the child tax credit to $5,000. Harris and Waltz have made their plan to expand the child tax credit and curb child care costs one of the campaign’s top priorities.

Gonzalez doesn’t believe Trump will do anything to help workers — after all, the glitzy hotel and casino that bears the former president’s name on the strip fought hard to prevent workers from unionizing before election in 2016. “All Trump wants to do is cut taxes for his friends, for his rich friends, not for us,” he said. “He showed us that.”

In recent years, the state’s powerful, politically engaged unions have helped Democratic candidates win — and this year, the Culinary Union alone aims to knock on at least 900,000 doors. The AFL-CIO also campaigned for Harris, and the Nevada Teamsters pushed to endorse Harris, although the national organization declined to make an endorsement.

“People I’m talking to are hearing talking points from the Trump campaign, they’re hearing a plan from the Harris campaign,” said Max Carter, a state assemblyman and former union electrician who campaigned on behalf of the Harris campaign.

But Republicans also position themselves as defenders of workers. “Trump’s big innovation really went after these working-class voters,” Byler said. The former president delivered a message of populism and managed to differentiate himself from a past era of Republicans focused on fiscal and social conservatism and a hawkish foreign policy.

Voters increasingly say they trust Trump over Harris to improve economic conditions and deliver on policy promises. A September poll by Noble Predictive Insights, for example, found that 47 percent of voters trust Trump to ban gratuity taxes, compared with 40 percent who trust Harris more on the issue.

Many voters remember the early days of the Trump administration when spending was simply lower. “I think the economy was just better when Trump was president,” said Magali Rodas, a 32-year-old mother of two who was pricing groceries at her local Latin American market.

Her husband, an electrician, has struggled to find work since the pandemic, she said — even as rent and other costs continue to rise. He is also an immigrant who has been fighting for legal status in the US for more than a decade. Biden, Rodas said, continues to let immigrants into the U.S. without any plan to help those already in the country. “What have the Democrats done for us in four years?” she said.

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It’s a common complaint of campaigners at Make the Road Action in Nevada, a progressive group focused on electing Latino and other minority voters. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, the economy was better under Trump,'” said Josie Rivera, the group’s organizer. they stay at home.’

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in the weeks leading up to Election Day found Trump trailing Harris by just two percentage points among Hispanics.

Make the Road campaigners are working to fact-check Trump’s rhetoric that the economy has been at its “best” during his presidency. They also spoke to voters about Project 2025, the ultraconservative roadmap detailing how the former president and his allies would restructure the US government — starting mass deportations or gutting education and climate programs with disastrous consequences for immigrant and black communities.

“Still, we face a lot of misinformation,” Rivera said. “We try to combat this when we go door-to-door, with one-on-one conversations and personal referrals. But it can still be difficult to reach voters.

Many voters of color are turned off by the president’s racist rhetoric about immigrants, but they don’t necessarily take him seriously or believe he will actually implement the extreme policies he says he will, Rivera noted. However, many voters seem to trust the former president’s business acumen.

“I don’t like him as a person, but I like his economic perspective,” said Maile McDaniel, a 22-year-old Reno resident. “Because he’s shown he can do it before. He showed he could keep inflation low, he showed he could make things affordable.

McDaniel said that as an expectant mother, she is particularly concerned about the cost of child care and inflated prices at the grocery store.

Child care in Nevada is also more expensive than elsewhere in the country, and other basic costs in the state remain, for some, unaffordably high. The median home price in the Las Vegas area, for example, far outpaced national averages, and the median rent increased by nearly a third between 2020 and 2022.

Democrats say Joe Biden’s bailout has brought in billions to fund everything from education to housing programs. And the president’s deflationary law also provided unprecedented funding for new construction. But many of these projects are in the early stages, and it may take some time before Nevadans see the benefit.

The potential benefits of competing proposals not to tax tips are also unclear. A Yale Budget Lab analysis estimated that more than a third of American tipped workers no longer pay federal income tax because they earn too little.

Harris’ version of the plan would also aim to end the practice of paying tipped workers below the minimum wage, even though in Nevada all workers are already entitled to a minimum of $12 an hour, regardless of whether they earn tips. Tax exemptions for tips can also leave some workers worse off – depriving them of other tax credits.

Voters leaning toward either candidate also wondered why Trump or Harris hadn’t already tried to push through some of those reforms.

“Trump was president for four years,” said Kenneth Logan, a retired bartender who lives in Las Vegas. “He says a lot of things, but usually doesn’t follow through. I say if someone tells you who they are, believe what they tell you.

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For decades, Nevada has led the way in the polls, voting for the winner in every presidential contest since 1912 with two exceptions — the state fell for Gerald Ford in 1976 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Yet this year, even seasoned strategists and sociologists have struggled to predict which way the Silver state will turn.

Indeed, reaching voters has long been a struggle in Nevada. Its largest cities, Reno and Las Vegas, are home to a transient population, many of whom work unpredictable shifts in the state’s 24-hour entertainment and hospitality industries. The state is also incredibly diverse and is home to several immigrant communities that speak primarily Spanish or a language other than English.

The political affiliation of residents can also be difficult to analyze. Many voters in Nevada have been strongly independent for decades—voting for both Democratic and Republican candidates. But new changes to the voter registration system — which automatically registers eligible voters at the DMV and lists them as “nonpartisan” by default — have swelled the ranks of voters who are not affiliated with any political party, even though voters’ beliefs are grew increasingly entrenched and polarized. Campaign operators struggle to find these independents and find out if they can be influenced.

Another uncertainty is how the state’s predominantly Hispanic population, who make up nearly 20 percent of Nevada’s electorate, will be affected. Latino voters here have traditionally supported the Democrats, although the party’s popularity has been declining. Both parties struggle to send strategic and thoughtful messages to Latinos even as they desperately seek to win their votes.

Asian-American voters — who make up 12 percent of the state’s population — are another increasingly important voting bloc, and Harris’ campaign is particularly working to woo a growing constituency of Filipino-American voters in the state.

There are also indications that Nevada’s Latter-day Saints, who make up 6 percent of the state’s population and have historically been reliable Republican voters, have been turned off by Trump’s Christian nationalism.

More than any other group, however, the Nevada campaigns remained focused on winning over state workers.

“I think it’s time for all the people like us who work in these hard jobs in this country that somebody work hard for us,” said Claudio Lara, 49, who works as a cleaner in Vegas.

He voted for Harris, he said, because she is a child of immigrants and a woman. “It’s time for a woman and it’s time for a change,” he said. “We need strong change, drastic change in this country.