It’s a little after 10:00 a.m. on a sunny 70-degree Saturday when first-term congresswoman Jacky Rosen, Nevada’s Democratic Senate candidate, takes the stage at a rally outside of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, just off the Vegas Strip. “I know it’s early,” Rosen, dressed in a pale blue suit, tells the crowd. “But I always start a rally off like this.”
The 61-year-old member of Congress proceeds, to the beat of a 23-year-old song by the rapper Coolio, to say: Ain’t no party like a Democratic party ’cause a Democratic party don’t stop.
It’s not quite as cringe-inducing as the time Hillary Clinton urged voters in 2016 to “Pokémon Go to the polls,” but the Democratic party rap would’ve been only slightly less coolio if Mitt Romney had recited it.
Another problem is that there isn’t much of a party gathered here to kick off the first day of early voting in Nevada, despite the fact that the Nevada Democrats brought in former vice president Joe Biden, Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto, gubernatorial candidate Steve Sisolak, Rosen, and a mariachi band.
When Donald Trump speaks less than an hour later to a crowd of thousands alongside incumbent Nevada senator Dean Heller in rural Elko County, a seven-hour drive north of Vegas, he mocks Biden. “Biden, they just said the count: 193 people showed up,” Trump says. “And we love Elko, but in all fairness, it is easier to draw a crowd in Las Vegas.” As Trumpian embellishments go, it’s not far off: The union said there were more than 500 rallygoers in Vegas, which was itself an exaggeration. In any event, in 2016, about 800,000 people voted in Clark County (home to Vegas); 18,000 voted in Elko County.
Nevada is widely seen as a must-win state for Democrats if they’re going to take back the Senate in 2018. Heller is the only Senate Republican up this year in a state won by Hillary Clinton in 2016, and if Democrats can’t win here polling suggests it will be extremely difficult for them to net the two seats necessary to control the Senate. With a blue wave likely to sweep over the House of Representatives, many analysts expected Rosen would’ve put this race away by now. But on October 25, Heller led Rosen by 1.7 points in the Real Clear Politics average of polls.
Why Rosen hasn’t run away with it in Nevada isn’t entirely clear. She is not a bad candidate. She’s relentlessly focused on delivering her message about keeping Obamacare’s rules for preexisting medical conditions. “It’s time to repeal and replace Dean Heller” is one of her favorite canned lines. But she isn’t very well known or experienced. “Nobody knew who she was until three years ago, until the Democrats got a little bit desperate trying to find a candidate to run for Congress,” says Jon Ralston, the veteran Nevada political reporter and editor of the Nevada Independent. Rosen, a Chicago native, moved to Las Vegas after graduating from the University of Minnesota; she started as a waitress and later did some consulting work for Nevada businesses. Ralston says Rosen was “Harry Reid’s 17th choice in 2016, and I may be being generous there.”
The good news for Rosen is that unenthusiastic votes will count just as much as enthusiastic votes, and the Nevada Democratic machine has a good record of dragging voters to the polls. In 2010, Reid trailed Republican Sharron Angle by 2.7 points in the final Real Clear Politics polling average; he won by 5.6 points. Democrats did a few points better than their polling in 2012, when Heller eked out a 1.2-point victory while Obama bested Romney by 6.7 points. And in 2016, Donald Trump had a 0.8-point lead in Nevada polling; Hillary Clinton beat him by 2.4 points.
It’s not unusual for polls to be off by a few points, but many believe the consistent Democratic overperformance is due to the union machine turning unlikely voters into actual voters. “Today, we’ve got about 250 hospitality workers who have taken a leave of absence from their union jobs,” Bethany Khan, spokeswoman for the 57,000-worker strong Culinary Workers Union Local 226, tells me after the October 20 rally. “They’re in the field every day, maybe 9 to 12 hours a day, and six days a week.”
The number of union campaign workers is about double that of a typical midterm, Khan says: “It’s the same as a presidential year, which is unprecedented.” But Ralston says Republicans have been working to catch up. The Republican National Committee, he notes, “really came in here early last year and started erecting a foundation I’ve never seen here.” The RNC has 36 full-time paid staffers and a network of 2,000 unpaid volunteers in Nevada.
The unions may still be strong enough to pull a generic Democrat like Rosen across the finish line in Nevada. But it’s easy to see why Rosen’s campaign is not firing up the progressive left the way that, say, Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s campaign is in Texas.
While Rosen wants to take a half-step toward single-payer health care (a Medicaid “buy-in”), O’Rourke is all-in on a single-payer “Medicare for all” plan. While Rosen awkwardly recites rap lines, O’Rourke rocks out on his guitar to squeals of delight from his fans. (O’Rourke, who skateboarded at a campaign event last month, is a dorky guy’s idea of a cool guy—much like Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person.)
O’Rourke scratches just about every progressive itch. On October 18, he said he believes President Trump should be impeached. The next day, I asked Rosen if she too thought Trump had committed impeachable acts.
“You know, I guess we can see where the Mueller investigation takes us, and we’ll let that follow out to its completion. And if it shows something there, then I guess we’ll take it from there,” Rosen replied. “But right now what we have to do—look, we have I think it’s 18 days now till the election. I have my blinders on, I’m working hard for Nevada. I have a job in Congress that me and my staff are still doing, and I’m working hard to win this election to represent the people of Nevada. Going forward, we’re going to look towards 2020, and hopefully we’re going to put forth a good candidate, get out the vote, and that’s how we’ll take back the presidency.” That’s a long way of saying: Don’t bet on it.
Back in June, liberal megadonor Tom Steyer said that politicians like Rosen were afraid they would “enrage Republicans and drive them to the ballot box in November” by talking about impeachment, according to the Washington Free Beacon. Nothing that has happened since, including Michael Cohen’s pleading guilty to campaign finance law violations, has changed Rosen’s wait-and-see stance on impeachment. A Suffolk poll from September shows why: Nevada voters opposed impeaching Trump 60 percent to 36 percent. When Biden was asked about the possibility of a Democratic House impeaching Trump, he told CBS: “I hope they don’t. I don’t think there’s a basis for doing that right now.”
While Rosen is closely following the mainstream Democratic playbook, Heller is tightly hugging Trump. At the rally in the mining town of Elko, Heller set a 24-karat standard for sycophancy, saying, “Mr. President, you know a little bit about gold. In fact, I think everything you touch turns to gold.” The night before the rally, the moderator at the only Nevada Senate debate this year recalled Heller saying in October 2016 that he was “100 percent against Clinton, 99 percent against Trump.” Heller responded: “I don’t agree with everything he says, but I do agree with most of what he does.”
In Nevada, the economy remains a source of strength for Republicans and a challenge for Democrats. At the debate, Heller argued that he helped create the economic success by drafting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Rosen hit Heller for adding $1.8 trillion to the deficit with the tax cut, but when asked after the debate if she’d vote to repeal it, she said: “No, I think we need to go back and reform it bit by bit.”
When Barack Obama appeared at a rally with Rosen on October 22, he claimed credit for the current economy, saying: “When you hear all this talk about economic miracles, remember who started it.” When Biden spoke at Rosen’s rally, he identified a number of pocketbook issues—worker pay, education, the growing use of non-compete clauses in contracts—without specifying solutions. “Nobody—nobody—should have to work two jobs to make a living in the United States of America,” he said.
Biden also focused on Trump’s character and lack of decency. In an effort to reach disaffected Republicans, he cited columnists George Will and David Brooks on how Trump was undermining the values that define America. “This is not your father’s Republican party,” Biden said.
Despite its boring candidates, the Nevada Senate race is worth watching, and not just to see who will control the Senate. It could also send Democrats an important message about whether in 2020 they should be the party of Joe Biden or the party of Bernie Sanders. If Rosen’s mainstream message fails in Nevada, while staunch progressives win elsewhere, Democrats may conclude they’d be better off with a presidential candidate who paints in bold colors, not pale pastels.
