David F. Damore is associate professor of political science at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior analyst with Latino Decisions (which has done some consulting for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, though Damore has not been involved). Robert E. Lang is professor of urban affairs at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and executive director of Brookings Mountain West and The Lincy Institute.

If you’re not a political obsessive, you could be forgiven for forgetting that the Nevada caucuses are coming up this week and next. Geographically remote to much of the country, the state has received little attention in the early campaign season. It doesn’t have a claim to a “first,” like Iowa and New Hampshire, and it has fewer delegates to offer than South Carolina. Even though Nevada has been an early nominating state since 2008 and hosted two debates so far this cycle, with one more to come before Election Day, there have been just 76 candidate visits to the state since the start of 2015, compared with 337 for Iowa and 311 for New Hampshire, according to National Journal. The press, accordingly, seems to have flocked to the other early nominating states more than Nevada.

Yet if you look at what really decides presidential elections—if you clear away talk of “momentum” the horse race and “winning the day”—it is Nevada, among the first four states, that can tell us most about the electoral realities of the 2016 presidential election. Because Nevada is far more representative of the country than the other early voting states, it captures many of the challenges and opportunities facing the Democratic and Republican parties in 2016 and beyond. So far this year, it is the Democrats who appear to be doing the most to take advantage of Nevada’s early state status.


A solid swing state, Nevada has long been a political bellwether in the general election, voting for the winning presidential candidate in 31 out of 38 elections, including every election since 1912 but one (1976). Economically and demographically, Las Vegas, the state’s largest metropolitan region, resembles other large metro areas such as Northern Virginia, Florida’s I-4 corridor and the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, including Denver. Come November, it is the suburbs of these politically contested regions that will hold the balance of power in the presidential election.

Among the four early states, Nevada is the only one you could fairly call urban. It might be strange to think of a place with so much desert and so many mountain ranges as urban. But nearly three-quarters of Nevadans live in Las Vegas, whose more than 2 million inhabitants make it the 30th-largest metro region in America. Among the other four early states, the next biggest metro—Greenville, South Carolina—isn’t even close; with fewer than 900,000 people, it is the 63rd-largest metro in the country. In this, Nevada looks far more like America than Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina: More than 80 percent of the country’s population lives in urban areas, and Nevada offers the first barometer of which candidates are effectively reaching these voters.

Nevada’s urban spaces also much more closely mirror the accelerating diversity that is reshaping the country. The state has fast-growing Latino (27.8 percent), Asian-American (8.3 percent) and African-American (9.1 percent) populations. The Las Vegas region, Nevada’s economic engine, is already majority-minority, and the state is expected to follow by decade’s end. Iowa and New Hampshire are, of course, disproportionately white, and while South Carolina has a high rate of diversity, it is limited to a large African-American population (27.8 percent).

Moreover, because roughly one in five Nevadans is foreign-born (the fifth-highest share in the nation) and the state is a magnet for domestic migration, Nevada has the smallest share of native-born eligible voters in the country. In fact, Nevada has more eligible voters born in either California or east of the Mississippi than in Nevada itself. As a consequence, Nevada's electorate is constantly churning, and the state lacks the well-worn campaign pathways and traditions of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Beyond its size and diversity, Las Vegas captures the emerging hyper-connectivity of the more tech-focused and service-based economy taking hold across the country. The city hosts more than 41 million visitors annually and is the top convention destination in the United States. McCarran International Airport has daily nonstop flights to Europe and Asia, as well as every major city in the United States, and Las Vegas is home to four Fortune 500 companies that export the state’s economy across four continents. It’s little surprise that electric car manufacturers Faraday Future and Tesla are both building factories in Nevada.

So, what can Nevada’s urbanization, diversity and connectivity tell us about the 2016 election? This month’s caucuses provide the first test of whether and how the two parties and their respective candidates are responding to these dynamics. And in Nevada, the strategic advantage so far seems to be going to the Democrats, who are using the caucuses as a party-building activity—working to mobilize the state’s younger, minority constituents, who are concentrated in the Las Vegas urban core and, increasingly, in inner-ring suburbs.

Although it was a midterm year, 2014 was a reminder of the fickleness of the Democratic electorate in Nevada: Turnout in greater Las Vegas plummeted to less than 42 percent of registered voters, from 81 percent in 2012, and the GOP gained unified control of state government for the first time since 1929. To avoid a repeat this November, the Democrats, who caucus on Feb. 20, must increase their margins in Las Vegas sufficiently to offset the party’s weaknesses in the rest of the state.

To begin engaging these voters, the Democrats are holding their caucuses on a Saturday morning and are allowing same-day registration. The state Democratic Party has conducted extensive caucus trainings, including bilingual events in heavily Latino East Las Vegas, and the party is organizing at-large caucuses at six major Las Vegas resorts to facilitate participation among the heavily unionized casino workforce. The hope is to repeat what occurred in 2008, when more than 117,000 Democrats caucused and the party increased its voter registration advantage over the Republicans from 12,000 in January to more than 100,000 by Election Day. Barack Obama went on to carry the state easily.

To win Nevada’s six electoral votes this fall, the Republicans, meanwhile, need to get high turnout in the state’s sparsely populated, more conservative rural counties; win the support of the majority of nonpartisan voters (19 percent of current registrants); and carry Washoe County in northern Nevada, the state’s second most populous county. George W. Bush pulled this off in 2000 and 2004 to secure 22,000-vote victories in both elections, but John McCain and Mitt Romney came nowhere close in 2008 and 2012. The Republicans will also be in good shape if they can turn out the kinds of voters who showed up in the 2014 midterms—when the overall electorate was 17 percent rural (compared with 11 percent of the state’s population) and a third of all voters were over age 65 (compared with 20 percent of the state’s voting age population).

However, far from galvanizing or unifying events, previous Republican caucuses in Nevada have exposed fissures within the party and highlighted the state party’s institutional and organizational weaknesses—and 2016 doesn’t look much more promising. In 2008 and 2012, just 44,000 and 33,000 Republicans participated in the caucuses, respectively, and the state party struggled to administer the nominating process; it took days for the vote count to be finalized in 2012, and supporters of Ron Paul caused disruptions for the party in both years. Last spring, establishment Republican state lawmakers, hoping to increase voter participation in the nominating process, introduced legislation to replace the GOP caucuses with a primary, which would also hand the process over from the party to the state. But despite lobbying by national Republicans, the bill was left to die on the last day of the legislative session—blocked by Democratic legislators and a coalition of Tea Party-aligned lawmakers who saw the legislation as an attempt to marginalize grassroots conservatives.

This does not bode well for the Republicans’ chances to generate an uptick in participation or an infusion of new voters. This year, the party chose to hold its caucuses on Feb. 23, the Tuesday evening after the Democratic caucuses, in order to steer clear of South Carolina’s GOP primary on Feb. 20. The party is also requiring all participants to be registered at least 10 days before the caucuses, another burden to participation.

The most important caucus numbers to watch will be the total Democratic and Republican participants and the number of new registrants each party is able to attract. If the Democrats can turn out a high number of caucus goers and widen their registration advantage over the GOP (currently at 48,000), then they will be well-positioned for November, just as they were in 2008. Regardless of which candidate prevails in the caucuses, the Democrats should then enter the fall campaign with the structural advantage, in no small part because of how the state party has capitalized on Nevada’s early state status.

And if history is any guide, a Democratic win in Nevada this fall would give the party’s nominee a good chance of winning the presidency. Far from an outlier, Nevada is an all-American state, and its population and economic engine—Las Vegas—is an all-American city. As goes Nevada, so goes the nation: This statement would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, but it now reflects the political evolution of the modern American West.