Vice President Kamala Harris recently wrapped up a swing state tour right here in Las Vegas.

It was her first trip here as the expected Democratic nominee for President.

Her visit comes about two months after former President Donald Trump was here, and, just like we did after covering his rally, we sought further insight from David Damore.

He's the Executive Director of The Lincy Institute and Brookings Mountain West and a Political Science Professor at UNLV.

David, when we had you on last, it was mid-June.

The primaries had just wrapped up, and polling in Nevada showed former President Donald Trump with a double-digit lead over President Joe Biden.

Fast forward two months, it's a whole different scene.

And recent polling has Kamala Harris, the Vice President, with a-- well, she's narrowed the lead against Trump.

Polling has it in Nevada about two to three points of a lead for Trump, but there was a decipher AI poll that found her with a nearly six point lead.

What do you make of this?

(David Damore) Well, a couple things.

We know Nevada is a very difficult state to poll.

It's transient population, language barriers, people working crazy hours, so it's a really, really difficult state.

We don't have anybody here who does it regularly, so it's kind of one-offs every time here.

But I think it shows that the race is very much in flux.

I think when we were in June, everybody was kind of, How many more months of this?

And now the race has been completely reset here, and people are learning about the new Democratic candidates here and reassessing where they-- their perceptions of how they want to vote in November.

-Republicans would say that this is a honeymoon period for Kamala Harris.

Are we still in that honeymoon?

-Week three; it's a pretty long honeymoon.

And next week we'll have the Democratic National Convention, which will give an entire week of sort of unfettered television access here.

So I think they're sort of thinking this will be a September strategy once people really start, Labor Day hits, we start thinking about, Okay, how many more days to the race?

She'll have her first debate in early September as well.

So then I think you'll-- that that will sort of put more pressure on the race there.

She'll, obviously, at some point have to do some media interviews as well.

-Well, expand on that.

Why do you bring that up?

-There's been a criticism, right?

And that's, you know, it's traditionally been one of her weaknesses there.

At this point, there isn't much of an incentive for her to do that.

She's still sort of putting together her team, gearing up for the convention here.

There'll be plenty of opportunities to do that moving forward there, but this is going to be certainly one of the attack lines you've heard from the Republicans already.

Like, Get her in the room with a reporter; have her sit down.

We'll see how that goes there.

-What does she need to do to win Nevada?

-I think you saw some of that on Saturday night, right, the enthusiasm, bringing together the Democratic Party, all the sort of diverse parts of that constituency there.

One of the things I think was important about that event was a lot of data collection.

So you're thinking about, Okay, not just people showing up on one event, but is this a resource we can tap into to volunteer moving forward, coordinate with the state party, coordinate with some of the GOT, the Get Out The Vote activities there.

That's, that's an important part of that there, as well as, obviously, the donors and that energy there and in bringing that forward there.

So really good event.

This is her seventh event here, but the first time since she's been the presumptive candidate here.

And she taps into lots of different constituencies that I think are salient in Nevada.

The diverse demography, in particular.

-Immigration is an issue that Republicans continue attacking her on.

She did address that at the Las Vegas rally.

Let's listen, and then I'll have you respond.

(Kamala Harris) I was the attorney of a border state, Attorney General of a border state.

I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers who came into our country illegally.

I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.

We know our immigration system is broken, and we know what it takes to fix it-- comprehensive reform that includes, yes, strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.

-David, you and I have talked about this before, but immigration and the border, how big of a deal is that to Nevadans?

-The immigration part is really important.

We're obviously not a border state here.

Immigration, I think, plays a little differently in Nevada than it does in, say, Arizona and Texas, because of that dynamic here.

We have a very large constituency of nonnative borns, about 20% of the state's population here.

So this has always been a haven for immigrants here.

This is very similar to the Obama rhetoric, right, coming out of the 2020 election-- 2012 election, excuse me.

One of the goals was comprehensive immigration reform.

Makes it through the Senate, doesn't even get a vote in the House, and here we are 11 years later talking essentially about the same policy framework here.

And she's trying to-- the point about the border security is that's a perceived weakness of her, perceived weakness of the Biden's handling, Biden administration handling for at least for the first three years, the administration there.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have hammered on this.

Sort of, We're going to round up all the unauthorized immigrants and ship them out of the country there.

But there's a-- that's not really practical, first level.

There is this notion of the earned citizenship, I think, does resonate, particularly in a state like Nevada where you have a lot of mixed families, right?

You have families where the children may be citizens, but the parents or the grandparents may not be.

So it's a little different here than what we're going to see in Arizona in there.

It's really trying to sort of reshape that debate a bit, trying to take a weakness and make it a strength, focusing on her history as a prosecutor, thinking about a broader policy debate there.

Very, again, reminiscent in what we saw coming out of the 2012 election.

-Vice President Harris also talked about the economy, saying she will work to raise the minimum wage and also implement a policy of no taxes on tips for service workers.

This was something that former President Trump proposed here in Las Vegas.

-Mm-hmm.

-Now she's doing it.

She have to do that?

She's not in an easy spot.

-It resonates here.

There's a bill that's been introduced in the Senate, I believe by Ted Cruz.

Cortez Masto has cosponsored it.

So you're getting some sort of activity around this.

My sense is this is all going to be, to the degree it moves forward, it's going to be when the 2025 tax bill gets debated.

The individual taxes expire next year.

There's going to have to be some action taken, otherwise everything reverts back to pre-2017 levels there.

Does this get in the mix?

That's going to be interesting.

One of the things you've seen in the Republican Party, as they become more sort of populist, is are they willing to sort of move away from corporate tax breaks and actually focus on families and some of this, some of the working class tax burdens.

-As you and I did discuss before, though, that would have to be an act of Congress.

-It would be.

-This could not be done by executive action, whether it be Trump or Harris.

Okay.

We also spoke with some of the supporters of Kamala Harris at the rally.

A lot of what they said was top-of-mind for them were abortion rights.

Let's listen to what they said, and then I'll have you respond.

-Well, I'm just proud of her.

As a black woman, I think it's just really good to see the first black female President.

I'm really hoping-- my biggest issue is with abortion.

I'm really hoping that she makes that something that we can have legal again in all of the 50 states.

-I would say probably women's rights are up there.

Project 2024 or 25 is a really negative thing, and it could affect a lot of people.

-What scares you about it?

-Well, just, I myself, am an atheist, so just having them trying to get religious ideals back, you know, into government, I think is really dangerous.

I think our country should be open for any religion to be practiced.

-She's gonna restore some sanity to our country and stop some of this crazy chaos, I hope.

I mean, I hope that she's center enough and, with Tim Walz, center enough that hopefully the radical right and the radical left can come together a little bit more.

-I like the way she looks out for the common good.

I think I like all of her social positions.

I think that she's going to look for the middle class more than Trump would, who looks for the rich and the corporate.

And that's my expectations.

-The unity of bringing everybody back together again and her financial views and how she brings so much energy back to us.

-The last two ladies that we heard from, by the way, both told us they are veterans.

One is a registered Republican but is supporting Kamala Harris.

The other said she was a Republican about 10 years ago.

She is supporting Kamala Harris.

But back to reproductive rights.

They are codified in state law right now up to 24 weeks.

Why are Nevada voters making this an issue that's top of mind for them?

What's the threat of a federal ban?

How real is that?

-Donald Trump has said, "Leave it to the states."

That's been there.

Question is, does that carry forward?

We won't know if that's a possibility of any federal legislation until we know the composition of Congress.

It would be hard to get through the Senate, through the filibuster, through the 60-person margin.

But the threat of that is there.

We saw everybody sort of thought Roe versus Wade was sort of an established precedent there, and they've rolled that back here.

So in Nevada, you're absolutely right, but you also have a ballot initiative that's going to try to take that to the next step in here as well.

And for the Democrats, it's a huge issue for mobilizing voters.

I think before Harris got in the race here, this was sort of back up if there was less enthusiasm for Biden, right, Well, we can sort of use this issue to mobilize voters.

It cuts across parties quite a bit there, and then the other part of it is it taps into this broader issue that the Harris campaign is really pushing, that is the freedom.

Traditionally, we think of the Republicans as being the small government pro-Freedom party here, but the Harris campaign has done a nice job flipping that and using that abortion issue, gender identification issues, what books you can read.

That has been a very sort of strong message that they've been pushing here.

I think we'll continue to see that, because the abortion issue is a little bit of sort of not the easy issue, but the issue, Well, if they're coming after that, then what comes after this?

And you look at sort of Project 2025, some of the discussion you have, and some of the conservative circles about what they want to do here.

JD Vance's own sort of policy proposals as well, that is, tracking women who might cross across state lines.

Some of those things.

That's a lot of big government getting in your business there.

So the Harris campaign has used that, and the Democrats, more generally, are using that as a freedom argument.

-Back to Roe v Wade.

You and I talked off camera about Catherine Cortez Masto, the Senator.

And had that not happened, the reversal, what do you think would have happened in the race?

-Really tough.

Everything going into that 2022 midterm election, it was seen as this is the Republicans' chance.

The Biden first midterm, not very particularly popular.

Inflation surging there.

The Dobbs decision gave, really gave the Democrats a lifeline going into that race.

And if you look at Cortez Masto's ads over the course of that, they were dominated by the abortion issue, contrasting that to her opponent at the time, Adam Laxalt there.

I think it's probably safe to say that the Democrats, without the Dobbs decision, some different election in 2022.

-The reproductive rights, they will be on the ballot in November.

-They will, and you've seen that across the country-- Ohio, Kansas.

Not particularly liberal states there, but those in those cases, you've seen cross-party support coming out to protect access to abortion rights.

-And in particular in Nevada, that would be enshrined in the state constitution, not just codified into state law.

Okay.

You talked about JD Vance, the Republican Senator and candidate for Vice President.

Tim Walz, the Governor from Minnesota, was also at that rally on Saturday.

Have you ever come across a time where so much has been made of who the next Vice President of the United States is going to be?

-Usually, it's a two- or three-day story.

In particular, it's not well known, getting into that?

But I think moving in this cycle, there was, because you had the two oldest candidates running when it was Biden versus Trump, so really the potential that one of these Vice Presidents could have to assume the Office at some point there.

So I think that sort of, that frame is certainly there.

I think both of them were sort of unexpected picks in the senses they were in the case of Vance, 40, half of Trump's age there, only two years in the Senate.

I think there was push he might take a sort of more moderate Governor.

Did not do that.

In the case on the Harris campaign, there was a lot of expectation, I put myself in this group, thinking it would be Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania, right?

Pennsylvania, the most important state in the election, right?

Why not have a popular Governor there?

But you see the Republicans really struggling with Walz, right, trying to sort of define him, because he's not the classic sort of liberal candidate there.

This is a sort of working class, Midwestern kind of dad type of figure there, and they've really struggled to sort of nail him down.

San Francisco liberal?

No, he's not that.

And I think at the end of the day, they were just very, very comfortable together.

You see them on the stump, right?

They sort of play off each other very well.

He's also made it very clear that he doesn't want to run for President, that this will be the last job he has.

So I think there's always this sort of concern now, Well, how ambitious is the Vice President there?

That's always been the history in American politics.

So I think because of that, the sort of unknown, the fact that going into this, everybody was very concerned about if we have these two older candidates, who's going to be the Vice President?

I think that that sort of carried over.

-Yeah, it's had a lingering effect.

Okay.

Of Nevada Senate and House races, the Cook Political Report, the races they consider to be most competitive, that would be Senator Jacky Rosen against Sam Brown.

They consider that a tossup.

Any thoughts on that?

-I think that's fair.

I think it leans towards Rosen.

She's got the bigger war chest.

You already see that coming out.

A lot of help from the outside groups on the Democratic side.

You're starting to see that on the Republican side here.

I think the challenge for Sam Brown, he's not particularly well known.

What's he going to do?

And like a lot of Republicans in a swing state, he's caught between sort of Trump and the sort of median voter, if you will, there.

And so it's harder for him to sort of define who he is, what he stands for.

He certainly has a compelling biography, and his first ads have certainly highlighted that quite a bit there.

But where does he go from there?

Don't quite know.

And you see on the Rosen, as expected, leading into sort of her bipartisan credentials.

She's one of the most bipartisan Senators there.

You sort of see her, see her play that up as a sort of common sense problem solver.

-Representative Susie Lee, her race against Drew Johnson, considered to lean Democrat by the Cook Political Report.

-Yeah, that's interesting, because the 3rd District has always been, since it was created after the 2000 census, the most competitive race.

And this, in this election, we talked about the Republican, very split field, not particularly well-known candidates there.

The national Republicans have not indicated they're going to spend in that race, which puts a lot of pressure on the Republican to demonstrate that they can raise money and mount a campaign before the outside money comes in.

-At the state level, you were quoted in a recent Las Vegas Review-Journal article about Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo and how involved he is in those races.

How would you characterize his involvement?

-Umm, well, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, he's probably really frustrated coming out of last session, right, a lot of partisan gridlock.

He ended up having to veto it.

Coming in, didn't probably have a lot of knowledge about some of his colleagues in the legislature there.

And you saw him very active in the primaries, right, sort of picking within the party, which can be kind of controversial there.

But he did quite well.

All of the candidates that he backed, and his PAC ended up funding, ended up winning there.

So moving forward, he can begin to build a bit of a bench, a bit of a team there, moving in there.

It's unlikely that they're going to be able to secure either a majority neither.

The Chamber's there, but their goal has been to avoid the two-thirds majority for the Democrats there.

-So he can still have his veto power.

-So his veto will hold up if the Democrats were willing to override that there.

And it's also, I think, speaks to sort of the, you know, the weakness of the state party, in the Republican state party here.

There has been a long time, more than a decade or so, you've seen some of the gubernatorial candidates.

Presidential candidates, they have largely set up organizations outside the state party organization.

So this very much sort of continues that tradition there where there's not a lot of trust and a lot of confidence with the state party organization, so you build your own.

-Have you seen past Republican Governors in Nevada get involved at this level?

-Not to the degree that he has.

You didn't see this with Brian Sandoval when he was Governor there.

He obviously, 2014, great year for the Republicans.

He ended up doing quite well taking, the Republicans winning up and down the ballot and giving him majorities in both Houses there.

And then in the prior decade, it was sort of split.

So you had less of that there.

So it's nothing-- we're seeing this across the country.

You certainly see all this in Virginia, for example, where Governor Youngkin had spent a lot of his political capital in those state legislative races.

Didn't work out well for him, but Lombardo, you know, he knows he's not going to win the majority here.

He's just trying to sort of build up, moving into what will be his reelection.

-And he was on our show last week, which was about Nevada's housing affordability crisis.

He was talking about the President's role in freeing up federal land for development.

We also had Zach Conine on, the State Treasurer, as well as Brandon Roberts, the president of Nevada Realtors.

The rest of that discussion you're going to see in just a little bit.

But I bring all of this up because Brookings Mountain West is going to be having its own panel, Nevada's Housing Policy Landscape: Data, Analysis, and Policy Solutions.

That's September 23.

What do you hope to gain out of that?

-An understanding of the local housing market and how it plays nationally there.

So we've got some research coming out from the Lied, the folks at Lied Real Estate.

They're doing a really interesting deep dive at the assembly level district, looking at home ownership, who's denied loans, right, also they have some data on investor-owned properties as well so we can get a sense of that there.

We have a colleague of ours, Chris Nelson, is going to look at sort of the people who we expected to have houses who don't and sort of what's driving that.

Not just population growth, but some of the challenges we have on the wages side.

The ratio is supposed to be about 3 to 1, and now it's about 6 to 1 between annual earnings and mortgage.

And that just makes it unaffordable.

So there certainly is the sort of supply side of it there, but also need to think about diversifying our economy and increasing overall wages.

-And then the other panel that I am particularly excited about, because I get to moderate it-- -We're very excited for that.

-U.S./Mexico Relations: Addressing Challenges at the Border.

That is August 27.

What are you looking to gain from that?

-So this is part of the Brookings Institution's Elections 2024 series.

So they're going into swing states and focusing on particularly salient issues that play regionally here.

And so we're doing the U.S./Mexico border here.

We have a panel that will include Michael Kagan, who runs the Immigration Clinic at the Boyd School of Law; John Tuman, who does a lot of work on Mexico/U.S.

economic relations; Rachel Torres, who looks at the intersection between public policy and Latino political behavior; and then we'll have Vanda Felbab-Brown from the Brookings Institution.

And she's done a lot of stuff on the fentanyl trade, spent a lot of time in Mexico looking at how the cartels behave, looking at the implications that has for U.S. policy in terms of trying to combat the fentanyl issues and some of the public health issues that that creates there.

So it'll be a broad topic.

We want people to come out.

There is an understanding that, obviously, I think everybody understands that Nevada, getting heavily, about 20% of our population is immigrant, most of those come from Mexico.

So we have strong ties to Mexico there.

Also a point that I don't think people are aware of is Mexico is now the biggest trade partner with the U.S. That is only going to increase now.

And then thinking about I-11, that's one reason why we have I-11, trying to be built in Arizona.

We've talked about before.

But that is a way to avoid the ports in Southern California, but also part of this sort of reshifting of U.S. industrial policy to be less reliant on supply chains in Asia and be much more engaged with Latin America.

-Yeah, I agree.

When we talk about U.S. and Mexico relations, we're talking about immigration, we're talking about border security, but we're not talking about our interdependence economically.

I'm so looking forward to that.

See you then.

Again, August 27 at Greenspun Hall.

David Damore, thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Thank you.