Less than a month before the November election, Democratic vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) made the Harris campaign’s latest bid to turn out voters in the Silver State, highlighting a recently announced proposal to cover home care, vision and hearing under Medicare and receiving Nevada’s first tribal endorsement of the cycle.
In a nearly half-hour speech to an audience of about 2,000 people, Walz discussed housing, the economy and health care, touting the campaign’s plans for $25,000 down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, Medicare’s negotiation of prescription drug prices under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Vice President Kamala Harris’ Medicare announcement to help individuals caring for children and aging parents.
“For the first time in history, [Harris] negotiated with Big Pharma to make sure that we can now negotiate for Medicare drugs. The savings we make from that can pay for our senior care,” Walz said, highlighting how funding for Harris’ Medicare proposal will come from the drug-price negotiation plan and crackdowns on hidden drug costs.
Walz also criticized former President Donald Trump’s campaign’s focus on federal land being the solution to the housing crisis, saying that doesn’t apply to states such as Minnesota, where federal land is limited. He instead touted the proposed down payment assistance and attacked the corporate purchase of homes.
While federal land in Minnesota accounts for about 7 percent of its total land area, in Nevada, the federal government owns about 86 percent of the land, limiting its development and use.
The opening up of such lands in the Silver State has received bipartisan support from the state’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, and Democratic members of Congress, though conservationists have argued that any lands bill should sufficiently protect the environment, and some critics of releasing federal lands for development have called for less urban sprawl and more upward development.
Critics have said the development of more land also requires potentially costly infrastructure and could strain or hinder public services in the case of wildfires or other natural disasters.
“The housing issue is real,” Walz said. “It’s generational wealth, but it’s much more than that … It’s the place you gather for holidays. It’s the place you bring your kids home from the hospital.”
On foreign affairs, Walz tore into Trump for recent revelations that the former president had as many as seven secret calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin since he left the White House in 2021 and gave COVID-19 testing equipment to Putin while he was president.
“I can guarantee we do not have dictators on speed dial,” Walz said. “Donald Trump is a risk to our national security.”
The Harris campaign event in Reno at the Grand Sierra Resort came a month after the campaign postponed a rally because of a wildfire in the region. Walz discussed the fire in his opening remarks, calling for a “grateful round of applause for our first responders.”
Ahead of Walz’s remarks at the rally, Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Chairman Steven Wadsworth announced his tribe’s endorsement of Harris, saying the tribe is backing candidates who will protect its sacred society and vital funding. The tribe has approximately 3,000 members.
“[Harris and Walz] see us as valuable voices in this presidential election,” Wadsworth said. “Meanwhile, the opposing party calls us names, uses harmful rhetoric to degrade us.”
Wadsworth noted the record investments made by the Biden-Harris administration in Native American communities across the country and the record number of Native Americans appointed to government offices, including the first Native American cabinet member, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and a 35th generation New Mexican.
He said he hopes other tribes follow suit.
Walz landed at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport on Tuesday evening ahead of the rally and met with leaders from the Yerington Paiute Tribe, Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe, Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and the Stewart Community of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California.
Native American voters are among the critical demographics for presidential candidates hoping to win the Silver State, with polling indicating Native American voters generally support Democratic candidates versus Republicans.
Estimates based on U.S. Census data place members of Nevada’s 28 Indigenous nations, bands and colonies of voting-age population at about 70,000 people, more than the 33,596 vote margin between President Joe Biden and Trump in Nevada’s 2020 election.
