The Nevada city is in a crucial district in the key swing state – yet the polarizing presidential race has forced residents to stop talking about who they’ll vote for

'People are sick of politics': how the US election left Reno divided and silenced

Duds and Suds in Reno, Nevada, is a laundromat with a little tiki bar inside, where patrons can sip a tall-boy and shoot the breeze while they wait out their spin cycle.

They have to be careful what they say, though, because talking about the presidential election is banned. Talking about politics at all, in fact, is banned.

Gene Sanguinetti, the manager, said he was forced to instigate this rule after a fist-fight broke out.

“We had somebody who liked Trump, and somebody that didn’t like Trump,” he said. “It got pretty ugly.”

Reno is the seat of Washoe County, a crucial district in a key swing state. People here take politics seriously. Four years ago, the red dirt of Sun Valley, a poor area to the north of town where doublewide trailers abut abandoned lots and burned-out cars rust in the sand, bloomed with blue Obama/Biden signs.

In richer, more conservative areas, like Lakeridge, cars were plastered with Romney/Ryan bumper stickers.

But this year – though Washoe County is as important and hotly contested as ever – is different. This year, there are no presidential election lawn signs anywhere.

People don’t want their neighbors to know who they’re voting for, for fear of the kind of conflict that led Sanguinetti to ban the topic of politics from his establishment entirely, residents say.

The only Clinton placard the Guardian could find – a small one, by the side of an industrial service road – had been kicked over and stomped into the ground.

The division on the ground here reflects a campaign season of unprecedented levels of vitriol; no presidential election in American history has ever been fought between two candidates held in such low national regard. Reno – like the rest of the country – feels like it is being pulled apart at the seams.

“It’s a very divisive election,” Sanguinetti said. “Many people are voting against the other candidate. There’s always a certain number like that – but I’ve never seen it like this, and my first election was 1968.”

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“I would say that more than half of our customers are what I call ‘Trumpets’,” Sanguinetti said. “Which is unusual, because many of our customers are socio-economically challenged – dollars are short for them, and they typically vote Democrat.” There’s a lot of anger, he said, likening the feeling to Britain’s Brexit vote.

Charles Bland, a construction worker and Republican precinct captain in Washoe, seemed exhausted defending his candidate. “I think the things he says have been twisted to seem offensive,” he said, speaking to the Guardian before Trump spoke to a fired-up crowd of several thousand at the Reno/Sparks convention center last week.

“He says things that Americans feel,” said Bland, who had brought his young grandson to the rally. “They’re tired of everything being politically correct.” He said he had seen a lot of lifelong Democrats shift their allegiance to Trump for the first time.



Clinton currently holds a razor-thin lead of just 1.2% in Nevada, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average. A poll by Emerson University and conducted between October 4 and 8, putting the two candidates at a dead heat on 43% each, though a new GOP poll conducted October 11-12 showing Clinton with a six point lead implies that recent allegations of sexual assault made against Trump may be hurting him; early voting begins here in just over a week, on October 22.

The so-called rurals, which is the term loosely used by locals to mean everywhere outside of Clark and Washoe counties – within which lie Las Vegas and Reno/Sparks, and therefore most of the state’s population – are as solidly Republican as can be.

There is a way it plays out, one Republican party insider said, in which Washoe County would be the fulcrum on which the whole election balances.

“This county makes all the difference in the world for the state,” said Kim Bacchus, the president of the Northern Nevada Republican Women’s Pac. “The rurals are always solidly conservative; Clark County, with two thirds of our population, is fairly solidly Democrat. So … Washoe County has always been the determiner.”

“Why is Washoe a big deal for the presidential election?” she continued. “Because without Washoe County, Trump loses. Period.”

In 2012, Washoe County went blue, voting for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a slim margin of around 6,000 votes. But since then, the town has seen an influx of people moving in along the I-80 corridor from California, many of them conservatives looking to escape the Golden State’s liberal politics. In other parts of town, attitudes toward Washington DC have degraded from distrust to contempt.

The polarization is especially glaring within the Republican party. The Washoe County party is barely on speaking terms with the state party, insiders told the Guardian. “It’s October of a presidential election year and they’re doing nothing to elect candidates,” Bacchus said of the county party.

“They can’t raise money, have no message, they have no volunteers, they have no plan for getting the vote out, they’re doing nothing. It’s just a little club, and they have a little clubhouse to meet in until they run out of money for rent,” she continued.

Her Pac deals with the candidates directly now; she circumvents the county party entirely. Many others do the same. “Some Democrats I talk to say ‘I’m just not gonna vote for that candidate,’” Bacchus said. “Some Republicans I speak to say the same – ‘I’m not gonna vote for that candidate.’”

She shrugged. “People are sick of politics,” she said.

As for Sanguinetti, the manager of Duds and Suds, his disgust with the toxicity of 2016’s political discourse has driven him, for the first time in his life, to abandon mainstream politics entirely. He’s planning on voting Libertarian in November.