Lesile Swest says they started to support the Democrats after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. At a campaign event in North Las Vegas this weekend, the 32-year-old Las Vegas resident wore a shirt that read “I used to be a victim until I voted.
“We’re looking for progressiveness,” Swest, who is Black, said. “We weren’t getting progressiveness from Biden or Trump.”
It’s dissatisfied voters such as Swest who the nascent Harris campaign is banking on mobilizing after the top-of-the-ticket shuffle, especially amid former President Donald Trump’s persistent polling advantage over Biden in Nevada (including better numbers with minority voters) throughout the 2024 campaign.
In Nevada, nearly a fifth of registered voters identify as Latino and the state has the third highest growing Black population in the nation — making outreach to minority voting blocs a critical part of any campaign strategy in the battleground state. Already, Harris has more nationwide favorability with Latino and Black voters than Biden did, early polling data indicates.
To that end, the Harris campaign held more than 50 events in Nevada last weekend, many aimed at attracting Black and LGBTQ+ voters. The campaign says the efforts reached nearly 50,000 voters and were supported by more than 1,000 volunteers, surpassing any of the Biden campaign’s previous campaign efforts.
Almost all of the attendees that The Nevada Independent spoke to at a canvassing event in North Las Vegas said that Harris’ vitality and entry into the race had inspired them to get out and canvass for the first time.
Black voters
Dina Piersawl, 61-year-old chemist who just moved from Chicago, praised Harris’ depth of political experience and said she can “run circles” around other candidates.
For Piersawl and other voters and volunteers at a packed Black voters for Harris event in North Vegas on Saturday, there was a clear contrast between Harris, of an Indian and Jamaican background, and Trump, who she called an “obvious racist.”
Harris’ favorability among Black voters already surpasses Biden’s by 7 points, according to a mid-July poll from the left-leaning pollster Data for Progress. The same poll found only 49 percent of Black voters nationwide believed Biden should have remained in the presidential race.
Trump has publicly attempted to court Black voters — exit polls indicated that 18 percent of Black voters in Nevada supported him in 2020, a 6 percentage point increase from 2016 and double the support that GOP candidate Mitt Romney received from Black voters in 2012.
As a professional Black woman, Piersawl said she relates to Harris and thinks the previous attacks on her performance as vice president and a U.S senator were unwarranted, calling them a result of racism and misogyny.
“I understand the plight of being a Black professional woman,” Piersawl said. “You have to be twice as good.”
Trump and those in his political orbit have not shied away from attacking Harris based on her race and gender — a line of attack that Swest (who recently attended a Trump rally) said she was shocked to hear and contrasted poorly to Harris.
“Harris represents the products of slavery in America in the best way,” Swest said. “She has our best intentions at heart.”
Dylen Richmond, a 20-year-old Las Vegas resident and a student at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Georgia, said he’s become increasingly hopeful about the Democrats’ chances in November as he’s seen more of his friends post online in support of Harris. The journalism and economics double major became a campaign volunteer the same day Biden announced the end of his re-election bid.
“We got this thing in the bag, honestly,” a confident Richmond predicted.
Polling has been scant in Nevada since Biden dropped out of the race, but Harris led Trump by 2 points in a recent Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll. Another national poll released Thursday by Axios found that Harris significantly leads Trump among 18-to-34-year-old voters.
Yet, for Richmond, the threat of another Trump presidency and Project 2025 — a conservative policy playbook assembled by the Heritage Foundation for the next Republican presidential administration — is more important than who is the Democratic candidate.
“I’ve got some friends saying, ‘Hey, we have to fight against that.’ It’s not just about her. It’s about her supporting us.” he said.
The surprise appearance of Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) at the North Las Vegas event on Saturday helped further rally support for Harris. The voters, Booker said, were “the foot soldiers for justice.”
Latino voters
Latino support for Harris, however, is a bit less clear-cut.
Over a third of Nevada Latinos voted for Trump in 2020, signaling that Republican support among the demographic group seems to be growing. While Democrats have hoped that they could continue to rally Latino support with a more liberal immigration platform, multiple surveys signal that Latinos are warming to more stringent immigration measures and increasingly trust the GOP to handle the issue.
Historically, Republicans have gained about a third of the Latino vote nationwide, said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, vice president of UnidosUS’s Latino Vote Initiative. Support for Democrat’s among Latinos has slightly waned and right now, the GOP is on track to regain that percentage and maybe even improve slightly upon it, Martinez De Castro predicted.
Last month, a survey from TelevisaUnivision showed 33 percent of registered Latino voters in Nevada “definitely” supported Biden, with 30 percent definitely supporting Trump, well within the statistical margin of error.
Harris, however, appears to be on track to winning back Nevada Latinos who had slipped away from Biden, according to an early read of a July poll from the Democratic firm Equis Research. Harris “notably pulls a chunk who said they would sit out a Biden/Trump rematch,” said Carlos Odio, the company’s co-founder, on X.
“Republicans are regaining some ground, and they could potentially improve upon that,” Martinez De Castro said. “But they’re not getting a majority, which is what some of the stories seem to imply.”
