Thinking about Silver State elections

Last week, Nevada -- a state many friends helped turn more blueish through election turnout work -- passed extremely progressive process reforms that legalized access experiments tried out during the pandemic.

Nevada is now the sixth state to adopt largely all-mail voting systems after Sisolak signed Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson’s AB321, permanently codifying pandemic-related election changes adopted for the 2020 election season. The legislation was staunchly opposed by Republicans; the bill passed on party lines out of both the Assembly and Senate. 

“I’m proud of the work we did to expand access to the ballot box for all eligible Nevadans. As John Lewis said, voting is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democracy,” Frierson said in a statement. 

The bill requires all county and city clerks to send every active registered voter a mail ballot before a primary or general election. Inactive voters, who are legally registered to vote but don’t have a current address on file with election officials, will not be sent a mail ballot. The bill will allow voters to opt out of being mailed a ballot by providing written notice to their local or county election clerk, and the measure maintains certain minimum requirements for in-person polling places.

That is, Nevada's election system now aims to make it easier for everyone to vote, just what Republicans fear.

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This is happening at a time when the Democratic Party may be losing some of its electoral edge. After long years during which Dems had a huge advantage among voters' stated party preferences, that's going away:

The trends here are clear: The Democratic lead in statewide voter registration has decreased by about 40 percent over the last four cycles and non-major-party registration has increased by 50 percent. (The numbers are actually slightly larger since November; both major parties have lost more ground.)

Nevada voting guru Jon Ralston attributes some of this shift to successful implementation of opt-out Motor Voter registration. Everyone who comes in contact with the Nevada DMV is now automatically registered to vote, but without a party preference unless they take additional action. He speculates that the growing fraction of independents in the Washoe County/Reno area lean Democratic, while in the far more populous Clark County/Las Vegas region they lean right.

Yes -- Nevada is a still a swing state.

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Democratic Party post-2020 election polling from Equis revealed Latinx community voting trends peculiar to Nevada. (Nevada is not Florida or Texas!)

In Nevada, our post-election survey showed that Trump benefited from [shifting] Clinton16 > Trump20 voters, but in even greater measure from new Latino voters who hadn’t voted in 2016 despite having been eligible then.

Importantly, these new Trump voters in Nevada (both those who hadn’t voted for Trump, or voted at all, in 2016) are less polarized, in terms of ideology or partisanship, than your usual Republican voters. 

In general, we know enough to say that the “new” Trump voters look like true swing voters. (Listening to them in focus groups reinforces the point powerfully). 

Neither party should assume that a Hispanic voter who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 is locked in as a Republican going forward. Nor can we assume this shift was exclusive to Trump and will revert back on its own. 

And if there’s a lesson for the future, it is to watch the margins and those voters who often remain invisible: the ones who stayed home and the many others aging into the electorate. After all, no two electorates are the same [people in different years].

In Nevada, probably most especially in the Las Vegas area, nothing replaces Latinx people talking with Latinx neighbors to get out a progressive vote. The Culinary Union, which organizes workers in the hotel and casino industry, has long taken the lead here; can the union still fill this role when its industry is recovering from the pandemic? We'll see.