I Went to Las Vegas to Find Out How Folks Felt About the Election. What I Saw Was Bleak.

LAS VEGAS—Last Friday, in the aftermath of a disastrous presidential debate for President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the East Las Vegas Community Center for her fifth visit to Nevada this year. (She’ll be back again soon, this coming Tuesday.) The visit was originally planned as a persuasion exercise targeted at this swing state’s wavering Latino voters—so, naturally, the veep found herself attempting to assuage concerns about her boss’s well-being. “Harris spent the entirety of her 11-minute speech drawing contrasts between Biden and the former president,” noted the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Those contrasts? Our guy’s old, but the other guy is such a liar. “Donald Trump couldn’t pass a polygraph three minutes into that [debate],” remarked Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, taking the stage after Harris.

Though I was in Vegas myself at the time, I could not attend this event, which was planned in relative secrecy and tightly controlled by Biden’s communications staff. At that moment, I was getting some frank thoughts from my Lyft driver: Andrew, a Filipino American local and immigrant who had missed the debate but had an idea of how he would approach the ballot box come November. “You just have to look at the facts and at each person’s record, and see who was better, who did more for the economy,” Andrew explained, revealing he voted for Trump in 2020—and was “leaning” toward him in 2024. “And I don’t think most people will vote for Biden again.”

Andrew emigrated from the Philippines as a child and studied nutrition and dietetics during college in Grand Forks, North Dakota (a degree he never put to use, as he didn’t like the jobs made available to him), but has otherwise spent his entire life in Las Vegas. The city has changed a lot over that time: a 21^st-century population boom, a rise in homelessness, and an increased law-enforcement presence. He preferred the rural quietude of North Dakota over the congestion and noise of Vegas, but he otherwise couldn’t complain.

“It’s a safe place,” he told me. “I feel like I get other New York passengers all the time who tell me they got mugged up there.” (I told Andrew, truthfully, that this had never happened to me, but I took his point.) Andrew added that crime tended to be concentrated among unhoused populations, many of whom had gathered on the tourist-famous Fremont Street before the cops pushed them north. “They did a good job.”

Still, the six-block Fremont Street Experience downtown provided the starkest possible display of the brutal inequality within Sin City. Tourists sipped from their megasize margarita cups and splurged their cash in every casino available while unhoused locals found whatever patches of shade they could in the 110-degree weather. The economic conditions as advertised to visitors were summed up by a metal sign in a pop-up retail stand: “Due to the Rising Cost of Ammunition, No Warning Shot Will Be Fired.”

Slipping into nearby King’s Bar, I caught an eager gambler with a stark red TRUMP tee walking in front of a TV screen blasting an ad for Jacky Rosen—the Democratic Nevada senator up for reelection this fall—touting her work on legislation to crack down on the international fentanyl trade and her support for the scuttled bipartisan immigration bill, likewise promoted here as a means of curtailing the spread of fentanyl. Strolling away from the ever-busy Fremont toward a more sparsely populated area of the city, I saw a homeless resident’s thin cardboard slab blowing across an empty street, buoyed by the hot, dry winds.

But how did folks in Vegas feel about the president and vice president? It was hard to detect whether they felt anything about the leaders of the free world at all. Aside from a fellow bus rider who remarked that Instagram had “taken a wild turn” after the debate, few people I encountered seemed to have paid much heed to Biden, his disastrous debate, and the Democratic Party panic. I saw one digital billboard for the Biden-Harris campaign on the highway to North Las Vegas, its presence literally overshadowed by other signs advertising immigration services in Spanish or emphasizing the need for “Faith” and to follow “the Chosen One,” slogans as vague as their letters were big. Meanwhile, the four vertical Trump flags that flew alongside a shabby hostel on Sunset Road were very visible.

Yet something that became apparent is that the politics of Las Vegas are local, and targeted. I stayed at the STRAT Hotel and Casino in the Gateway District, which gave me a clear view of the blaring, shifting digital signage dotted all around Vegas’ most popular attractions. One screen across the street shouted out the front-runner in the city’s mayoral race, Democrat Shelley Berkley, before showing off the #BringThemHome campaign on behalf of the Israeli hostages. I was also told I could shoot a machine gun at the nearby #StripGunClub, a nice complement to the BulletsAndBurgers.com truck I’d seen just a few blocks down.

But if national politics don’t seem to be breaking through in Vegas, it’s not hard to understand why that might be. I headed farther east to the Boulder Station Hotel and Casino on Monday and found myself in a surprisingly empty gambling floor. When I remarked on this to my bartender, Yesenia, she mentioned that in general, Vegas had still not quite reached the level of foot traffic, 24/7 busyness, and economic heights it’d seen so much of just before the COVID-19 pandemic. She’d been working this job for only a year; her previous gig was at a Mexican nightclub downtown that had closed during the lockdowns. “Things have been slow ever since,” she told me. “But I think things might pick back up when football’s back on.”

Indeed, if there’s one thing you need to understand about Las Vegas right now, it’s that the city is still nursing its post-COVID hangover—one that hit its economy in a particularly acute way. Every single local I spoke to—driver, barfly, budtender, dealer, gambler, local business owner—mentioned how eerie Las Vegas looked in the thick of COVID and how the rebound had only gone so far. During lockdown and after, the streets had fully emptied out; there was no one walking about except the unhoused; all business, in all quarters, of all kinds, had suffered a deep shock. It was clear that people had wanted, needed to get back to business as usual as soon as possible. Yet clearly the worries of the disease and its impacts still ride high today, especially among all the blackjack dealers I saw clad in face masks. In the quieter Arts District, at the small shop Recycled Propaganda, I viewed a telling design riffing on the iconic Hunter S. Thompson novel: Fear of COVID in Las Vegas.

“I’m glad you came out here,” said Nicole, a dealer at the massive Antique Alley Mall next to Recycled Propaganda. “The Arts District is what the real Las Vegas is like.” She and her fellow antiques dealer, Douglas Abbott, have lived in the city for decades and can cite every single factor that has sharply overhauled the living experience: a population that blew up from about half a million people in 2003 to nearly 3 million people just 20 years later. A reduced mob presence, affecting everything from public safety to income sources to gambling relief. Skyrocketing commercial rents, which makes them wonder how long their Arts District outpost would remain feasible. An increase in gas prices that has fueled mass adoption of electric vehicles (of all stripes—cars, bikes, and scooters), driven in large part by the outsize Tesla presence in the Silver State. And, of course, shifting political tides, up to and including the Supreme Court cases on homelessness and administrative-state regulation that had landed merely a few days prior. “I don’t know what the next few years will look like for us,” Nicole confessed.

On the way back to my hotel, I passed the Blue Angel Motel, marked by a Marlene Dietrich statue out front and a host of unhoused Black and brown Nevadans scrounging behind the motel’s brick exterior, catching some shade from the scorching heat. Closer to downtown, I saw big-screen advertisements for right-wing comedians Theo Von and Jeff Dunham, the latter of whom branded his tour “Still Not Canceled.”

No one mentioned that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been here just a few weeks earlier, stumping for Biden, or that the city’s Trump International Hotel was surrounded by solar-panel fixtures of the type the candidate says he’ll defund should he be reelected. None of the union-represented working-class bartenders and servers here seemed to care at all about his arbitrary promise not to tax their tips either.

Nevada is an important electoral state, sure, but what’s anybody heading the nation going to do for a Las Vegas that’s slower and more populous, but doesn’t quite seem to have gained the economic benefits, having taken such a stark hit four years ago that even now it seems impossible to fully recover? There’s no surety here, only hope and careful anticipation.