Kamala Harris bets on high-stakes win in Nevada

At the 24-hour poker tables in Las Vegas, a firm rule is increasingly being enforced: “no politics talk”. Dealers accustomed to keeping an eye on cards and chips say they also have to be quick to close down partisan debates as both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris place bets on Nevada by ramping up their campaigns in a state that was the narrowest Democratic hold in the last election.
Trump was polling ahead of Joe Biden here until the president folded four weeks ago but Harris has her party believing she could be holding a winning hand for November: she fired up activists with a well-attended rally last weekend and an aggregate of recent polls puts the two rivals dead level.
“Of course, we have people on both sides at the table,” said Elizabeth Reggie, a veteran dealer in a casino poker room favoured more by locals than tourists.
“They’ll start talking and they want to get on each other, sometimes they’ll get that little bit into it before I can tell them, ‘guys, you know we can’t talk about politics at the table’,” she said after the end of her eight-hour day shift. Reggie, who backed Trump in 2020, would never share her own views while working but says there are a few dealers at her casino who support the former president while others are excited by the emergence of Harris, reflecting the split in the state.
“I would flat out not have voted for Biden, I would definitely have voted for Trump if Biden was still in the race because that man was lost in space, it frightened me that he was so confused,” she said.
As might be expected from an expert in No Limit Texas Hold’em, the most popular poker variant, involving up to four rounds of betting per hand, Reggie is hedging her bets and curious to see what cards Harris holds.
“Now we have somebody new. So let me hear you, let me see what you’ve got for me. I won’t just vote for you just because you’re a woman — white, black, Asian any kind of background thing, that doesn’t make me vote for you — you’ve got to show me something. So if she shows me the right thing you never know.”
Nevada is crucial to the Sun Belt strategy for winning the White House by capturing the swing states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina that are characterised by sizeable black or Hispanic populations. It is also where both campaigns are making a play based on tackling economic hardship faced by working-class voters owing to post-Covid inflation and unemployment.
Although it has the highest state jobless rate of 5.2 per cent, Nevada has become much harder to call because of voters such as Reggie who previously backed Trump but are curious to hear from Harris, or Sarina Martinez, who backed Biden in 2020 but was turned off by the age of both main party candidates. At 78, Trump has become the oldest nominee on a presidential ballot in history now that Biden, 81, has dropped out. Harris, 59, seems a whole generation younger.
“When it was Trump-Biden, honestly, I just thought that they were a mess, I thought it was embarrassing as an American citizen to see that these are only two candidates that really have a chance at winning,” said Martinez, 28, who works for a Las Vegas property company. “I think the age is ridiculous. I definitely would have picked a third party.”
She said that Harris, however, could get her vote. “She could, just depending on her campaign. Also, I know she is supported by AOC [the left-wing New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and even though I’m not the biggest Kamala Harris fan, I am a big AOC fan.”
This underlined the crunch likely to come for Harris as she reveals more of her cards — she is unlikely to be able to appeal to both Reggie, a former Trump voter who wants cuts to overseas aid, and Martinez, a disenchanted former Biden voter seeking more social and healthcare spending.
Trump made his play for America’s estimated four million tipped workers in a speech in Nevada on June 9 by announcing that he would end tax on tips. Saying he “got my information from a very smart waitress” at his own hotel in Las Vegas, he added that “everybody loves it — waitresses and caddies and drivers and everybody. It’s a large, large group of people that are being hurt badly. They make money, let them keep their money.”
During the same speech, Trump added: “If we win Nevada, we win the whole thing.”
The Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000 of the state’s cocktail and food servers, porters, cooks, bartenders, laundry and kitchen workers, called Trump’s pledge “wild campaign promises from a convicted felon”.
After Harris issued her own plan to cut tax on tips combined with a rise in the minimum wage during her Las Vegas rally this month, the union pledged to work with her “to make history together”.
Nevada’s two Democratic senators have backed a Republican bill sponsored by Ted Cruz, a Texas senator, to end the tax on tips despite a warning from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget that it could add $150 billion to $250 billion to the deficit over ten years. Economists warn it will encourage taxpayers of all income levels to define more of their pay as tips while some casino workers also warn that depressing their declared income will make it harder to secure loans for cars or mortgages.
“We asked the Harris campaign to support this issue of raising the minimum wage for all workers and supporting this fight about no taxes on tips and she did it,” said Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer. Most US states pay a lower minimum wage to tipped workers and rely on gratuities to make up their pay cheque.
Pappageorge said that the switch from Biden to Harris had not made Nevada any more Democrat but might help with turnout. “It’s not a Democratic state, this is as split of a state as you can find. It’s really about a third Democrat, about a third Republican and about a third independent,” he said.
“We think it would be a red state but for the mobilisation of working-class voters, who are generally considered low-propensity voters, but we’ve changed that in Nevada.”
The Culinary Workers Union has a track record of training members to knock on doors and encourage latent Democratic supporters to get to the polls. “I think Nevada is still just as split as ever with Harris as it was with Biden and Trump,” Pappageorge said. Biden won by 33,000 votes in 2020 out of 1.4 million cast. “We think it’s going to be even closer this time.”
Jon Ralston, founding editor of The Nevada Independent and a veteran political observer, said: “It is very difficult to poll Nevada because people work shifts and are hard to get a hold of, also the transient nature of the state … but it’s clear there has been a shift here — the Democrats were despondent after the debate [on June 27 where Biden performed badly against Trump] but are now more reinvigorated than I’ve seen them in a long time, they really believe they can win here if their ground game comes through,” he said.
“But it’s mid-August, who knows what might happen. People keep asking the same question, when will the Harris honeymoon end? If it doesn’t end before November Trump is going to lose but it will ebb and if it ends it is going to be a close race.”
At Elizabeth Reggie’s table this week, Jose Solorio, a veteran Hispanic political consultant, was $350 up after a three-hour poker session. But the 65-year-old could have won more if he had gambled on the political horse race at the right time. “One of the sites I go to is off-shore betting, you can bet on the presidential race outside the US and Trump was a two-to-one favourite, minus 200, which is a heavy favourite. But in three short weeks Harris is now the favourite, minus 125 (odds of 4 / 5). I could have cleaned up!”