Nevada will play a crucial role in the presidential primary next year, as the fourth state to nominate a candidate and the first heavily Latino state to vote. In an effort to win support of the growing minority, Republican lawmakers in the state are trying something new — expanding voting rights for minorities instead of restricting them.
As lawmakers consider restricting the minority vote in Nevada requiring voter ID, the GOP-controlled state Senate passed a bill last week that would switch the state’s historically messy caucus system to a primary; members of the Assembly debated the legislation earlier this week. The purpose of the change, a state Republican leader told the Wall Street Journal, would be to get more of Nevada’s more than one-fourth Latino population to participate in the election.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Nick Phillips, political director for the Republican Party of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, “said the push to switch to a primary is aimed at increasing voter turnout, noting that many Nevadans, particularly its many casino and call-center employees, work off-hours.” Many of those casino employees and others working odd hours throughout the state are also Latino immigrants.
At the same time that they’re looking at making the election more inclusive, the GOP-controlled legislature is also trying to require voters to show identification at the polls. Nevada does not currently have a voter ID law in place but the new law could be one of the most restrictive in the country and would not accept college IDs. Latinos are much less likely to have an eligible ID than white voters. Other Republican lawmakers have introduced bills requiring certain registered voters to present proof of citizenship or see their registration cancelled.
Given that Republicans are not usually proponents of expanding voting rights, David Damore, a senior analyst for research group Latino Decisions and a University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor, told ThinkProgress that he’s more skeptical about the conservative lawmakers’ intentions with substituting the caucus for a primary. But even if their goal isn’t to expand voting, it would still be a side effect of the switch.
Unlike a caucus, where highly engaged voters must show up at a certain time to participate, a primary allows people to vote at any point during the day, participate in early voting for two weeks before the election and to vote absentee. By changing the system in Nevada from a caucus to a primary, Republican lawmakers would be making it easier for working class people to vote. Democrats could opt out and keep the caucus, a choice they’ve indicated they may prefer to keep their early state status.
Although Nevada follows Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in the primaries, the state marks the candidates’ first major test among minority voters. Latinos make up 27 percent of Nevada’s population — a record high number that has been rapidly increasing since 1960, when just four percent of the state was Latino. And their population will continue to grow; currently, more than a third of all new babies in Nevada are born to Latino women.
Latinos’ mounting population in Nevada meant that President Obama easily won the state in 2012 with more than 52 percent of the vote and with Hispanic voters supporting him by almost three-to-one. Fifteen percent of eligible voters in Nevada were Hispanic in the last presidential election and that number will only increase as the U.S.-born Hispanic population ages.
The 2012 loss helped Republicans recognize the need to win support of Latinos, especially in Nevada. After the last election, the Republican Party commissioned a report to look into how the party can improve its chances with Hispanics, chief among the recommendations being to embrace comprehensive immigration reform. But while the state Republican Party and conservatives with interest in Nevada have recently ramped up efforts to win over Hispanics, many of them continue to support immigration policies that do not appeal to the minority group.
The LIBRE Initiative, a group funded by the billionaire conservative Koch brothers, has launched initiatives in Nevada and other battleground states to connect with Latinos including driver’s test classes and tax preparation help. Even though the Koch network spends enormous sums of money supporting candidates who oppose creating pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the classes are a way for them to push conservative ideology on Latinos. Often the group will pass out ideological materials or collect names and contact information to be used by Republican campaigns.
Daniel Garza, executive director of LIBRE, told the Washington Post his group aims to end the “deafening silence” from “libertarians and conservatives” when it comes to courting the Hispanic vote and engaging directly with the Latino community.
The Republican Party is also undertaking minority outreach in the state. Will Batista, the Nevada director for Hispanic initiatives for the Republican National Committee, said he has been meeting with Latino voters and Hispanic community leaders to help his party win a larger share of the Hispanic vote than it has in past elections.
“We were able to engage hundreds of individuals [at the Reno Cinco de Mayo festival] as well, not one Democrat in sight,” he told NPR. “We had members of our assembly and state Senate come out and participate with us. Once again, where are the Democrats? They’re not in our community.”
Though a number of Spanish-speaking Republican candidates will be seeking the nomination in 2016, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), most of the candidates have been resistant to support comprehensive immigration reform to engage minorities. Bush has said he’s be open to allowing undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship but Rubio has recently distanced himself from his own comprehensive immigration reform bill. Most of the other Republican candidates have either deliberately remained fuzzy on the issue or have pitted themselves against immigration reform.
Meanwhile, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton visited Nevada on the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo to speak with people personally affected by the immigration system. During her remarks, she called for granting “full and equal citizenship” to undocumented immigrants and extending an existing executive action that provides deportation protections to undocumented immigrants, among other reforms that are likely to more closely align with the policies supported by the state’s Latinos.