Nevada seemingly slips away despite Biden’s courting of Black, Latino voters

LAS VEGAS — President Joe Biden, clinging to the nomination and surrounding himself with prominent Black and Latino leaders, made a hastily shortened return to the campaign trail with a two-day swing through Nevada, a once-promising battleground state that Democrats fear could be slipping away from them.

Before it was curtailed by his Covid diagnosis, Biden’s Nevada trip was designed to sharpen his message after weeks of trying to hold off restive Democrats in Washington who are agitating for him to bow out of the race. It focused on appealing to traditional gatekeepers in the Black and Hispanic communities whose leaders have stood with the president even as voters from those groups have been shifting to the right at a faster rate than others, powering former President Donald Trump’s leads in Sun Belt states like Nevada.

And Biden’s Western swing — an effort by the White House to counterprogram the Republican convention — came amid warnings from Nevada Democrats that the president’s campaign risked being further drowned out in the state by deepening concerns over a sputtering economy, low wages and the high cost of housing.

The president tried to project a show of force as he joined leaders of the influential congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses, shuffling between venues and delivering energetic speeches, mostly relying on a teleprompter. Biden aides and allies contend they are building on established infrastructure to turn out voters in a state that no Republican presidential candidate has carried since 2004.

But in interviews with POLITICO, more than a dozen elected leaders, party activists and Democratic and independent voters in Clark County, home to nearly three-quarters of Nevada’s residents, described a pervasive sense of unease. Few voters expressed a desire to push out Biden at the top of the ticket — arguing it’s too late to make a move, or that nominating another Democrat at this juncture brings its own set of risks. But several said they wished he had read the room last year and exited gracefully.

“I hate to say it, but I think Trump is going to win,” said Jacob Carleton, who lives and works in Las Vegas’ Arts District. Carleton said he always thought of himself as a liberal, but he’s grown disillusioned with his party elders for waiting too long to stand down. He mentioned by name — and unprompted — former Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both died in office, in their late 80s or early 90s.

“They aren’t some patron saint, but people act like they are rusted in, like some old barnacle,” Carleton said, adding of 2024, “it feels like a bad TV rerun. It’s so prideful he didn’t get out.”

Few officials and voters said they were enthusiastic about Biden. One compared the president to his 51-year-old Cadillac that doesn’t run like it used to, and sometimes has trouble running at all, especially in the blazing desert heat. But like his 1973 Cadillac coupe Deville, Biden is familiar and even comfortable, said Greg DeVille, a supporter who runs a large real estate firm and has been involved in a group supporting Black real estate professionals in the state.

“He’s right for the job,” DeVille said, citing a line from Biden moments before about looking out for low- and middle-income Nevadans. “I think like Joe said, ‘You know, school teachers, firefighters, law enforcement, should pay less taxes than the well-off.’”

And others said they’ve come to view Biden as almost an afterthought, focusing instead on the threat a second Trump term poses.

Indeed, Democrats on the sidelines of Biden’s stops pointed to policy over personality or blind fealty. Rep. Nikema Williams of Georgia, one of many Black members of Congress accompanying Biden on the trip, told attendees of a community forum that she didn’t need to “be in love with my candidate” so long as they “do the right thing when they get there.”

The specter of Trump loomed outside a desert parking lot, where Aaron White was retreating for the shade of a parking structure.

“This is a guy who said people should drink bleach,” said White, an independent from North Las Vegas, before sizing up Biden, whom he plans to vote for in November.

“He’s ‘Sleepy Biden.’ He falls asleep all the time, but he’s agreeable,” White said. “He’s like your grandfather.”

At Biden’s speeches, which were attended by activists, Black and Latino voters and union members who form the Democratic base in Nevada, the president outlined new policies to bring down housing costs and ease the effects of extreme heat on the workforce. But as he pushes to make up ground in Nevada and other battlegrounds, the president said he’s unwilling to relent on drawing sharp contrasts with Trump over their records.

“Donald Trump’s presidency was hell for Black America,” Biden said at an NAACP conference in Las Vegas. He pointed to Trump’s push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, rising unemployment and efforts to wipe away Black history. “His mismanagement of the pandemic was especially devastating to Black communities.”

He praised Vice President Kamala Harris and pronounced her equipped to serve as president and hearkened back to his halcyon days serving under former President Barack Obama.

Biden was joined by several of the Black caucus’ heavy hitters, shouting out the likes of Reps. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and huddling in air-conditioned photo lines with Bennie Thompson of Mississippi; Yvette Clarke of New York; Troy Carter of Louisiana; Nanette Barragán of California; and host Steven Horsford of Nevada. Though a number of members of the House Democratic Caucus have said Biden should end his campaign for reelection, the Congressional Black Caucus and its members have remained Biden’s most loyal supporters.

Biden also taped an interview with Black Entertainment Television’s Ed Gordon, touting his record of delivering for Black Americans. Allies at Biden’s events downplayed Trump’s ability to win over a sizable share of Black voters — taking care to note that most of the elected officials who have called for the president to quit the race are white, and none are Black.

Some Black Nevadans are peeling off, however. Robert Harrison, who works in security, was a lifelong Democrat and voted for Biden in 2020. Harrison now says he’ll vote for Trump.

“Democrats in my opinion have done basically nothing,” he said. “It’s like beating a dead dog, or a dead horse.”

Trump, Harrison said, “squashed a lot of the B.S. I’m not saying he was perfect. I guess he would be the lesser of two,” he added, pausing for a few seconds, “evils.”

Biden’s new housing proposal formed the centerpiece of his pitch in Nevada and represents an attempt to shift the focus of the race toward policy areas where aides have long believed they hold an advantage over Trump.

Even as Biden’s overall approval ratings remain near record lows, polls show some of his policy priorities consistently win majority support. In swing states like Nevada, aides argue that their path to victory relies on relentlessly promoting Biden’s first-term accomplishments and second-term agenda, and contrasting it with a Trump platform that they’ve portrayed as deeply unpopular among most Americans.

But the Biden campaign has struggled to find ways for that message to break through — a task that has become only more difficult in the weeks since the debate.

White House officials drew up the rent cap proposal earlier this year after Biden pressed them for more ways to combat rising frustration with the cost of living, according to two senior Biden officials, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations. They had planned even before the debate to debut the policy during the Republican convention, drawing a sharp contrast with the GOP on its efforts to boost housing affordability. Nevada, they decided, served as the ideal location to roll it out given the outsize impact that soaring home prices have had on voters in the state.

On stage with Trump in late June, Biden alluded to a plan to “cap rates, so corporate greed can’t take over.” But that reference was largely overshadowed by his dismal overall performance. And since then, the president has spent much of his time fending off scrutiny of his fitness for office and calls from within the Democratic Party to abandon his reelection bid.

Still, Biden and his aides have remained hopeful that the housing proposal will make a difference when and if the conversation moves back to core voter concerns like the economy and cost of living. In a trip earlier this year to Nevada, Biden rolled out a slate of proposals aimed at bolstering housing affordability and availability.

But he worried that those policies were too long term, one of the senior officials said. While the rent cap proposal would still require legislation, it’s viewed as a more straightforward plan with a direct impact on rent prices that voters can easily grasp.

“There are housing challenges there that really are top of mind for people, even more so than other parts of the country,” one of the senior officials said of Nevada. “It’s a really important place for him to lay out the stakes, noting that he has a real, concrete plan.”

On Wednesday, Biden dropped by The Original Lindo Michoácan Restaurant. The president’s Covid diagnosis forced his campaign to scrap speaking events at UnidosUS and a planned campaign rally in Las Vegas.

Biden’s appearances were closely scrutinized by attendees for any lapses as voters reflected on the broader dynamics of the presidential contest. Tick Segerblom, a Clark County commissioner and former state legislator, said he initially believed the attempted assassination of Trump last weekend would bolster his already stronger campaign. But then Trump picked Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running-mate, a development Segerblom said would help Democrats because of Vance’s hard-line views on immigration and his isolationist bent.

“There’s never been a bigger difference between the two sides,” he said.

Segerblom said he felt like the Biden campaign was mobilizing on the ground — relying on the robust ground game and union operation that have powered Democratic victories in the state over the past two decades — but his confidence level continues to shift up and down with each passing news cycle.

“The pieces are coming into place,” he said. “Whether we do it, I’m not 100 percent sure.”