When I first suggested to my editor that I write an article about Nevada in the 2016 election, I expected to have to defend my state for going red despite an overwhelming Clinton landslide nationally. Little did I know that, in this election, Nevada would be one of the few states to actually go blue.
Nevada has been a swing state for quite some time. Since 1992, the state has voted for a different party in every other election. Nevada went Democratic in 1992, voted Republican in 2000, and turned back to the Democrats again in 2008 for President Obama. No one was sure how Nevada would vote in this election. Even Nate Silver, the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, who went on a 14-tweet rampage about how the Huffington Post got Florida all wrong, claimed that, “few advantages are permanent in Nevada, and Clinton, who is advertising heavily there, can’t take a lot for granted.” He went on to say that because Clinton’s foundation in Nevada was not strong, it had been difficult to declare Clinton or Trump a clear-cut winner from the beginning. This hesitation came from the man who was able to prove to an entire Data Analysis team of a major newspaper that Florida would, in fact, be a Republican state.
This sense of uncertainty did come from the roots of the Nevadan people, however. Most of the state is made up of small rural and suburban cities, the key type of cities that Trump was expected to, and did win. In fact, the only two areas that Clinton won, allowing her to win the State, contained two of the most developed and populated cities in the State. However, Nevada still houses a great amount of conservative voters who believe that their second amendment rights are being stripped away from them, abortion is equivalent to murder, and the only person who can fix our economy is the business man himself.
Nevada has one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the country, but people were convinced that these populations would not show up to vote. In the past, Hispanics had one of the lowest voter turnouts, while the white, typically conservative populations which make up about 75% of the population in Nevada, had the highest voter turnout.
In The Yale Politic’s map, “Yale’s Take on the Election, Mapped,” I mentioned that there was a large working population in this state that worried greatly about the minimum wage and social security and that these voters would essentially decide which party would win the state. In a state with one of the highest gun owning populations, a failure of the working, minority classes to go out and vote would have easily led to a landslide Republican victory.
Going into this election, not very many people expected Trump to win, especially not by such large margins. This characterization isn’t bias; it’s pure fact. I come from Las Vegas, which houses the Las Vegas Review Journal, one of two of the only major news companies to endorse Trump. There were not many other news companies or data analysts who expected Trump to win by such a landslide, and the results of the election caught a lot of people by surprise. In fact, many Trump supporters were shocked to discover that their presidential candidate had actually won. Although it is difficult to determine the precise reason for Trump’s victory, some analysts such as the conservative operative Brendan Steinhauser claimed that, “The bad headlines hurt [Clinton] this past week,” and that, “Trump had the momentum and enthusiasm at just the right time.” Meanwhile, Howard Fineman from Huffington Post explained in his interview with ABC News that the win was unexpected because those who actually favored Trump were too afraid to voice their opinions in hopes that they would not be associated with Trump’s rhetoric. Whatever the case may be, Trump’s victory did not show up in the analyses of major pollsters. States that were supposed to vote blue voted red. Battleground states swung more right than left. Looking at the way things turned out, it is unbelievable how many people thought Clinton had this one in the bag.
Nevada has had its fair share of failures. The state ranks last in education, some cities have legalized prostitution, and our economy is based on getting people drunk and hooked on gambling. But I have never been prouder to come from Nevada. Not because we elected Secretary Hillary Clinton our choice for President of the United States, but because of our integrity. We said who we were going to vote for, and then we did.