LAS VEGAS — A crowd of about 100 enthusiastic Democrats cheered Thursday as Nevada party leaders voiced confidence that Vice President Kamala Harris, on track to replace President Biden as the party’s standard bearer, will carry the swing state in November.
Both the Harris backers and party officials ignored the latest RealClearPolitics poll average, showing ex-prez Donald Trump with a 5.6% Nevada lead. Four years of inflation have brought high gas and grocery prices here — and the GOP hopes it can flip a state that last went for a Republican presidential candidate in 2004.
Nevada party chair state Rep. Daniele Monroe-Moreno, Attorney General Aaron Ford and immigration attorney and state Sen. Edgar Flores all trumpeted Harris’ “record” in office and highlighted the veep’s support for abortion rights during a half-hour rally at a local campaign headquarters retrofitted with “Harris for President” signs.
“We believe in a country where women have the right to make their own damn decisions about what they’re doing with their own damn bodies,” Monroe-Moreno said.
Harris “rallied with organizers working to enshrine reproductive freedoms in our state’s constitution,” she added, without mentioning a successful voter initiative that codified Nevada’s abortion rights several decades ago.
Trump and his vice-presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, have “a dangerous plan right at their fingertips to use for every level of federal government to arm them to an active agenda to attack reproductive freedoms and so many other freedoms that we enjoy today,” Monroe-Moreno said.
Flores said electing Harris would correct deficiencies in the nation’s past.
“We have a lot of things in our history where we’ve made mistakes,” the legislator said. “But one of the ways we correct those wrongs is by electing the first Asian-American, black American woman to be our president.”
Ford used the refrain of Kendrick Lamar’s May 2024 “dis track” aimed at Drake, “Not Like Us,” as the baseline for his attack on Trump.
The AG said Lamar’s words illustrate “the stark difference between Kamala’s policies that truly serve the people and Mr. Trump’s policies that only serve himself and his billionaire friends.”
Harris, he said, supports “diversity, equity and inclusion. Kamala and the Democrats, we understand that our strength lies in our diversity.”
In a state where the greatest number of voters are registered as “unaffiliated” with either political party, Monroe-Moreno said “building community” would lead Democrats to victory.
She said, “On Tuesday, when I went into our office, I had folks that weren’t registered to be Democrats that knocked on the doors and said, ‘How do I get engaged?’”
Among those who Democrats hope will keep Nevada’s presidential record blue is Isaac Nelsen, an 18-year-old private Bishop Gorman High School graduate living in the city’s Summerlin area.
Nelsen said Harris “not only has my vote, but she has the votes of young people across the country because she’s fought for young people.”
He also told the Democratic faithful he was afraid of the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document.
The 900-page purported playbook for a Trump II presidency is not part of the Republican Party’s official agenda, and the ex-prez has distanced himself from the document, calling it “abysmal.”
The self-described “first-time voter” said the Project 2025 policy agenda “will roll back Americans rights and freedoms, hurt the middle class and threaten our democracy.”
Asked later how much of the massive document he’s read, Nelsen replied that he “skimmed” it with his father, Democratic state assembly candidate Ron Nelsen.
The elder Nelsen, who said he’s retiring from a garage-door company he’s run for 42 years, told The Post he’d read “between 12 and 50 pages” of the tome, enough “to know I’m opposed to it, vehemently so.”
State Republicans ripped the support effort.
“A desperate media blitz by the Harris campaign is just the Democrats’ latest attempt to save face against Kamala’s failed and dangerously liberal agenda. No amount of photo-ops will help Kamala Harris trick voters this November,” said Halee Dobbins, RNC Nevada communications director.
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