'We're first cousins': Harris' longstanding ties to Nevada could benefit her 2024 run

When Kamala Harris visited Reno and Carson City in the early days of her presidential campaign in 2019, she had high praise for her home state’s eastern neighbor.

“We're first cousins,” Harris said during a busy campaign day that included two roundtables, a visit to the state Legislature and dinner hosted by a progressive group in Carson City. “I just left Sacramento and just drove in, and I'm reminded of the beautiful border we share and so many other things.”

While the interstate relationship between Nevadans and Californians can be anything from symbiotic to resentful, Harris’ view of the relationship has always been familial.

The feeling, for many Nevada Democrats, is mutual — at least toward Harris. The state’s Democratic delegates and elected officials were quick to embrace her once President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race Sunday and made Harris his heir apparent, unanimously voting Monday to pledge their votes to her at the Democratic National Convention.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who met the now-vice president 15 years ago in California at a conference for current and prospective attorneys general and served alongside her in the Senate, lauded Harris’ long-standing investment in the Silver State.

“One thing I know about Kamala Harris is that she understands what Nevada working families need, because of her relationship with Nevada over the years and her involvement working not just with me, but understanding the uniqueness about the two Western states,” she said in an interview.

During the 11 months in which her 2020 presidential campaign was active — Harris ultimately dropped out before the Nevada caucus — she visited the state 10 times and hosted 27 events with a wide variety of demographic and interest groups, making her one of the most frequent visitors on the Silver State trail.

She’s been to Nevada six times thus far in 2024, and 14 times since becoming vice president. Harris has done events with everyone from the state’s congressional delegation to Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve to students at the College of Southern Nevada.

In the past four years, she’s been to Lake Mead to talk about climate change, Las Vegas union halls to champion the United Steelworkers and the Culinary Union , East Las Vegas to rally with Latino voters and the University of Reno to speak about abortion.

Will that familiarity matter come November?

Jeremy Hughes, a Republican strategist who was the Pacific regional director for the Trump campaign in 2020, doesn’t think so — especially because Harris is inheriting Biden’s campaign team in Nevada, not coming in with her own organization.

“It doesn’t matter one bit,” he said. “They could have picked anybody, and all the Democrats would have got up on stage and said, ‘This is the greatest person of all time.’”

Trump was favored in most state-level polls over Biden — and Hughes said he does not think the fundamentals of the race have changed. Two polls of the state released after Biden dropped out of the race show Harris trailing Trump by 2 and 10 points, respectively — though they were conducted before Biden dropped out.

But Harris supporters say when it comes to Nevada, the vice president hasn’t exactly fallen out of a coconut tree — she’s put in the legwork to make herself familiar to a wide swath of voters.

“I've seen her talk to constituents from every background, from every community — from hospitality workers to nurses to teachers to first responders to business leaders,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) said. “I'm confident that with her at the forefront, we are going to do very well up and down the ballot in Nevada.”

History in Nevada

Much of Harris’ bond with Nevada comes through her long standing affiliation and similar career path with Cortez Masto.

The two overlapped for four years as attorneys general of their respective states. Their relationship was forged in the fire of the foreclosure crisis, when they teamed up to investigate big banks.

Numerous states were pursuing a settlement with the nation’s largest banks for instances of mortgage fraud and other abuses — a broad approach favored by then-President Barack Obama, who sought quick action on the issue. At the time, Harris was in her first year as attorney general, while Cortez Masto was in her fifth. Nevada ranked first in the nation for the percentage of housing units in foreclosure, with California second — making the issue all the more potent.

Harris and Cortez Masto instead took the risk of pursuing a wider investigation for their states than the federal-state coalition planned to touch, based on their shared conviction that they could deliver more for distressed California and Nevada homeowners.

“We had a lot in common, because at that time — particularly when it came to the big banks — we saw a lot of, unfortunately, fraud and scams that were harming our constituents in our states,” Cortez Masto said. “In Nevada and California, as you well know, so much overlaps across the borders.”

The two deepened their bond in the U.S. Senate, both winning elections in 2016 and serving together for four years — where they worked on issues of mutual interest such as the restoration of Lake Tahoe.

If elected, Harris would be the first Western president since Ronald Reagan, and the first ever Democratic president from west of the Rocky Mountains. That perspective gives her experience with a number of factors — mainly environmental — that affect California and Nevada, from wildfires to water shortages to states dealing with high percentages of federal land.

“She'd be good as president for the state of Nevada, because the Western issues are so unique,” Cortez Masto said.

Harris has also maintained loyalty from Nevada state legislators over the years.

She came to the Legislature in 2019 while running for president, where now-State Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) remembered her taking genuine interest in Nevada-specific issues.

“She was authentically interested in what was going on during the legislative session at that point, and what was going on in Nevada, and what we were hearing from Nevada families,” Cannizzaro said in an interview. “That was a question that she asked — ‘What do you hear from Nevada families?’”

In an interview, state Sen. Pat Spearman (D-North Las Vegas) said she first met Harris at an Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority event in late 2018 and was impressed by her intelligence, courage and willingness to listen. She was an early endorser of her 2020 presidential campaign, and applauded Harris for maintaining her connections to the state.

“We were one of the first places she came to when the Dobbs decision was handed down,” Spearman said, referring to an August 2022 event . “She met with electeds at that time and asked our opinion, what do you think about it? What should we do? How do we tackle this? Because this is something that's not right.”

Harris also spent time with female state legislators in 2023, where she again made an impact on Cannizzaro. The State Senate Majority Leader, who was nine months pregnant at the time, recounted how she began to feel ill during the event. After excusing herself, she said Harris followed her and insisted Cannizzaro receive medical assistance. Harris called her the next day to ask how she was doing, and the next time she saw her, asked how the baby was doing.

Cannizzaro, who shared the story on X, wrote that it was an example of how the vice president is “the kind of person we should have leading this nation.”

Numerous veterans of Harris’ 2020 campaign in Nevada remain in her inner circle. Gabriel Uy, a Nevada Army National Guard captain who served as her Nevada political director, went to Washington with Harris as her deputy director of public engagement. Ernesto Apreza, her Nevada state director, now works as a vice presidential press secretary.

In an email, Uy recalled bringing Harris to his alma mater UNR and introducing her to his mother, who volunteered on the 2019 campaign — whom he noted Harris always remembered on subsequent visits.

“VP does her homework and shows up for communities in their communities,” Uy wrote. “When the cameras are on and when the cameras are off, VP is an extraordinary leader and is clear eyed about building a better future.”

Notably, Megan Jones, an adviser to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) for 20 years, is a senior political adviser to Harris and has worked for her since 2022 .

Democrats are banking on Harris’ age and race appealing to Nevada’s electorate — among the youngest and most diverse in the swing states. Even Hughes, the Republican strategist, did not disagree.

“Everyone is making the broad assumptions that [since] she's younger, she's a woman of color, that she will do better with younger voters and people of color,” Hughes said. “I don't think that's a wrong assumption.”

But the challenge will be activating those voters.

Her staff and surrogates will need to work quickly — they only have about 100 days to make a dent in polling averages that show Trump winning Nevada by nearly 6 percentage points. But that average is based on polling against Biden, and the Harris campaign is hoping that the coalition built by Nevada Democrats over the decades, and won by Biden in 2020, can rally to her cause once again.

“As the late great Harry Reid reminded us, if you can win in Nevada, you can win anywhere,” Harris said at a January rally in East Las Vegas.