In Las Vegas, housing could make or break the battle for the White House

It’s 105F (41C) in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, about 20 miles away from the bustle of tourists on the Vegas strip. Front yards have small pebbles instead of grass, and signs that welcome the start of autumn seem premature in the sweltering heat.

Andrew Clarke knocks on the door of a ranch-style house. A dog barks aggressively from inside. “Hi, my name’s Andrew. I’m an organizer with For Our Future Nevada. Is Jennifer available?” Clarke asks in an upbeat voice. The voice says Jennifer doesn’t live there any more.

“Well, thank you so much, sir. Have a great day,” Clarke says, leaving the doorway.

For organizers such as Clarke, if a specific person is not home, they leave it be. The goal isn’t to try to get every voter to support Harris. Rather, it’s to secure confidence in a Democratic base and ensure voters get to the polls.

This election season, one major factor will determine whether Clarke can succeed: the economy, or at least how people view it .

And Democrats are fighting an uphill battle. Americans across the country have felt their purchasing power drop after inflation peaked at 9.1% in summer 2022 – a four-decade high, a situation that doesn’t bode well for an incumbent administration.

In Las Vegas, if there’s anything that Democrats and Republicans can agree on, it’s that the economy has been shaky and the housing market is horrific.

Nevada saw the highest unemployment rate in the country after Covid shut the strip down, reaching 30% in April 2020. Over four years later, the unemployment rate has gone down to 5%.

But although the casinos have reopened, residents are still feeling a strain, particularly when it comes to housing. The median home price in the Las Vegas area soared from $345,000 in August 2020 to $480,000 in August of this year, far outpacing the growth in median home prices for the country as a whole.

Many Clark county residents moved to Vegas because of its lower cost of living, especially compared to California, its neighbor to the west, where median home prices have climbed over $900,000. What happens when a place that was once a cheap place to live is no longer cheap?

“Rents have gone up, sales prices have gone up, interest rates have gone up. It’s so difficult for people who once found Las Vegas and Nevada a very inexpensive place to live, right before the pandemic hit five years ago,” said Linda Rheinberger, a real estate agent in the city.

With people able to work from home, some Californians moved to Nevada in search of bigger homes for cheaper prices.

“Some of them are paying cash because they’ve cashed out of their homes in other markets, and they come here with a bucket of cash,” Rheinberger said. “How does someone in the middle class, who doesn’t have a basket of cash and has to rely on a mortgage or loan, how can they compete?”

For some residents, that has meant giving up dreams of homeownership, at least for now.

Carlos Velis, a retired sportswriter and editor, said he and his wife, who still works, were saving up for a house. Their rent had risen from $1,200 a month to $1,950, but they found they still could not afford a home, even with good credit scores.

“Rent is increasing, but the salaries are staying the same,” Velis said, in Spanish. “It’s unfair.”

When Danielle Aio, a cocktail waitress at the Cosmopolitan, moved to Vegas from Hawaii in 2019, she thought she would eventually buy a home.

“Now, interest rates are so high here. And housing costs went up,” Aio said, adding that this makes buying a home unfeasible. Over the past four years, Aio said, her rent had gone up from $1,180 a month to $1,640.

It’s a similar story for Kelly-Lynn Carvalho, a manager at the Wynn Las Vegas, who moved from Honolulu to Vegas after her fiance was laid off.

“We were kind of plucked from paradise,” she said. “We moved here partly because there’s no income tax and the economy was better … It’s difficult to want to buy [a home] with housing prices and utilities on the rise. We’d love to be able to, but I don’t know.”

Though inflation is starting to ease , and Harris introduced a slate of housing proposals as part of her economic agenda , the sentiment could pose a problem for Harris. Some voters in Nevada blame the Democratic administration for the economy’s woes.

Carvalho said that although she’s still undecided on who she is voting for president, she is leaning more toward Trump because of his background as a businessman.

“I don’t agree with his tactics or the way he comes off, but his results [when he was his office], you can’t argue with that,” Carvalho, who voted for Clinton in 2016, said. “Sometimes I don’t even want to listen to what he says, just because of the way he says it or how it comes off. But I can’t really argue with where the economy was during his time.”

If he had been elected president instead of Biden in 2020, she said, “I think he would have run it like a business. I think we would have been in a better place.”

Dr Aaron Adaoag, a doctor with a private practice south of the city, agrees that Trump has the business acumen to stabilize government spending.

“There are certain things I don’t agree with him on, like a woman’s choice to have an abortion. But other things, like spending … spending is the one thing that drives me bonkers,” Adaoag said. “I honestly believe that you need a businessman in office. You need somebody who knows the numbers, who knows how to run a business, who knows how to allocate capital. …

“I think they just got to get somebody in there that can right the ship, whoever that is. Right now, I just think Trump’s the better guy, business-wise.”

Harris is facing headwinds in swing states such as Nevada, but her candidacy has brought a resurgence in groups that plan to canvass on the ground for her – and that could make all the difference.

Organizers say the energy around Harris has been palpable ever since she announced her candidacy. For Our Future said they saw an increase in volunteers who were willing to knock on doors and work the phones in support of Harris over the summer.

“People were not excited about either of the options we had at the top of the ticket, and people were generally not receptive to us on doors,” Clarke, of For Our Future, said. “People had a sense that they knew what they were getting with either Biden or Trump. It just was making them feel like they didn’t have power or agency. That sentiment has changed overnight.”

“She’s energizing important groups in Nevada,” said Thom Reilly, who served as county manager for Clark county from 2001 to 2006 and formerly as chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education. “It has re-energized the culinary union, and they vigorously came out with an endorsement of her.”

The culinary union, representing more than 60,000 workers in the service and hospitality industry, will send stewards across Vegas from September until election day knocking on doors and talking to members about why they need to vote for Haris.

Eileen Scott, a cocktail waitress at the Harrah’s hotel and casino, is planning to help the union canvass for Harris because the vice-president is a longtime union supporter.

“She’s definitely for the work, for the union, changing the economy,” Scott said. “What the union taught me is we’re not political, but we need to know our allies so we can keep it strong.

“What scares me if Trump gets in is that one of his first missions is to get rid of the union and not represent us. It’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

In June, Trump appeared to court union members, saying at a rally in Vegas that he supports no taxes on tips – a policy that the union has been pushing. But union officials have dismissed it as a wild campaign promise.

“Trump’s notorious for that. At the end of the day, Trump lies,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the union. Pappageorge said that more important than no taxes on tips is getting rid of the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. He said: “You’re not hearing Trump or any Republican saying a peep about that, and they never will because their buddies own these massive companies that want to be able to pay people $2.13 an hour.”

Though Aio, from the Cosmopolitan, said some co-workers have been enticed by Trump’s no-tax-on-tips promise, others, like herself, are “definitely going to vote against him”.

“I just don’t want him to be president. [No taxes on tips] is one small thing versus a whole four years,” she said.

Other groups are also planning to mobilize for Harris, including Make the Road Nevada, which plans to canvass Hispanic voters, a key demographic in the city.

“A lot of Latinos were saying they were going to vote for Trump, saying that the Biden administration was responsible for inflation and the economic state. My family and friends were saying that we need to vote for Trump because he is better for the economy,” said Velis, who volunteers with Make the Road.

“As a Democrat, [Harris’s candidacy] makes me feel a lot better about continuing the work. The Democratic party is focusing on positive aspects of what they need to work on.”

Trump will surely get a large share of Nevadan votes, as he has in his last two elections. But the work of Democratic organizers appears to have helped their candidate get the state’s votes over the last two decade. Whether or not the renewed energy around Harris will work for another presidential election is still anyone’s guess.

“I think Trump would have won if Biden was there, and that’s how it was trending. It’s kind of changed pretty remarkably,” Reilly said. “But it’s going to be close, because the last several presidential elections have been close.”

In the meantime, it’s a battle that is going door to door. “We’re in our persuasion phase. These are folks that we are pretty sure will be voting for the Harris-Walz ticket, but we’re not completely sure,” said Jarrett Clark, communications director for For Our Future. “It’s more like the moveable middle.”