Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton make last appeals for Nevada’s votes

Nevada’s six votes are just a small piece in the Electoral College pie, but you wouldn’t know that by the attention being paid to the Silver State by the opposing presidential campaigns in the final weeks of the election.

How the campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have worked toward earning those six votes, though, could not be more different.

Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, have spent more time in Nevada themselves compared with their counterparts since the start of October. Trump has visited the state three times since the start of the month — including his Reno visit on Saturday — and his running mate has been in Reno twice in that same time period. Clinton has campaigned in Las Vegas twice, and her vice presidential pick, Tim Kaine, has been here once.

Beyond those personal visits from Trump and Pence, the Trump campaign has hosted just a handful of other events across Nevada. But most of them came just recently as recent polls in Nevada have tightened.

A pair of Review-Journal polls conducted after the first and third presidential debates showed Clinton with a seven point lead in the state by late October. But a CNN poll conducted from Oct. 27 to Nov. 1 showed Trump with a six point advantage in the wake of the FBI announcing on Oct. 28 that they are looking into additional emails from one of Clinton’s top aides, Huma Abedin, potentially tied to the private server Clinton used while secretary of state on the computer of Abedin’s estranged husband, former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner.

Whether any classified emails were found on that computer has not yet been disclosed by the FBI.

And since then, Trump has sent two of his top surrogates, Ben Carson and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to the state for public rallies — Carson on Saturday and Giuliani on Sunday — hoping to seize upon that possible slide.

But those events, which are usually held at the Trump campaign’s Las Vegas headquarters, don’t generate near the fanfare seen at Trump’s grand-scale rallies that feature broad statements often aimed at undocumented immigrants or his opponent’s private email server controversy.

Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, has saturated Nevada with more than two dozen rallies, featuring big-name supporters from the political and pop-star fields since the start of October.

SETTING HIS OWN COURSE

“Trump has not relied on traditional methods,” said Eric Herzik, chairman of the political science department at University of Nevada, Reno.

Clinton deployed the Democrat Party’s most influential players to Nevada in the final five weeks of the election, including President Barack Obama, her husband and former President Bill Clinton, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Vice President Joe Biden, and even music icons such as Katy Perry and DJ Steve Aoki, in a focused effort to drive voter turnout during the state’s two-week early voting period that ended Friday.

Trump, Herzik added, “is basically doing it on his own.”

Trump doesn’t have the ground game or surrogate pool that his opponent has at her disposal, and is lacking in both areas when compared with the campaigns of recent Republican presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and John McCain.

And that seems to have hurt him in driving Republicans to the polls based on early voting results.

Nevada Democrats turned out in droves during early voting, and both Herzik and UNLV history professor Michael Green said the Clinton campaign’s heavy focus on Southern Nevada is a big reason. Democrats in Clark County hold a 72,000-vote lead heading into Election Day. Statewide, that gap sits at 46,000 in favor of the Democrats. Those numbers are favorable for Clinton, as they are nearly identical to the lead the party had in 2012 when Obama won the state by 7 points.

GROUND GAME GAP

A big part of Trump’s lack of surrogate events or ground game, Herzik said, is the divide between Trump and the Republican Party elites nationally, such as Romney, House Speaker Paul Ryan and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a former presidential candidate.

Even locally, Nevada Republicans have tried to distance themselves from the party’s presidential nominee in the wake of several controversies that surfaced in October, with the most notable being the leaked audio of Trump bragging about groping and kissing women without their consent while on an “Access Hollywood” bus in 2005.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe Heck and U.S. Rep. Cresent Hardy, who is seeking re-election, both unendorsed Trump after the tape was leaked and have not appeared on the campaign trail with the billionaire businessman.

That is highly unusual for a presidential election, according to Green.

“You traditionally see with a candidate what you see with Clinton. Catherine Cortez Masto is up there with her at events, as well as the congressional candidates,” Green said, referring to the Democratic nominee for Harry Reid’s seat in the U.S. Senate.

“Not so with Trump. It speaks to the divide in the Republican Party,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean Trump will lose out on getting most of the Republican vote, Green added.

That party divide, though, left Trump with a single surrogate stumping in Nevada for him in October: U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who held a small rally at the Trump campaign’s Las Vegas headquarters on Monday.

Instead, Trump has relied on his star power while hosting fewer campaign events than the Clinton campaign. Those rallies tend to be significantly larger and often draw several thousand enthusiastic supporters eager to hear him speak.

While Trump mentioned early voting during those visits, he spent most of his speaking time recently zeroing in on the email scandal surrounding Clinton.

Herzik noted that both sides are talking almost exclusively to their base voting pools, but said Clinton is doing slightly more to reach a wider group, thanks to her surrogate rallies. Obama, he said, should help with appeal to African-American voters, and Sanders’ popularity with Democratic millennials should help pull in those votes as well.

Whether Trump’s approach will be effective won’t be known until the votes are tallied on Tuesday night.

Contact Colton Lochhead at clochhead@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4638. Follow @ColtonLochhead on Twitter.