LAS VEGAS — About 100 enthusiastic Democrats cheered Thursday as Nevada Democratic leaders expressed confidence that Vice President Kamala Harris, expected to replace President Biden as the party’s standard-bearer, will win the battleground state in November’s election.
Harris supporters and party officials ignored the latest RealClearPolitics polling average that showed former President Donald Trump leading Nevada by 5.6 percentage points. Four years of inflation have sent gas and grocery prices soaring in Nevada, and Republicans are hoping they can flip a state not won by a Republican presidential candidate since 2004.
Nevada state Rep. Danielle Monroe Moreno, Nevada state party chair, Attorney General Aaron Ford and immigration lawyer and state senator Edgar Flores touted Harris’ “achievement” in office and highlighted the vice president’s support for abortion rights during a 30-minute rally at their local campaign headquarters. “President Harris” signs were displayed at the rally.
“We believe in a country where women have the right to make their own decisions about what they do with their bodies,” Monroe Moreno said.
“I joined with activists working to enshrine reproductive freedom in our state constitution,” Harris added, without mentioning the voter effort that codified abortion rights in Nevada decades ago.
Monroe Moreno said Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, “have a dangerous agenda at every level of the federal government that they are ready to use as a weapon to carry out an aggressive agenda to attack reproductive freedom and so many other freedoms we enjoy today.”
Flores said electing Harris would correct the country’s past flaws.
“Our history is full of wrongs,” the senator said, “but one of the ways we can right those wrongs is to elect the first Asian American, the first Black woman, as president.”
Ford used the refrain from “Not Like Us,” a May 2024 diss track aimed at Drake, as the bassline for his attack on Trump.
The attorney general said Lamar’s comments showed a “clear contrast between Kamala’s policies, which truly serve the American people, and Trump’s policies, which only serve himself and his billionaire friends.”
“I support diversity, equity and inclusion. Kamala and the Democratic Party understand that our strength lies in our diversity,” Harris said.
In a state with the most voters registered as “unaffiliated” with either party, “community building” will help Democrats win, Monroe Moreno said.
“I went into the office on Tuesday and people who aren’t registered Democrats were knocking on the door and asking, ‘How can I get involved?'” she said.
One candidate Democrats are hoping will maintain Nevada’s favorable presidential record is Isaac Nelsen, an 18-year-old graduate of the private Bishop Gorman High School who lives in the city’s Summerlin neighborhood.
Nelsen said Harris “has fought for young people and that’s why she’s won not only my vote, but young people’s votes across the country.”
He also told Democrats he feared the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” document.
The 900-page playbook for a second Trump presidency is not included in the official Republican agenda, with the former president distancing himself from it, calling it “terrible.”
The congressman, who describes himself as a “first-time voter,” said Project 2025’s policy agenda “would roll back Americans’ rights and freedoms, hurt the middle class, and threaten our democracy.”
Asked later how much of the massive document he had read, Nelsen said he and his father, Ron Nelsen, a Democratic state legislative candidate, “we skimmed through it.”
Nelsen, who said he was retiring from the garage door company he had run for 42 years, told The Washington Post he had read “between 12 and 50 pages” of the tome and had “read enough to know that I am very strongly opposed to this.”
The state Republican Party sharply criticized the aid effort.
“The Harris campaign’s desperate media offensive is just the latest attempt by Democrats to save face over Kamala’s failed and dangerous liberal policies. No amount of photo-op will help Kamala Harris deceive voters in November’s election,” said Harry Dobbins, Nevada communications director for the Republican National Committee.
