Nevada DeepDive And Senate Thoughts

On Nevada, And What It Means Nationally

Let’s have an honest and frank conversation about the US Senate and the current state of races for it, why don’t we.

The GOP are very clearly triaging Blake Masters, which is one of those things that is theoretically reversible but rarely ever is, because when a candidate is losing by enough to justify triaging, they need money badly, and the triage takes that away, making a polling bounce to get back in range less likely. We know they’re triaging Masters from the reporting that money was pulled from future Arizona budgets to pay for JD Vance’s ad buys in Ohio, that Peter Thiel said no to funding them, and that the McConnell backed Senate Leadership Fund spent in Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina yesterday but didn’t spend a dime in Arizona.

Speaking of states the SLF didn’t spend in, $0 in New Hampshire. The GOP are likely to nominate a nutter for the seat, and Maggie Hassan would need either a true wave, or to be deeply unpopular, to lose. Neither condition exists. Thus represents the last time I (hopefully) write about this race.

McConnell and the SLF didn’t just play defence – they put $5.7M combined in Georgia and Nevada, but they also put $9.01M into Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, plus another $3.67M into Pennsylvania, so they’re very clearly playing defence with these current ad buys. (Remember, most of these GOP candidates are being outraised at least 3:1.) This is not an ad spend you put together when you’re confident of your position – a confidence buy is the four offensive targets + something dumb like Colorado or Washington, not this utterly defensive bullshit.

None of this says that the GOP can’t go back on offence, but spending decisions inform what the parties think – and right now, they think they’re looking at more prospective losses than gains. The fact that McConnell isn’t risking Ohio is fairly surprising to me – I’d keep my Arizona buys and just hope state partisanship takes Vance over the line if I were running the Senate GOP, but I also wouldn’t have appointed Rick Scott to lead the NRSC – which, again, has no money because Scott has used the fundraising money inefficiently, to raise gaudy numbers with expensive online ad buys that just inflate your fundraising totals at a high burn rate (and is probably committing fraud in some way, to be fair).

In Georgia, Herschel Walker is doing better relative to the mid summer, but that’s basically because the last two polls there have been Trafalgar and Emerson, and the pollsters who showed Warnock leads haven’t gone back in a while. Herschel’s other problem is the runoff rule, which means he needs 50%+1 on the day, or he goes to a runoff where turnout dynamics fuck him worse than Mike McCarthy did my Packers fandom for half a decade.

Pennsylvania also (kind of) looks better for the GOP, but there it’s the same shit – the last three polls have been two GOP ones and Emerson, and even they all have Fetterman up by 4 or 5. Oh, and it came out that Dr. Oz once said in a radio interview that incest is fine as long as its further than first cousins, which (whatever the truth of that statement from a medical perspective – and no, I don’t know if it’s true or not, I ain’t Googling that shit) is not a good headline when you’re down and trying to get back on message.

At this point, the GOP need three things to happen to win the Senate, none of which are impossible, but all of which carry some risk at this point – they need to avoid losing any of the Wisconsin/North Carolina/Ohio tranche of seats, they need to get back one of Pennsylvania and Georgia (or Arizona, but again, triaging), and then they need to win Nevada. Hell, at this point you can make the argument at this point that Republicans don’t have a path to win the Senate without Nevada.

Months ago, that sort of statement would have been dumb, because the GOP need to win two of the big four, and basically any combination of them was on the table. Now, I don’t think they’re getting Arizona, and frankly neither do they, and they’re probably not getting both of Georgia and Pennsylvania short of a very red GOP year, in which case they’d likely also win Nevada. The likeliest GOP path to a Senate majority is Nevada and one of Georgia and Pennsylvania, which tells you why they’re not Senate favourites right now.

The core truth of the current polling and the current environment is that Nevada is essentially a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the GOP to win the Senate. If you’ve ever rooted for a football team who needed four things to go right for them in Week 17 (or, now, I guess Week 18), Nevada is the “win your own game” of that set of conditional statements. Republicans need others to help out along the way, but they need Nevada – and the thing is, it doesn’t look great for them there.

…

I know the medium term case for Republican optimism in Nevada well, and I agree with it – it’s below average in terms of degree holders, it’s very working class, and it trended right in 2020. That’s all true, and I think it flips either in ’24 or more likely ’28, but I think as a matter of course there’s a decent amount of Democratic upside this year.

We can start with the fact that Vegas was essentially a ghost town in 2020, with the city’s main attractions shuttered and nobody really making trips there. To the extent that working class voters – especially Hispanic ones – moved right because of COVID (and not just generally being culturally conservative), I think Vegas is probably a decent case for where it was a COVID effect. The reason I say that is that we also know Nevada is extraordinarily socially liberal – 68% of the state thinking abortion should be legal in most or all cases, per the 2020 AP Votecast – and you don’t get that if Hispanics in Vegas moved right because of cultural conservative (as is the case especially in South Texas).

What most people miss about the educational realignment is that education is not in itself the cause of the realignment – it’s just the easiest manifestation of it. The effect is not educated people becoming more left wing, it’s that degree-holders are more likely to hold socially liberal views than those without degrees, and that people with socially liberal values are trending left while those with culturally conservative ones are trending right.

Why did Upstate New York trend so left in 2020? It’s not exactly a bastion of college educated meccas – there are some University towns, yes, but it’s not exactly what you picture when you think of left trending areas. Why? Because secular, working class people are still likelier to be social liberals than, say, religious degree holders.

What does any of this have to do with Nevada? Simple – it has probably the most socially libertarian city in the world. You can’t live in Vegas as a cultural conservative, you just can’t – because it is a city designed around the idea that judgement cannot be tolerated. Whether you’re a frequent guest at Caesars or a line cook at the Bellagio, the mix of people you meet and work with – and the amount of shit you see – is incompatible with a hands on, interventionist, judgmental approach. Be in Vegas long enough and you’re seeing dudes do cocaine off hooker’s breasts and dudes gambling their next 15 mortgage payments Brazilian soccer they’ve never watched because “some guy” had a tip. Hell, you might be lining up beside them for a shift at the roulette table the next day.

It's a city of social liberals – again, 68% pro-choice statewide means north of 70% in Vegas, easily – and it’s a city where education doesn’t necessarily mean a lot. There are a lot of well paid people in that city without degrees because you don’t need formal education for much of what makes that city run.

The concerns about Hispanics are definitely real, but the voters Democrats need are social liberals – unlike in Texas, where there’s a clear strategy disconnect between getting back South Texas and winning Southlake, there’s no cognitive dissonance from a Hispanic strategy and a Henderson strategy in Nevada. Oh, and we’re running a Hispanic incumbent who will, you know, go on TV with Spanish ads and position herself better to the community than Biden did, who ran a national strategy that ignored Nevada in specific and mostly ignored Hispanics in general.

Does this mean Nevada’s a lock? No, but it does mean that a lot of the arguments for Democrats doing worse there are mostly crap. It’s a medium term problem for the party doesn’t mean it will flip now, the state GOP have no real record of winning much of anything recently, and Democrats are up 3.8% on average right now – leading by 4 in a AARP poll done by Trump’s pollster and Biden’s pollster (a series which has been lower on Democratic leads than other pollsters across other states), and by 7 in a Suffolk poll for the Reno paper.

“Ah, but the polls!” doesn’t work here either – yes, in 2020, the polls underestimated Trump, but in 2018, 2016, 2012, 2010, and 2008, Democrats beat their polls in Nevada, so the whataboutism here doesn’t really fly like it would in the Midwest. Adam Laxalt is the best GOP Senate recruit of the Big 4, but that’s not a compliment, much more an insult to Oz, Masters, and Walker.

The thing is, the case for Nevada always made much more sense in a wave – it’s a narrowly blue state and Laxalt is a poor man’s 2014 Corey Gardner – good enough to win in a good year, not some going to win in a neutral year. And that’s what this is looking to be.

So where does this leave the GOP? Not in a good place. The GOP’s preferred solution to their candidate quality problems earlier in the cycle was to nationalize every race – which worked great when Biden had an approval sub-40% and Dobbs hadn’t happened. Now, nationalizing the race doesn’t help Republicans, but they can’t go heavily localized, because Oz is a nutter, Herschel has undiagnosed CTE, Masters supports a Federal Personhood amendment and privatizing Social Security, and Laxalt is honestly too bland to notice or care about anything he says – and also, if it’s localized, Hispanics will probably respond to Cortez-Masto’s messaging more, so, no good there.

The GOP, whether they knew it or not, made a bet that this year was red enough to sweep bad candidates into office anyways. Now it’s not a red year, and they’re trying to pick up the pieces. Nevada is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of that – and right now, it’s hard to argue Democrats aren’t favoured there.