Tech driving Nevada’s Democratic shift
In the last decade Nevada has gone from Republican outpost to contested battleground to an emerging Democratic hotbed.
— Twenty years ago, long before Nevada was part of the early presidential selection process, the phone typically rang unanswered at Washoe County Democratic Party headquarters in Reno during mid-term elections.
“We had a small conference room and a tiny reception area, but no staff at all,” recalls Chris Wicker, who started a seven-year run as county party chairman in 2002.
“There wasn’t any state party focus up here except in presidential years. If you talked to people, they would say ‘I didn’t know there was a Democratic Party in Washoe County,’” he said.
In the last decade Nevada has undergone a political transformation from Republican outpost to a contested battleground to emerging Democratic hotbed. All but one member of the state’s congressional delegation is a Democrat along with all but one of the statewide officer holders. The Democratic swing has been so pronounced that President Donald Trump’s campaign views Minnesota — a state that hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since 1972 — as friendlier territory than Nevada. When Democrats caucus here today to pick their preferred nominee for president, there will be 165,000 more total registered Democrats in Nevada than in 2008, the first time the state held its closely watched contest.
Nowhere is the new blue streak clearer than in northern Nevada’s Washoe County, a place not long ago considered a GOP stronghold. But as the growing suburbs tucked into the shadow of the Sierra have changed, so has Nevada’s political landscape.
California transplants have brought their politics with them. A tech boom — spurred by companies like Tesla, Apple and Microsoft — has drawn the young and college-educated, demographic groups that lean left as do Hispanics who made up 29% of Nevada’s population in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Now the phone is ringing all the time in county Democratic headquarters in Reno, which is staffed year-round.
For decades, the key to Republicans winning a statewide election in Nevada was to sweep the more conservative rural counties and build just enough of a margin in the Reno-Sparks area to offset heavily Democratic Clark County.
In 2008, President Obama became the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to carry Washoe County. Just four years earlier, Vice President Dick Cheney capped a campaign swing across the country with an appearance at a Sparks high school in a working class neighborhood the night before George W. Bush won re-election.
The GOP hasn’t carried Washoe County — or Nevada — in a presidential election since.
“You guys have turned this state around,” former Vice President Joe Biden told hundreds gathered last month in the same Sparks High School gymnasium where Cheney rallied the GOP troops in 2004.
Republicans argue they have a comeback plan, one bankrolled by an incumbent president popular with his party and party donors. Keith Schipper, Nevada spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the GOP has built a “topnotch ground-game operation, unparalleled data program, and vast fundraising war chest” that will out match Democrats.
Bob Fulkerson, longtime leader of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, said a growing population of Asians and Pacific Islanders is adding to the influx of Hispanics, who the state demographer projects will account for one-third of Nevadans by 2029.
“I think we’re undergoing a sea change largely driven by demographics,” Fulkerson said.