Jon Ralston, contributing editor at Politico Magazine, has covered Nevada politics for more than a quarter-century. He has worked for both major Las Vegas newspapers and now has his own site, email newsletter and television program.

Some may ask of President Barack Obama’s decision to go to Nevada Friday to sign his immigration executive action: Why Las Vegas? I say: Why not?

Las Vegas provides the president with perfect meshing of the political and the substantive, of the symbolic and the real. And, most of all, it is home to one Harry Reid, the soon-to-be defrocked majority leader who needs a lot of help to get re-elected to a sixth term.


The president wants to boost the Democratic leader, even after Reid unleashed his chief of staff before the results came in two weeks ago to essentially blame Obama for the Senate turnover. But the fingerpointing is over and now both men need each other the way the president needed Reid to pass Obamacare and the way the senator needed Obama to help build a formidable Democratic machine in Nevada six years ago so he could survive in 2010.

Now this beautiful friendship, or at least political symbiosis, has been reinvigorated after a red wave washed over Nevada, accentuating Gov. Brian Sandoval’s status as a potent force, and coincidentally a Hispanic one, who would be a heavy favorite should he choose to run against Reid.

So what’s a president to do but help a fella out by agreeing to go to Reid’s home base? Here he can begin the process of rallying a base that deserted the Democrats two weeks ago and that Reid needs to reinvigorate if he has any chance to survive in two years. Hispanics are a key constituency for Reid, a demographic that helped him destroy Sharron “Some of you look a little more Asian to me” Angle in 2010.

The final figures are not in, but the Hispanic vote in Nevada this year dropped precipitously after growing each of the previous three cycles, reaching 18 percent in 2012.

Hispanics are about a quarter of Nevada’s population and could be as much as 20 percent of the electorate in 2016.

By announcing the executive action and then coming to Vegas to consecrate it with Reid at his side, the president shows he is willing to help rebuild the party’s base for the besieged senator. And the venue, Del Sol High School, also is meaningful for Obama, who has been there twice before, including in January 2013 when he made his immigration reform pitch shortly after he was inaugurated for a second term. This is a White House that loves symbolic gestures, so this will be a bookend to Obama's speech last year.

The president also well knows of Nevada’s importance in the 2016 White House sweepstakes, and while he is a lame duck, he cares about the party and who succeeds him. Nevada remains a purple state whose hue became a little redder after 2014, after becoming a little bluer in the two presidential elections Obama won here. Now an invigorated and burgeoning Latino vote could help it turn bluish again.

But beyond the favor to Reid, Obama can easily justify choosing Nevada for the signing ceremony. This is not homerism: Nevada, and Las Vegas specifically, is the best place to make the case for immigration reform. Why?

The most important labor force in the state, the one that populates the gaming industry, is the Culinary union, a 50,000-member organization that, coincidentally, was an early endorser of a 2008 underdog named Barack Obama. It was the first union in the country to embrace the future president, who actually lost Nevada in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but won more delegates because of the caucus system his campaign mastered.

The Culinary is a melting pot, with more than 50 percent of its workers Hispanic, 14 percent Asian and 88 countries represented. There’s a reason MSNBC is setting up a live truck at union headquarters Friday.

While the Mexican border states come first to mind when discussing the problem of immigration, it’s Nevada that actually has the highest share of undocumented immigrants in any state in America, at 7.6 percent.

The problem here is real and it is growing, affecting the school system, the job market and the state’s social service infrastructure. And what’s more, there is no better face for immigration reform than Astrid Silva, the remarkable young Nevada woman whom Obama cited in his Thursday evening speech and whom Reid has mentioned on the Senate floor more than once, including when the Senate bill passed a year and a half ago.

Silva’s compelling life story and her passion on the issue have given her national prominence, which reached its zenith Thursday evening. She spoke out in frustration many times this year, and she was nearly reduced to tears the night before the announcement because her father is facing deportation.

Obama’s invocation of Silva, whose story surely was provided to him by Reid, crystallized how this is about the re-cementing of the Reid-Obama bond that had so recently frayed. The media will queue up the gambling clichés when Obama signs the order today, but perhaps a play on another one more accurately describes why the president is doing it at Del Sol High School:

What happens in Vegas can only help Harry Reid.