LAS VEGAS — Outside a large strip-mall storefront next to Cardenas Markets in East Las Vegas, a raucous mariachi band welcomed hundreds of locals to La Cultura Cura, a daylong Latino cultural festival in late September where immigration law firms and major corporations shared table space to advertise their services a few feet from a row of Democratic campaigns with bilingual literature. Inside, families — and, eventually, a multistate delegation of a progressive group’s affordable housing demonstrators — lined up for free chicken, beans and rice as Mexican dance troupes performed in pueblo dresses, sombreros, and, in one case, the traditional garb of pre-Hispanic natives.

When I arrived, Maya Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris’ younger sister and a top campaign adviser, had just made the rounds inside the hall and was posing for selfies with a group of local Latina small-business owners sporting tiaras and custom T-shirts. The elder Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, would address an adoring crowd of over 7,000 in a Las Vegas convention center the following day.

Cesar Quintana, a chiropractor with a practice a few doors down, bankrolled and organized the community cultural event to give back to his neighbors — some of them his clients, virtually all of them of more modest means than him. But Quintana, clad in a black T-shirt with the Mexican American phrase “Viva la Raza” — meaning “long live the people” — also made clear he hoped the technically nonpartisan event would help Harris, whom he desperately wants to win in November. He cited her upbringing as the daughter of a single parent, her commitment to making health care more affordable, and, most of all, her refusal to demonize Latino immigrants and their descendants.

“They’ve been dehumanizing us at the border for some time now, and that’s concerning for me,” said Quintana, an American-born son of Mexican immigrants. “We’re part of this culture. We’ve been part of this culture since the beginning of the United States.”

But there were signs of the challenges Democrats face with Latino voters even in that friendly venue. Belen Quintana, a social worker who is Cesar’s sister and was helping run the event, has only voted once in her life. If she votes, she will cast a ballot for Harris, but she is still on the fence about whether to participate, given her frustration with how little she feels the government helps single mothers like herself.

“I’m very, very disappointed with how life’s been, with how things have been, with presidents — whether it’s Democrats or Republicans,” she said.

Nevada has the distinction of being the only one of the four battleground states in the Sun Belt where Harris has even a marginal polling lead over former President Donald Trump.

Latino voters, who made up about 1 in 5 of the state’s eligible voters in 2020, have been a critical part of Democrats’ steady takeover of Nevada politics since the days of the late Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. Democrats made a point of investing in Latino voter registration in the state following their loss in the 2004 presidential election, and have carried the Battle Born State with Latino help in every presidential election since.

For Harris to keep the party’s streak going, however, she likely must meet or exceed President Joe Biden’s 61% share of the Nevada Latino vote from 2020. She could also stand to increase Latino turnout, which clocked in at just under 51% in 2020, compared with 77% among the state’s more Republican-leaning white voters.

But, as in other states where Trump has made inroads with Latino voters, some new polling suggests Harris is in trouble with this critical voting bloc in Nevada. Nevada Latinos favor Harris over Trump 56% to 40%, according to a Suffolk University poll conducted in late September and early October. Much of Harris’s vulnerability is with Latino men: Among Latino men in Nevada, Trump leads Harris 50% to 44%.

Those numbers track with a New York Times/Siena College poll out Sunday showing Harris with the support of 56% of the Latino vote nationwide, compared with estimates that Biden won the vote of 62% of that group in 2020, and Hillary Clinton had 68% in 2016. At the same time, a CBS News survey also out Sunday, has Harris winning 63% of the Latino vote nationwide.

“The magic number in Nevada has always been in the high 30s or 40s for a Republican campaign,” said Chris Roman, a Trump supporter and former Spanish-language TV executive in Nevada who now informally advises candidates from both parties.

The Harris campaign says it is pulling out all the stops to reach Nevada’s Latino voters, emphasizing a variety of themes. One of the campaign’s 14 field offices in the state is not far from where La Cultura Cura was held, part of a strategy of embedding itself in Latino communities.

The campaign aired at least four bilingual TV and digital ads targeting Latino voters in Nevada and Arizona, which highlight Harris’ upbringing as the daughter of immigrants and how that informs her fight for working people, the contrast between her and Trump’s records on immigration, her middle-class-oriented “opportunity economy” agenda, and her support for in vitro fertilization treatments.

For the third time since she became the Democratic nominee, Harris went to Las Vegas on Thursday; she conducted a bilingual town hall with Latino voters that was broadcast on Univision. At least three of the policy-related questions were about cost-of-living issues or access to social programs.

“The Latino community, by and large in the United States, is an ascendant community, that somewhere along the line has come here for increased opportunity,” said Colin Rogero, whose firm Conexion has made all of Harris’ bilingual advertisements. “And inherently that makes them economic voters, because when you’re talking about opportunity, you’re talking about the opportunity to progress.”

A Hard-Hit State

Notwithstanding Harris’ outreach, Latino voters’ frustration with the economic tumult of the past four years appears to be the main culprit for Harris’ closer-than-hoped-for lead with Latinos in Nevada. Even as recent polling shows Harris narrowing Trump’s advantage on the economy nationally, evidence points to discontent over inflation helping Trump in Nevada in general, and among Nevada Latinos in particular.

In Nevada, where the economy is so dependent on the tourism and gaming industries, the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic was especially severe. In 2022, a year when all Nevada Democrats in federal office were re-elected, then-Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) lost his job, in part over his role in closing down businesses during the pandemic for public health reasons.

That pain still lingers. The state’s unemployment rate and median household income still have not quite returned to their pre-pandemic levels.

Latino Nevadans, who are disproportionately employed in the state’s boom-and-bust service industries, have taken notice. A large plurality of Latino voters in the state consistently rank inflation and the economy as their top issue, in some cases followed by housing affordability. The same Suffolk University poll showing Harris with a smaller advantage than she needs among Latino voters reported 46% of respondents saying they were worse off than they were four years ago, compared with 39% who said they were better off.

“You still hear: ‘I was better off under Trump. I had more money, more buying power. I felt safer. I had hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I was able to buy a house. I had multiple job offers,’” Roman said. “The economic reasoning and rationale overcomes exceptions to personality.”

As for Trump’s advantage among Latino men, in particular, Roman added a cultural explanation rooted in machismo. “A lot of guys like that he’s a tough guy. They love that this guy’s got cojones. This guy is strong. This guy’s a man,” Roman said.

For its part, the Harris campaign has launched, “Hombres con Harris,” a specific initiative to rally more Latino men to her side. The initiative is slated to enlist male Latino members of Congress, as well as Latino entertainers like Al Madrigal, and plans to hold events geared toward men in Las Vegas, Reno and Sparks, Nevada, in the coming weeks.

In her two rallies and televised town hall in Las Vegas, Harris has emphasized her policy proposals to help working Nevadans afford a middle-class living standard. Harris’ “opportunity economy” agenda includes an increase in small-business startup tax credits from $5,000 to $50,000; a $6,000 tax credit for parents of a newborn; $25,000 in down-payment assistance for first-time home buyers; and a relatively vague plan to combat “corporate price gouging.” Harris also hopes to cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for all Americans — in effect, expanding on the Inflation Reduction Act’s cap on those costs for Medicare beneficiaries.

Another especially clear area of contrast with Trump is in housing policy. In addition to her proposed aid for first-time homebuyers, Harris has promised to sign legislation banning “certain forms of price fixing by corporate landlords” and preside over the construction of 3 million new rental housing units by cutting “red tape” and increasing tax credits for affordable housing development.

“I believe in the strength of the private sector to create jobs and to work with the government to strengthen the economy,” Harris said when asked about her housing plan during the Univision town hall.

Harris’ focus on economic policy follows her and the national Democratic Party’s shift to the right on immigration policies. Harris fielded three questions about immigration at the Univision town hall: one from a Las Vegas woman whose undocumented mother was unable to get the health care she needed before she died; one about what Harris would do for Dreamers (a subset of undocumented immigrants who arrived as minors); and one about how she plans to toughen up border security.

Harris’ response to the bereaved daughter, Ivett Castillo, who wanted to know what Harris would do for undocumented immigrants like her mother, was perhaps most telling. The vice president expressed empathy for Castillo, pausing to honor the late mother’s memory, and later asking to hear her name. She also affirmed that the inability of Castillo’s mother to obtain citizenship — even as her father did — was the result of a “broken immigration system.”

But Harris offered little in the way of concrete solutions for people like Castillo’s late mother, pivoting instead to her commitment to passing the bipartisan border security bill that died in the Senate due to Trump’s intervention. The bill would have provided additional resources to process asylum claims and increase funding for border agents, but would not have addressed someone living in the country for years like Castillo’s late mother.

“It would have allowed us to have more resources to take on transnational criminal organizations,” Harris said. “I have prosecuted transnational criminal organizations, from the Guadalajara cartel to the Sinaloa cartel.”

The Harris campaign might be looking at polling that suggests traditional border enforcement is as much a priority for Latino voters as it is for the overall electorate. In fact, per the Times/Siena College national poll, 9% of Latinos supporting Harris “strongly support” building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, and another 10% “somewhat support” the policy.

Leo Murrieta, director of Make the Road Nevada, the state’s largest progressive Latine rights group, has been disappointed in Harris for focusing so much on border enforcement without much discussion of her plans to help undocumented immigrants, a shift from 2016 and 2020 when Democrats more frequently talked about pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

“Democrats are horrible on the issue of immigration, so they’ve stopped talking about it, and they should, because they’re horrible on immigration,” he said.

That hasn’t stopped Murrieta from mobilizing an army of volunteers ― and paid canvassers ― to knock doors for Harris in the Latino community. Hundreds of Make the Road activists from across the country hit the doors for Harris on Friday, Sept. 27. The following day, that same group marched for affordable housing and renters’ rights in the Las Vegas sun, before joining revelers at La Cultura Cura that afternoon.

In conversations with prospective Latino voters in Nevada, Murrieta has found that discussions of the Biden administration’s work capping out-of-pocket insulin expenses for Medicare beneficiaries and efforts to crack down on corporate landlords resonate strongly with the Latino voters they target.

“When we talk to them about what is happening, what they’re hearing on the news, we’re talking to them about who is creating breathing room in your budget, and that’s the Biden-Harris administration,” Murrieta said.

An Evolving Latino Ecosystem

Make the Road Action, along with the Culinary Union and other Latino-heavy unions and nonprofits, is part of a major institutional infrastructure advantage for Democrats in their pursuit of Latino votes.

These groups have existing mass constituencies to which they can speak about Harris and other Democrats’ policy agendas with a level of authority that is difficult to replicate in paid advertising.

The state’s prominent Latino elected officials are also virtually all Democrats, creating a legion of influential campaign surrogates for Harris. State Sen. Edgar Flores, who was at La Cultura Cura, noted the absence of Republican elected officials and candidates at that event, which he took as the latest evidence that Nevada Republicans have simply not put in the work to build relationships in the Latino community.

“Stuff like today is just a constant reminder of the drastic difference,” Flores said. “It’s just one world versus the other in terms of what one party is doing versus the other when it comes to the Latino vote.”

Roman, a Latino Trump supporter, had a similar assessment. “Democrats understand that they need to make ties with the Latino community even during the offseason,” he said.

But the conservative Latino landscape is nonetheless orders of magnitude more developed than it was even a decade ago. The LIBRE Initiative, the Latino-oriented arm of the libertarian Koch network, has a major paid canvassing operation in Nevada, though it is officially only active in downballot races since the organization has refused to endorse Trump.

What’s more, Jesus Marquez, a onetime conservative Spanish-language radio host who did outreach for the Trump campaigns during the two previous cycles, is now spearheading a pro-Republican evangelical Christian group, the American Christian Caucus, which assembles dozens of volunteers to canvass every Saturday. Much of the American Christian Caucus’ work focuses on marshaling the growing number of Latino evangelical churches for conservative causes and candidates.

When I followed him earlier in the day on Sept. 28, he and his fellow Christian conservatives were targeting low-propensity Republican and independent voters of all backgrounds who might need a nudge to show up to the polls.

Faith is a core part of what drives Marquez’s involvement in politics; he concluded the canvass kickoff at his church, Fervent, earlier in the day with a prayer thanking God for providing the “tools we need for this canvassing.” Marquez also has a large following on Facebook, where the tone of his often bilingual posts might best be described as staunch MAGA.

Speaking to prospective Republican voters in the 105-degree heat, though, Marquez stuck to a less strident, secular script, focusing on voters’ frustration with the economy and the direction of the country. “Were you better off four or five years ago than you are right now?” he asked. “And you feel like right now the economy is going in the good direction?”

Pleased to hear the answer to both questions was “no,” Marquez knew exactly how to follow up. “That’s what we want you to take into consideration when you go out and vote.”

Still, there were signs that the pro-Trump right in Nevada is not yet a well-oiled machine. Marquez and his allies came to the doors armed with literature for a host of downballot candidates — GOP U.S. Senate challenger Sam Brown, U.S. House candidate Drew Johnson, and Las Vegas mayoral contender Victoria Seaman — but not Trump.

When I asked Marquez why Trump’s literature was missing, he did not have an answer.

“I cannot comment whether it’s strategic or anything else,” Marquez said. “But he is definitely in the middle and center of all this.”