Who will win Nevada? Billionaires and small businesses hold the key

“Would you all care for some water?” asked Cheryl Watkins, an elderly woman standing at the front door of her bungalow. The two election canvassers who had just knocked, donning broad-brimmed sunhats and wide smiles, gratefully accepted. “Yes, please!”
It was 1pm on another hellishly hot, utterly cloudless day in Las Vegas. The temperature was “only” 38C. “This is heaven for us,” said Fabiola Zavala, a housekeeper at the Vdara casino in Las Vegas. She and Rocelia Mendoza, a waitress at the nearby Wynn casino, had taken time off work to knock on doors in a working-class neighbourhood of single-story bungalows and yards filled with dead grass, cacti and volcanic rocks on the outskirts of Sin City.
The pair were one hour into an eight-hour door-knocking shift. Their goal: to make sure that people were planning to vote in the presidential election on November 5 — and if they were, that they would be voting for Kamala Harris. “We have knocked in 113F before,” Zavala said. “When you believe in the cause, any obstacle can be overcome,” she added, pulling back her watch to show a strip of pale skin on her sun-browned arms.
It is unforgiving work. Bar the occasional, tiny refuge of shade provided by a parched tree, there is no relief. Cars creak in the heat. The streets are lifeless as everyone cowers in their air-conditioned homes. Mendoza claimed, however, that she was happy to “sweat for the cause”.
The “cause”, of course, is to put Harris in the White House; she will need the votes of about 700,000 people in Nevada to win this state. And in Harrison, she has found an ally. “We have six people in this house, and we are all going to vote Kamala,” she said. “I cannot deal with another four years of Donald Trump.”
Six down, and only several hundred thousand more to go.
This article is the second of The Sunday Times’ four-part series on the business people and employees in “swing states” — the handful of US states where the margins between Harris and Trump are the finest, and so that will ultimately decide who wins the election. Up for grabs in Nevada are its precious six electoral college votes; the candidates need 270 — out of a total of 538 — throughout the US to win.
• What happens if there’s an electoral college tie? The election explained
Mendoza and Zavala are part of a small army raised by the Culinary Workers Union, the most powerful organised labour group in Nevada. Its 60,000 members clean toilets, serve at tables and change sheets in the hotels and casinos up and down the Las Vegas strip. The union has endorsed Harris, and thus thrown behind her one of the most well-oiled state political machines in the country — one that has negotiated contractual rights for its members to take paid leave from their employers to canvas during campaigns. By election day, they will have knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors. “This is a company town,” said Ted Pappageorge, the union’s chief. “This is like a mining town, or a steel town, but it’s gaming. It’s these giant resorts.”
In his mind, the choice is stark. On one side are the Democrats and the blue-collar workers of the lower and middle-class fighting for a fair wage. On the other stand the billionaire “owner class” bent on busting unions, driving down costs and lining their pockets. Trump, for example, has promised a new wave of tax cuts for top earners.
Sitting in his union headquarters, a low-slung, slate-grey rectangle in the shadow of the towering casinos of the strip, Pappageorge said: “There couldn’t be a starker difference between Kamala Harris and Trump about how they’re going to approach the right to organise and the issue of making sure working-class families can rebuild the middle-class with good jobs.” Trump? He is, in the union’s framing, the pantomime villain who recently palled up with Elon Musk over the latter’s mass-firing of Twitter employees.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk on an August broadcast on X. “I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ … I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ ”
And yet Nevada is, for Democrats, a melting ice cube. In 2008, Barack Obama won the state by 13 per cent. Four years later, his margin nearly halved to 7 per cent. Hillary Clinton won by 3 per cent in 2016, while Joe Biden squeezed to victory with a margin of just 2.4 per cent in 2020.
• Democrat blame game bodes ill for Harris
With just over two weeks until election day, early voting stations have already opened and Harris and Trump are, in effect, dead even in Nevada. Harris is clinging to a margin of just 0.5 per cent — fewer than 7,000 votes in a state of 3.2 million people (1.4 million voted in 2020). Pappageorge said: “If we had the election right now, Trump wins.”
Hence the intensity with which he is sending out his members to pound the pavements, primarily in Vegas and Reno, the two gambling hotspots that also happen to be located in the only districts to vote Democrat. The rest of the state is endless parched desert and Republican voters.
There is certainly truth to Pappageorge’s framing. More than half the state’s income comes from gaming and hotels, and a handful of its controlling billionaires also happen to be key Trump backers, including Robert Bigelow, owner of a budget hotel chain, and Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate and Republican super-donor Sheldon Adelson. She recently gave $95 million (£73 million) to a Trump-aligned political action committee to fund ads in two other swing states — Wisconsin and Michigan.
That the Vegas billionaires will vote Trump, then, is a given, but increasingly the rightwards shift is coming from another class of business owners: urban-dwelling Hispanics.
One such is Rafael Arroyo, a 39-year-old owner of a chain of shops that test the smog levels of cars and employ 30 people. Inflation has triggered a huge swing in public opinion for small business owners like him, he said. The price of supplies for his business, such as the specialist gasoline he uses to test vehicle exhausts, has tripled. “It’s got to be Trump right now,” he explained. “His policies seem to be the ones that are going to help the inflationary environment. If Harris had policies to help, then she would have done them already. She’s been in office [as vice-president] for almost four years.”
But inflation is not the only factor affecting his voting intentions. The father-of-four has decided to run for the first time, as a Republican, for local office, and that’s partly due to his concerns over the Democrats’ “soft on crime” policies. In February, one of his locations was burned down by a homeless person. “But I’m lucky,” he said. “If that was my only business, my life is over.”
Nevada’s working-class urban centres were traditional Democrat areas, due to the increasing numbers of Hispanic, black and Asian residents. Since 2010, the state has gone from a 54 per cent majority white population to 45 per cent in 2022, with Hispanics now the fastest-growing, at 30 per cent of the state.
But Javier Sanchez, owner of a Las Vegas insurance brokerage, said that many have lost the faith. “The Democrats have had the minority market cornered for a long time,” he said. “They’ve been good marketers, but not good executors, of what they have promised.”
For many, the support for Trump often comes down to a simple, basic truth: people had more money in their pockets when he was in office.
Under Biden, inflation has pushed prices up by nearly 20 per cent, and wages have not kept up. Layered on top of that were the Covid lockdowns. Pappageorge said that 95 per cent of his union’s members were put out of work — and saved, he said, by federal assistance programmes and stimulus cheques that helped keep people in their homes and food on the table. Harris has sought to double down, pledging to raise the minimum wage and to remove taxes on tips — a source of income for service workers. (Trump has also said he will stop taxes on gratuities).
Biden has passed landmark bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, under which hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into roads, bridges and airports, creating jobs. But even that, for some, is not enough.
“The only thing I could possibly say that has been good under this administration is the fact I can see with my own two eyes that they are spending money on infrastructure … spending money on our roads, on our bridges. I see all of that, and I appreciate all of that,” said Maria Caminero, 60, a lifelong Republican who moved to Nevada from Cuba when she was five years old.
For all that, access to skilled labour for her upholstery and mattress manufacturing business is critical to her. Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants, but her hope is that he will institute a skilled-worker programme to bring in upholsterers and seamstresses. “I think that that would be a good way of bringing people into the country legally to work,” she said. “We don’t want to hire illegal immigrants by any means, but sometimes we don’t have a choice.”
This is not an uncommon view among Hispanic voters, many of whom came to the US as immigrants themselves but are increasingly frustrated with lax border policies that have let in millions more behind them.
Neither Caminero, nor Arroyo, who was born in Puerto Rico, is put off by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his deportation pledge. “People are angry, you know. Minorities, especially, have been very affected by the influx of illegal immigration. It really has been a detriment,” said Caminero. “We can only take so many on,” Arroyo added. “It’s basic economics: we have to stop the flow.”
Mendoza, trudging through the heat for the Democrats, has come to a different conclusion. Biden, famously, stood on the picket line last year with striking auto workers, and Harris has picked up that “friend of the worker” mantle. “I believe the promise of Kamala,” Mendoza said. “She is the one that is going to fight for us, the people with little resources.”
With polls open as of last week, what is hard to find is the mythical “undecided” voter. Most people appear firm on who they will support. And in this state known for gambling, the odds are even as to who will win. Caminero said: “I’m praying that God has his hands on this election.”