Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivers the keynote address on June 23 to the Nevada Democratic Convention in Reno. | Scott Sonner/AP Photo Elections Trump-Warren split-screen offers sneak peek at 2020 campaign Democrats count on the president’s immigration policy to power a surge in Latino voter turnout.

RENO, Nev. — In the space of just a few hours, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump provided a glimpse of what the 2020 presidential campaign might look like in a battleground state.

It won’t be pretty.


Here, in front of a raucous crowd Saturday at the Nevada Democratic Party’s state convention, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts unloaded on a president she said stands for “hatefulness, ugliness and cruelty.”

Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto followed, calling Trump “ignorant,” his immigration policies “disgusting.”

At the southern end of the state, not long after touching down in Las Vegas for a speech to the state GOP convention, the president spoke directly to the party base — and only to them.

“I got elected largely because we are strong on the border,” Trump reminded the crowd.

Then he proceeded to deride Warren, as he frequently has, as “Pocahontas,” offered a new nickname for Democratic Senate candidate Jacky Rosen — “Wacky Jacky” — and tossed a veiled insult at Republican Sen. John McCain, who’s suffering from brain cancer.

It’s a long way from 2020, but Saturday’s split-screen sketched out not only the tone of the next presidential election, but also one of the pivotal issues — the president’s immigration policy and its effect on Latino voter turnout.

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Trump largely avoided the controversy surrounding his separation of children and their parents at the border, dismissing any electoral advantage for Democrats amid fallout from his administration’s zero-tolerance policy.

But Democrats here in Reno saw the border controversy as rocket fuel for their efforts to register and turn out Latino voters in the hopes of ousting Republican Sen. Dean Heller in 2018 — and putting the state out of reach for Trump in 2020.

In recent months, Democrats and left-leaning groups have earmarked millions of dollars toward those initiatives in Nevada, seeking to replicate an effort that helped lift Democrats to sweeping victories here in 2016, while relentlessly yoking the state’s Republicans to Trump.

“Up until a week ago, we thought that Dreamers and pushing back on Republican attacks on sanctuary [policies] would be the primary immigration debate,” said Jeff Parcher of the Washington-based Center for Community Change Action, part of an affiliation of groups planning to spend $3 million turning out low-propensity voters here. “But obviously now, the issue on the border has overtaken everything in people’s minds.”

Last week, the consortium began testing online ads pinned to Trump’s now-abandoned policy of separating migrant families at the border. In one spot, a girl is pictured clutching an adult’s leg beside the admonishment, “Trump & the GOP agenda are tearing families apart.”

Democrats were preparing Sunday to add a plank to the state party’s platform formally opposing the separation of parents and children at the border.

Cortez Masto, the first Latina senator, said Trump is “going down a dangerous path.”

“This type of anti-immigrant attack is not only going to have a positive impact for Latinos in general,” she said. “I think it’s just every minority population that he is attacking.”

Speaking in a ballroom beside a bowling alley at a resort and casino here, Warren and Rosen, a Las Vegas-area congresswoman, told delegates they will visit the U.S.-Mexico border in coming days, with Rosen saying, “This granddaughter of immigrants is going to see firsthand what’s happening to these innocent children, and what we can do to help them.”

Rosen’s remarks came days after she went up with a Spanish-language ad on Telemundo to run throughout the World Cup, promising to fight “Trump’s dirty game of separating mothers from their children.”

Steve Sisolak, the Democratic nominee for governor, released a video accusing his Republican opponent, state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, of “giving Trump a free pass” while “children are crying for their parents.”

For many Democrats, the furor over Trump’s border separation policy recalls a 2016 election in which images of Latinos registering to vote at taco trucks in northeast Las Vegas and lining up to vote outside a Las Vegas grocery store presaged a rare victory for the party in the presidential election year. Nevada Democrats in 2016 not only delivered the state to Hillary Clinton, but also sent Cortez Masto to the Senate and recaptured the state legislature.

Yet despite the growing significance of the state’s Latino voting bloc — Latinos now account for nearly 30 percent of Nevada’s population — Latinos traditionally vote at lower rates than white voters, performing especially poorly in midterm elections. In a disastrous election for Nevada Democrats in 2014, low turnout in Latino-heavy portions of Las Vegas’ Clark County helped Republicans sweep Nevada’s statewide elections and take both houses of the legislature.

In an effort to avoid a repeat, a group of left-leaning organizations, including the super PAC Planned Parenthood Votes, Service Employees International Union and Center for Community Change Action, announced plans in April to spend $30 million on efforts to reach low-propensity voters in key states, including $3 million in Nevada.

The state Democratic Party is holding bilingual phone banks and offering voter registration trainings in Spanish, while the state’s powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226 is making plans for a campaign similar to 2016, when 300 workers took a two-month leave of absence ahead of the election, knocking on 350,000 doors.

Meanwhile, Voto Latino is aiming to register 1 million voters by 2020 in Nevada and other Latino-rich states. And billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer’s NextGen America has designated $2 million to register and turn out young voters in Nevada, with much of its organizing around immigration. On Saturday, the group was planning to co-host a protest tied to immigrant family separations outside Trump’s appearance in Las Vegas.

“It gives us a really good opening,” said Bob Fulkerson, state director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada Action Fund, a progressive group that runs registration and turnout operations in the state.

“It has never been this easy to raise money. I mean, people are freakin’ pissed off, and they want to know what they can do,” he said. “I’ve been a paid organizer in Nevada since 1984, and this kind of intensity, this kind of fire … this is what we dream of.”

Fulkerson, who is organizing a protest of an appearance by Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a school safety conference in Reno on Monday, said that before the uproar over Trump’s border separations, a Facebook page devoted to the protest had received about 4,000 views. As of late last week, he said, there were 27,000.

When Sessions arrives in Reno, he said, “We’re going to block the entrances. … We’re going to block the streets.”

Local Republicans have sought to defuse the effects of Trump’s border controversy by refocusing attention on the state’s booming economy. Following a recession felt more deeply in Nevada than most other states, the unemployment rate here now stands at less than 5 percent.

“I think it is the issue, and I think it’s one of the reasons why people continue to give the president a pass on other issues,” said Greg Ferraro, a Republican consultant and adviser to the state’s Republican governor, Brian Sandoval. “The economy is the ballast, and I think that people are willing to give the president a lot of latitude so long as the economy continues to grow at a robust pace.”

President Donald Trump speaks at a Nevada GOP Convention in Las Vegas on June 23. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo

But Trump’s hard line on immigration continues to force Republicans to move carefully in Nevada, fearful of alienating the state’s Latino voters.

Heller, who is widely considered the most vulnerable Republican senator seeking reelection this year, publicly opposed the child separation policy, though he is not keeping distance from the president. Trump was scheduled to attend a fundraiser for Heller in Las Vegas on Saturday.

Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican consultant who specializes in Latino politics, compared the resonance of the border separations with the furor surrounding Trump’s response to violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year.

“This is not your traditional Trumpism here,” he said. “When you start to see the Republican leadership come out, and the Republican elected officials start quaking in their boots, you know it’s significant. And the only other time I’ve seen this is Charlottesville. … He’s really putting the Republican Party in a bad spot heading into the midterms.”

Andres Ramirez, a Nevada-based Democratic strategist and former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic Caucus, said Trump has done more for Latino turnout in Nevada that Democrats could ever have hoped to accomplish on their own.

“There’s not much that I think the Democrats could have done that would have mobilized and invigorated Latinos more than what the Trump administration has been doing this week,” said Ramirez, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid. “Now that these immigrants are reinvigorated, it provides Democrats an opportunity to hone their message and make sure that [Latinos] are voting in these elections.”

The border controversy, Ramirez said, “helped jump-start the Latino community.” Now, he said, they are “on the attack mode.”

At the Democratic state convention, Warren, a potential 2020 presidential candidate, seized on that impulse, urging Democrats to “fight back” with her against Trump.

“He has called immigrants animals. He has complained about people coming here from ‘shithole’ countries,” she said. "And now Trump wants to create new family detention camps to lock up more people, triggering a whole new crisis.”

The crowd roared when Warren said, “I’m heading to McAllen, Texas, tomorrow, and I will take the message straight from Nevada: We will fight for the soul of our nation.”