Kaine accuses Trump of trying to get Nevadans to change their pronunciation

Buttering up voters in the swing state of Nevada, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine poked fun at Donald Trump for his insistence on pronouncing the state’s name wrong.

The Virginia senator spent the early part of his remarks Friday afternoon outside of Las Vegas talking up Nevada’s outsize influence in both the primary and general elections. But he delved quickly into a riff on Trump’s statement Wednesday night during his own visit to the state, when he told the crowd that “Nobody says it the other way. It has to be Neh-VAHH-da.”


“When you get to the very end of the race, a handful of states end up being the states where the race really gets decided, where it’s close right up to election day,” Kaine said. “And on any list of that handful of states, again and again and again, Nevada, not Neh-VAH-da, Nevada is one of those handfuls of states.”

The state’s pronunciation is often a sticky subject for Nevadans. The preferred pronunciation for the state is Neh-VAD-uh, but Trump insisted Wednesday that “I said when I came out here, I said nobody says it the other way. It has to be Neh-VAHH-da. Right? If you don't say it correctly, and it didn't happen to me, but it happened to a friend of mine, he was killed.”

Kaine said Trump’s mispronunciation was a rookie mistake.

“The thing that interested me about all of that is, hey look, I’ve been in politics for a while and I’ve misspoken and sometimes mispronounced something. Okay, that happens,” he said. “Now, I did learn when I first came to Nevada as chairman of the Democratic Party, the first thing everybody told me is ‘it’s Neh-VAD-ah.’ You know? They tell you if you’re from out of state, ‘rule one, don’t get that wrong.’ So it’s a little hard to make that mistake, but gosh only Donald Trump would make that mistake and then when he’s corrected he would, ‘no, you guys have to change the way you’re pronouncing it. My way is a better way of pronouncing it.’”