LAS VEGAS — Barack Obama’s best swing state in 2008 has become one of his party’s biggest problems in 2016.

Obama won a smashing double-digit victory in Nevada eight years ago, and he held the state by a comfortable 7-point margin in 2012, as the heavily Hispanic state became a poster child for demographic change driving Democratic gains in national politics.


So many people expected that this year, Nevada would be part of Hillary Clinton’s electoral firewall, especially after Donald Trump emerged as the Republican nominee while inveighing against illegal immigrants from Mexico and South America.

But Clinton now finds herself locked in a tight race with Trump in Nevada, a long-running source of concern for her campaign. And Democrats are also in greater danger of losing retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s seat, which could extinguish the party’s hopes of winning the majority. Catherine Cortez Masto, Reid’s anointed Democratic successor, did not lead a single independent poll against GOP Rep. Joe Heck all summer.

Operatives on the ground say that Nevada’s booming, Democratic-leaning Hispanic population has obscured other disadvantages that have redounded to Trump’s benefit, including a huge population of non-college-educated white voters, the core of Trump’s base; a fragile economy that still feels the reverberations of last decade’s economic crash; and Nevada’s long-standing penchant for insurgent-style politicians. What’s more, Republicans in the state are actively chasing the Hispanic vote, even as Trump himself has seemed hell-bent on turning them away from the GOP.

“It’s the perfect storm for Trump here,” said one Democratic consultant in the state. “Valets and dealers at gaming properties make good money here without a college degree. We have union organizations that have endorsed Clinton but whose members are buying what Trump is selling. Hispanics are being heavily courted for the first time. I don't believe at the end of the day that Trump will win here, but it’ll be a lot closer than it should be.”

Nevada is the most Hispanic swing state in the country, but it has a lower share of white voters with a college degree — another key piece of Clinton's coalition — than any other swing state, according to Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini. Ruffini’s estimates show less than one-quarter of registered Nevada voters are college-educated whites, while more than half are whites without degrees, who have formed the backbone of the Trump coalition across the country.

“Trump is doing unusually well with non-college educated whites, particularly men, and you have a disproportionally large group of non-college educated whites in Nevada,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who advised Reid’s Nevada campaigns. “Trump is being helped by how he’s doing among them. And you have a lot of economic frustration there, all of which feeds into the Trump message in a pretty big way.”

Trump nodded to the group himself, in his inimitable way, after his decisive Nevada caucus win in February. “I love the poorly educated,” Trump said in his Las Vegas victory speech that night.

“A college degree is not necessary for the vast majority of manufacturing jobs, so when he’s spoken to people at the working-class level about getting them jobs and not needing a degree, he does really well with them,” said Ray Bacon, the director of the Nevada Manufacturers Association.

For Democrats to win here, their own turnout machine must haul out unlikely voters. In 2008, Obama’s campaign did that by inspiring hope. Now, organizing efforts are characterized more by “a sense of duty,” said Yvanna Cancela, the political director of the powerful Culinary Union, a key part of the Democratic turnout machine in Nevada.

“People who are expecting to feel excited or inspired in the way they were in 2008, well, they’re going to be left waiting for that for a long time,” Cancela said. “That’s largely due to the fact that Donald Trump has ignited deep ugliness in this campaign cycle.”

The mood is indeed serious, even dire, among Democratic organizers. A handful of Culinary Union organizers said it’s a fear of a Donald Trump presidency that’s keeping them going on their eight-hour shifts, walking neighborhoods in the blazing desert heat. Teresa Parraga, a 56-year-old housekeeper at the Paris Hotel, said she’s “scared about the hate, the hate toward Latinos and Muslims.”

“I’m involved because I’m scared,” said Claudia Ramos, another housekeeper from the Paris Hotel who is a first-time organizer. “I feel sad about the way he talks about us.”

It’s that Democratic ground game that has strategists in both parties wondering whether the state’s notoriously difficult public polling is once again underestimating Democratic support — both from lower-propensity voters who decide to turn out late or from Spanish-speaking voters pollsters aren’t contacting in large enough numbers. Democrats already have a 72,000-voter edge over Republicans in party registration, which is "more than we've ever had at the same time during the last two presidential elections," Cortez Masto said.

Catherine Cortez Masto, Harry Reid’s anointed Democratic successor, did not lead a single independent poll against GOP Rep. Joe Heck all summer. | AP Photo

“Democrats have a registration advantage and a disadvantage when it comes to turnout,” as Republicans are higher propensity voters here, said David Cohen, a consultant who ran President Obama’s 2008 caucus strategy in the state. “So the machine that the Democratic Party has built over the last eight years or so was really the difference between Democratic victories and Democratic losses.”

Yet the Republican side, for the first time in Nevada in decades, is also investing in a prolonged, data-driven ground effort, spearheaded by Heck’s robust Senate operation and supplemented by significant investment by Koch brothers-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity, which are focused on down-ballot races and pushing free-market conservative issues. Republican National Committee spokeswoman Sara Sendek said the party organization has the “largest ground investment in the state’s history.”

The LIBRE Initiative, another Koch-funded group that targets Hispanic voters, is also on the ground and has been pushing anti Cortez Masto literature starting this month.

And there’s a feeling even at the presidential level that Latino Republicans, who were put off by Trump’s repeated offensive comments in 2015, may have been drawn back to him in 2016 because “they feel that he’ll be the stronger candidate on the economy,” said Jesus Marquez, a conservative talk show host on Spanish-language radio serves on the RNC’s National Hispanic Advisory Council. “He’s appealing to working class Latinos the same way he’s appealing to the white working class.”

And still, not all Republicans are nearly as optimistic about Trump’s prospects. Stung by two cycles of presidential disappointment, not to mention Reid’s 2010 victory, many believe that the Reid political machine working at full force will still be too much to overcome on November 8. ("They wouldn't have to do much" to have their best-ever ground game in 2016, Reid said of the GOP. "They haven't done anything in the past.")

"I don’t believe the polls saying Trump's running close, I think he loses by 6 points,” said one Republican strategist in the state. “I give him credit for being able to, by sheer force of personality, keep himself in this thing because he's an A-plus promoter with an F-minus campaign."

Joe Heck, the three-term GOP congressman, is running narrowly ahead of Catherine Cortez Masto in most polling and has established a cushion of support over Donald Trump’s support levels, too. | Getty

If that ends up being the case, it would be a huge boost to Democrats’ Senate hopes. Heck, the three-term GOP congressman, is running narrowly ahead of Cortez Masto in most polling and has established a cushion of support over Trump’s support levels, too. But Democrats are doing their best to tie Heck to Trump, hoping to draft off the fear down-ballot.

One Democratic ad plays clips of GOP Sen. Dean Heller and GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval voicing concern over Donald Trump — and then cuts to video of Heck saying he trusts Trump with the nuclear codes.

“[Heck] wants to support Donald Trump and has high hopes he’ll be the next president of the United States – a man who has no business stepping into the White House, a man whose platform and policies is based on hate, fear and discrimination,” Cortez Masto said

But Heck said that his longstanding presence in the community counteracts these attacks. He has held down a swing district in the Las Vegas suburbs increasingly comfortably over the past six years, and he regularly touts his outreach to minority communities.

"When people know who you are, it's very difficult to attach you to someone else and be responsible," Heck said. "They know who I am and will trust their own instincts, not what they're being told by my political opponent.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated when LIBRE Initiative began campaigning against Catherine Cortez Masto. It was in September.