On typical Sundays, the Biden campaign recruits about 150 volunteers to the president’s cause between its 13 field offices in the Silver State.
But July 21 was no typical Sunday.
On the day that President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, more than 600 Nevadans signed up to help her win in November, according to the campaign.
Dozens of first-time volunteers showed up at campaign events. Voters who had previously been unengaged answered texts from the campaign for the first time. Infrequent volunteers committed to more phone banking and canvassing shifts. And in East Las Vegas — where the campaign’s office focused on Latino voters, a group the president had struggled to connect with — 12 voters walked in and volunteered on the spot.
“Yesterday was something we have not experienced before,” said East Las Vegas regional organizing director Xiomara Alfaro Martinez. “[They were] people we’ve never met before or interacted with before, but they came in and they were super excited to take action.”
Call it Harrismentum, being coconut-pilled or just the excitement many Democrats now feel about a nominee unburdened by the fears of age, mental acuity and sagging polling numbers that convinced Biden to exit the race. But staffers for the now-Harris for Nevada campaign — renamed but still operating under email domains with Biden’s name — say the enthusiasm Sunday injected new life into a campaign that had been losing in state polls all cycle.
While Nevada is a critical swing state that will be key to both parties’ ambitions in the presidential race and beyond, Democratic enthusiasm for Harris was widespread. The vice president raised $81 million in the first 24 hours of her campaign, the largest single-day haul in election history — and 60 percent of donors made their first donation of the cycle.
Shelby Wiltz, who woke up Sunday as Biden’s campaign manager in Nevada but went to bed as Harris’ by the end of the day, said the campaign decided to keep all of its scheduled volunteer events in place after Biden dropped out. She was “pleasantly surprised” by the number of people who walked into those events “off the street” asking how they could help.
“We saw just incredible engagement,” Wiltz said in an interview. “Even folks that we had texted two, three days ago responding saying, ‘Hey, I can come in and do that canvas. I can come in and do that phone bank.’ That’s pretty atypical to see that type of response.”
It proved to be a rejuvenating day for a Biden campaign besieged by Democratic infighting — if not in Nevada, where delegates and elected officials alike mostly stuck up for Biden, then nationally — for the three and a half weeks since his disastrous June 27 debate performance.
On the ground
Harris still has her work cut out for her in Nevada. Republicans have been narrowing in on Democrats’ historic voter registration advantage, trailing by fewer than 30,000 active voters (in November 2020, that lead was nearly 87,000). And while the Trump campaign will need to pivot, it will attempt to define Harris on the same issues that dogged Biden — inflation and the border. Trump has an average polling advantage of nearly 6 points in Nevada, per FiveThirtyEight.
In a statement, the Nevada GOP previewed the kind of attacks it plans to launch, saying that Harris has “failed to address critical issues facing our country, from national security to economic recovery.”
But Democrats believe the enthusiasm and engagement they saw Sunday portends a shift in their political fortunes. Campaign staff and delegates also say Harris — a Californian who has long had relationships with her eastern neighbors — has unique advantages in Nevada. Harris has already made six campaign trips to Nevada already this year.
“There’s a lot of energy,” said Tracey Ly, the campaign’s regional organizing director in Northern Nevada. “The rooms just feel like they’re going to be fuller.”
Ly said several new people in Northern Nevada committed to volunteering or donating, while existing volunteers — excited by the new dynamic of the race — committed to signing up for more shifts and bringing in friends and family members to future events. Others sent her pictures of new yard signs bearing Harris’ name. She expects the upcoming weekend to be one of the busiest of the cycle thus far.
Of the six battleground states most likely to decide the election, Trump’s margins were often highest in Nevada — giving his campaign so much confidence that, when Biden was his opponent, the Trump campaign considered Nevada a lock. The Biden campaign had also acknowledged that its best path to victory was in the Rust Belt.
Now, Harris staffers and delegates believe the vice president, the first Black woman and Asian American to be a major party nominee, can activate a demographic that polls showed were hesitant to embrace Biden — voters of color.
“[Nevada is] the most diverse battleground state,” Wiltz said. “We are made up of all folks from all walks of life and all backgrounds. And I think that people are particularly excited to elect a president who comes from their communities, who looks like them, who shares experiences with them.”
Alfaro Martinez said that based on her conversations with new volunteers yesterday, she is also hopeful that Harris can better engage young voters — another group that Biden had been struggling to hold.
Even among Alfaro Martinez’s campaign team in East Las Vegas — which she said is almost entirely Generation Z and voters of color — the momentum shift has been noticeable.
“We’re all really pumped and excited,” she said. “This is such an amazing thing that happened yesterday.”
Delegate takeaways
To take advantage of the enthusiasm, Harris must first wrap up the nomination, winning a majority of Democrats’ nearly 4,700 delegates. Among Nevada’s 49 delegates — 36 pledged delegates and an additional 13 superdelegates who automatically get bids — Harris has already locked up numerous votes.
More than 20 Nevada delegates have indicated as of mid-Monday they will support Harris, either via public statements, social media activity or in conversations with The Nevada Independent. Harris’ support is even more concentrated among the elected officials and power brokers going to the convention as automatic delegates. Each of the five federally elected Democrats endorsed her, as well as the state’s attorney general, party chair and vice chair.
The DNC is hosting a rules meeting Wednesday to discuss the framework for selecting a new nominee. But with state delegations already committing all of their delegates to Harris, her road to the nomination is off to a quick start.
Tanner Hale, a delegate captain and the executive director of Young Democrats of Nevada, said that given Nevada’s swing state status, the delegates would rather proceed slowly — including checking in with the party’s rules and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — rather than coming out with a quick endorsement such as Tennessee Democrats, who unanimously voted to support Harris on Sunday. But he and other delegates expect the Nevada delegation to ultimately back Harris.
“This is a really exciting change and I think it jolts us in every key demographic and puts us back into contention in this election,” Hale said. “The rhetoric has been nothing but pro-Kamala.”
For Donna West, a delegate from Congressional District 1 who had vigorously defended Biden from age-based criticism online, the pivot to Harris was an easy one to make. She served as Clark County party chair in 2020, and thus was unable to endorse in the state’s highly competitive presidential caucus, but said she was “secretly a member of K-Hive.”
Despite feeling sad over seeing Biden withdraw, West said she believes Harris’ candidacy will both energize volunteers and neutralize a key issue.
“She’s the right person to take on Donald Trump right now,” West said. “The age issue has turned back now on Trump … so they’re going to now have to deal and grapple with that issue, which I’m kind of glad to see — because the conversation for the last three and a half weeks has been pretty one-sided.”
And many delegates are not just supportive, but enthusiastic. Between reposting the president and vice president’s statements, sharing memes or, as one Nevada delegate did, retweeting pop star Charli XCX’s statement that, “kamala IS brat,” campaign staff say the momentum, physically and digitally, is palpable.
“It’s fun to see the excitement,” Ly said. “It’s good stuff. We’re pumped.”
This story was updated at 3 p.m. on 6/22/24 to correct Tracy Ly’s last name.
