LAS VEGAS — On Tuesday, Hillary Rodham Clinton declared this city — with its flashy strip of casinos, rows of middle-class subdivisions and one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation — the perfect place to pitch her campaign message.

“I love to be here because I’m going all over the country talking about how we need to reshuffle the deck” to favor working people, Mrs. Clinton told a crowd gathered in the gymnasium of the Dr. William U. Pearson Community Center. “What better place to talk about it than here?”

Despite the outsize attention on Iowa and New Hampshire in this presidential race, Nevada, with its mix of rural and urban areas, a population that is more than 15 percent Hispanic, and lingering economic problems, is arguably the best early-state indicator of how a candidate would fare in a general election campaign.

“What’s happening here, particularly in Las Vegas, is very much what’s happening in the country demographically, but on steroids,” said David Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “We’re a state that has been white and rural and is now very diverse and will be majority minority soon.”