LAS VEGAS — Winning the California primary is crucial to Sen. Kamala Harris’ plan to secure the Democratic nomination for president. Winning the Nevada caucuses that will be held a few days earlier in 2020 would give her the momentum to make that task a lot easier.

Taking Nevada will be tough, given the state’s notoriously hard-to-predict electorate and chaotic caucus system, which is why Harris made her first campaign visit to the state Friday. She hopes her California-forged progressive platform will be attractive to voters in a racially diverse — but not as liberal — neighboring state, where 29 percent of the population is Latino, 10 percent is African American and a majority of state legislators are women.

At two campaign stops, Harris pushed her tax cut plan to middle-income voters in the Las Vegas area, where Democratic politics is dominated by the 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union. Harris also met privately with union leaders.

In the morning, Harris mixed a populist economic message with one of personal empowerment when she spoke to the Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit.

“People are acutely aware that their jobs are leaving, and there is no plan in place to deal with this,” Harris said during an onstage interview with attorney and TV personality Star Jones. Instead, she said, the response from the Trump administration “has been, ‘It’s us versus them. It’s those immigrants.’”

Many in the audience said they liked Harris’ proposal to give a $500 monthly tax credit to families earning less than $100,000. Harris proposes to pay for the plan by rolling back much of the tax bill that the GOP Congress passed and President Trump signed in 2017.

“It’s easy for a lot of people to say, ‘Oh, just go out and get a job.’ But (Harris) realizes that sometimes even when you have a job, it’s not enough to make ends meet,” said LaMetrice Dopson, an operations manager from Houston who worked as a volunteer for former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s failed U.S. Senate campaign in Texas last year.

Harris hammered home the economic populist message at an hour-long rally Friday afternoon before 600 people in the Canyon Springs High School gymnasium in North Las Vegas, a city where 20 percent of the population is African American. The campaign provided translation at the rally for Spanish speakers.

She drew the biggest cheers when she promised to roll back the 2017 tax law.

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Harris blistered those who argue that “the economy is great” by pointing out that the stock market is booming.

“Well, that’s great — if you own stocks,” Harris said. But “the economy in America is not working for working people.”

Patricia Cunningham was impressed with Harris, except for her support for the Green New Deal, a nonbinding congressional resolution backed by first-term Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that calls for the U.S. to run on 100 percent renewable energy within 10 years.

“I’m not sold on that,” Cunningham said. “I get concerned when candidates jump on something before we know how much it would cost.”

Several members of both audiences were drawn to Harris’ less overtly political remarks, particularly at the conference of African American professional women.

“You will find many times in your life ... that you will be the only woman who looks like you in the room — and it could be a board room, a meeting room, a hearing room,” Harris said.

“Look around this room and hold this image in your heart,” Harris said, gesturing to the ballroom filled with black women. “And remember that when you’re in those rooms, seemingly the only one like us, that we’re all in that room with you ... cheering you on the whole time.”

Harris has emphasized her experience as a district attorney and state attorney general, and pointed to her roots as the child of immigrants who met during the civil rights movement to help her appeal to progressives. But she will not be able to rely on her resume or charisma to win here. Nevada is a caucus state, so establishing a strong organization to get supporters to meeting sites on voting day next Feb. 22 is crucial.

“It will be the party loyalists who will dominate the process, so the candidates who are in step with those voters’ priorities and who have the infrastructure will do well,” said David Damore, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Those hoping to play here without investing the time and energy needed to organize support will not fare well.”

Nevada comes third on next year’s primary calendar, behind Iowa and New Hampshire, and just in front of California, which votes along with several other states on March 3. Millions of Californians will vote by mail during the month before election day, so Nevada and the other early states are a prime opportunity for any candidate to build momentum.

A key organization in Nevada is the Culinary Workers Union, which represents workers along the Las Vegas Strip. The union’s membership is 54 percent Latino and 55 percent female.

Union spokeswoman Bethany Khan said an economic populist message is “a strong race-class narrative that works for everyone in Nevada. We want to hear that versus just name-checking ‘labor’ or ‘working families.’ Tell us what you’re going to do.”

Khan said she doesn’t know whether the union will endorse a candidate. It has already met with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; former Vice President Joe Biden; and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as well as Harris.

Republican strategist Greg Bailor warned that union-friendly, left-leaning proposals that Harris and some other Democrats have backed, such as giving all Americans access to Medicare, might not be well received by the larger Nevada electorate.

Unemployment is only 4.4 percent now, but Bailor said memories of 14 percent state joblessness during the recession are still fresh.

“Nevada right now is a growing economy. Any wide-ranging change, like change in health care policy, is going to be a shock factor,” Bailor said. “Democrats need to realize that the economy is still fragile here.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli