Hillary Clinton posters are in their apartment window and Bernie Sanders stickers are on their car. The Macias family are similar to many Latinos who find themselves unusually torn ahead of Nevada’s Democratic caucuses.



But this family has more at stake than most. Tomasa Macias, the 50-year-old matriarch, collapsed and died last year while cleaning the toilets at a Las Vegas convention center owned by the billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson.

Her family are united in their belief that America’s unforgiving working conditions are to blame for the severe stroke she suffered on 5 May. But they are divided over which Democratic candidate would best serve the country’s working poor.



Theirs is a familiar story in Nevada, the third state to host a Democratic presidential contest, and one in which the fractured Latino vote threatens to further erode Clinton’s aura as the party’s nominee-in-waiting.

Both candidates arrived in the state on Thursday, and immediately collided over Bill Clinton’s record in the White House during a televised town hall debate broadcast live by Spanish-language channel Telemundo.

“Bill Clinton has been on the campaign trail making some very nasty comments about me,” Sanders said, apparently alluding to a comment the former president made equating the candidate’s populism to that of the Tea Party. Sanders went on to criticize Bill Clinton’s trade deals, Wall Street deregulation and welfare reforms.

That drew a sharp rebuke from Hillary Clinton, who appeared on stage after the independent senator from Vermont. “I just don’t know where all this comes from,” she said. “Maybe it’s that Senator Sanders wasn’t really a Democrat until he decided to run for president.”

Bill Clinton has been making some very nasty comments about me Bernie Sanders

Surveys ahead of the Nevada caucuses are notoriously unreliable – but this time the polls appear to be chiming with the feeling among political operatives and volunteers. Clinton, who once enjoyed a lead in the state, has lost ground, and is now considered to be roughly neck-and-neck with Sanders going into Saturday’s contest.



That, in itself, constitutes a major setback for the former secretary of state. Nevada was supposed to be the first brick in Clinton’s supposed “firewall” of support in states that are far more ethnically diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, the overwhelmingly white states where Sanders first put up a strong challenge to Clinton and then forced her into a resounding defeat.

Clinton beat Barack Obama in the popular vote in Nevada in 2008, in a victory that relied on her support among Latinos, who now comprise 28% of the state’s population and affectionately refer to her as “La Hillary”.

She still maintains the backing of Nevada’s older, democratic establishment, including a string of prominent Latino figures. Yet look beyond the endorsements from prominent figures, such as civil rights leaders Astrid Silva and Dolores Huerta and actor Eva Longoria, and the Latino community’s alliances begins to fray.

The same is true for unions in Nevada, which also tend to be heavily Latino and, in a service-sector dominated state, have historically been kingmakers in Democratic elections.

While labor leaders back Clinton, low-wage workers and indebted students are being drawn to the message of radical economic change propagated by the 74-year-old senator from Vermont who some are calling “El Viejito” (the little old man).

Clinton and Sanders both have broadly similar policies on issues close to the Latino community’s hearts, including the need for a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants.

It is on economic policies – such as free college tuition, a universal healthcare system, and breaking up big Wall Street institutions – where their differences appear, igniting debates in places like the Macias household.

‘She’s not sugar coating anything’

Tomasa Macias had been earning $8.25 an hour, without medical benefits, despite more than a decade of employment at the same agency. For days she had been feeling unwell, but she could not afford to take time off cleaning the Sands Convention Center.

Her family says that when Macias collapsed, management did not recognize the signs of a severe stroke, and left her on a chair for two hours instead of calling for an ambulance. She eventually fell into a coma. A month later, her family turned off her life support machine.

Hillary has been good to Latinos for a long time ... she has all that experience from when her husband was president Martin Macias

“We had been telling her to slow down, but my dad was out of work and we needed to pay the bills,” said José Macias, her 25-year-old son.

He said he and his sister Nancy, 22, would caucus for Sanders, not least because of the senator’s call for a $15 federal minimum wage, something that would transform their lives.

José was among several voters in Nevada, a state reliant on low-wage workers at hotels, casinos, restaurants and golf courses, who mentioned the Vermont senator’s minimum wage proposal in interviews with the Guardian. All of them pointed out it was $3 more than Clinton’s proposed hourly minimum.



“Families like mine don’t want to work all our lives and have nothing to show for it,” José said. Their father, on the other hand, is with Clinton, despite working at McDonald’s and earning just over the minimum wage.

Martin, 53, cannot vote because, like his late wife, he is undocumented. But he had fond recollections of Bill Clinton’s years in the White House, a period when all three of their children were born, and an era when he could easily find work building mobile homes in California.

Tomasa Macias, seen in a family photograph at her home in Las Vegas, Nevada. She died of a stroke while working as a cleaner. Photograph: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Guardian

“The economy was good then,” he said in Spanish. “Hillary has been good to Latinos for a long time and I feel that she has all that experience from when her husband was president.”

His 22-year-old son, also named Martin, is the other Clinton supporter in the house, and argued his siblings were wrong to be drawn to Sanders’s idealism. “She’s more realistic about what she can get done,” he said of Clinton. “She’s not sugarcoating anything.”



As these divided loyalties have begun to emerge, in the Macias household and across Nevada, the Clinton camp has changed its tune.

For weeks, Clinton allies were bullish about their prospects in diverse Nevada, where a further 18% of the population are either African American or Asian.

Martin Macias, husband of Tomasa, at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Wednesday. Photograph: Adithya Sambamurthy/The Guardian

But in recent days, Clinton campaign officials have been playing down their candidate’s prospects; campaign manager Robby Mook, the architect of Clinton’s Nevada victory in 2008, and Brian Fallon, the campaign spokesman, both caused eyebrows to raise when they suggested the state was “80% white”.

The claim was quickly batted back by the state’s Democratic senator Harry Reid, who was instrumental in securing Nevada’s “first in the west” position as an early-nominating state, in large part to ensure a more diverse state has a say early on in the primaries.

But the remark left a strong impression in the state. “Both Mook and Fallon know that 80% figure is ludicrous, and the attempt to make Nevada seem like Iowa and New Hampshire is a spin too far,” wrote Jon Ralston, the most influential pundit in the state, pointing out that around half of the state’s population are minorities.

He added: “I don’t smell a rat. I smell something much more pungent from the Clinton campaign: fear.”

Close confidantes of the former first lady insist talk of panic is overblown, pointing out that even if she loses Nevada she heads into the next state, South Carolina, with a sizable lead over Sanders.

The prospects even further on the horizon look good to Clinton. She is leading in 10 of the 12 states that will hold Democratic primaries between March 1 and 8, benefiting from overwhelming support of black voters, according to a Public Policy Polling survey released this week.

However Clinton’s claim to be able to excite the diverse coalition that propelled Obama to victory in 2008 will be undermined if Sanders can make inroads with Latinos in the same way he has managed to with younger voters and women.

And in this election like no other, Latinos feel it is their duty to vote.

Maids in Trump Hotel

The specter of Donald Trump looms as large over the Democratic caucus in Nevada as the Republican contest that will take place three days later. The billionaire property mogul’s name is emblazoned in huge letters across one of the tallest buildings in Nevada.

Latino leaders are anticipating record voter turnout from their community as the realization sets in that the Republican race is led by a frontrunner who calls Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals”, and who wants to mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants and then build a giant wall on the Mexican border to keep them out.

Trump’s combustible, anti-immigration rhetoric is driving ​​Latinos to the Democratic party

One morning this week, in the upper reaches of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, a Latino housekeeper snapped a clean sheet over a king-sized bed as she talked to a reporter about her wish to see the workforce unionized – and her admiration for Clinton.

“Hillary is a woman,” she said. “She understands the problems women face.” The maid asked not to give her name. Her boss, after all, could end up as the leader of the free world. And even if he doesn’t, he could still fire her.

While she plans to caucus for Clinton on Saturday, she said her daughters prefer Sanders because of his platform for free education. And what about Trump?

She laughed and wiped a marble counter. Not a chance. Her 19-year-old daughter, a high school senior, recently complained about her work. “‘Oh, Mami, Donald Trump, no!’,” she recalled her daughter saying. “‘When I go to school, I don’t say my mami works at the Trump Hotel.’ But I tell her, ‘He pays me.’”

Trump’s combustible, anti-immigration rhetoric has inflamed the 2016 presidential elections, and is driving Latinos to the Democratic party, irrespective of which candidate they vote for.

There is a sense on all sides that this year will be an epic presidential contest in a country coming to terms with decades of racial and economic inequality.

In Nevada, that is motivation for another major voting block, which overlaps considerably with the Latino vote.

Unions are among the most powerful players in the Democratic caucuses in Nevada. They run phone banks and get-out-the vote efforts. They pay for ads and their endorsements tend to carry great weight with their members on election day.

Nevada’s all-powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226 has 57,000 members including the bell boys, servers and maids that service the state’s tourism industry. The union backed Obama in 2008, but it has decided not to endorse a Democratic candidate in Saturday’s caucuses.

It is, however, planning to help with a get-out-the-vote effort, including among employees of Trump’s hotel, which organizers have been trying to unionize.

The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), America’s largest federation of labor groups, announced Wednesday that it would also not endorse during the primaries, a decision that could be a boost for Sanders.

“This is a green light for union activists and working Americans that, as they organize for Bernie, they will not face a coordinated AFL-CIO campaign against them,” said Larry Cohen, former president of the Communication Workers of America and a senior Sanders advisor.

Still, Clinton has garnered the backing of most major trade unions across the country, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Service Employees International Union, which began running Spanish language ads in Nevada this week.

The Sanders campaign has long argued that, while labor leaders endorse Clinton, the millions of rank-and-file union members, the workers who pound the nails and change bed sheets, file documents and flip burgers, are united in favor of the socialist senator from Vermont.

Long-time Democratic consultant Billy Vassiliadis agrees that Clinton “got most of the majors” when it comes to endorsements from labor unions, Latinos and African Americans.

The support of that Democratic establishment renders Clinton’s chances “excellent” on Saturday, he said. “This is not an election,” he added. “Endorsements mean a lot more in a caucus.”

That may be true, although in this especially heated contest, Trump and other conservatives may drive an unusually high turnout on the Democratic side.

Back at Trump’s hotel, Carmen Llarull, 64, explained how earlier in the day she had been called into her manager’s office and reprimanded for having her hair in pigtails. “Not professional,” they told her. Llarull likes Sanders. “But it is not his time,” she said. “This country is not ready for his dream.”

And if her boss becomes the next president? “I’m going to move to Canada,” she said.

“We are going to suffer. He is going to eliminate all the immigrants. For him, we are criminals, drug dealers. I came here 34 years ago from Argentina. My daughter has a beautiful career in the navy. My granddaughter is in the air force. We are normal people. Under him we will have problems.”



