I spent last week visiting organizers and volunteers from the Western states where Hope Springs from Field PAC volunteers had canvassed this year. I made three stops in Nevada, meeting with two groups in Clark County and one in Reno. Like Arizona, Reproductive Rights supporters are trying to put the question of abortion access on the 2024 ballot in the battleground state of Nevada.
Unlike Arizona, abortion is already protected through the first two trimesters. Supporters want to ensure those protections are guaranteed, especially after the election of a Republican governor in the state. The Nevada legislature and the governor had very public disagreements this year, and Democrats are still smarting over the last session. Still, the fact that protections now exist may mean Nevada is a harder lift that states like Arizona.
But volunteers emphasized the opportunity posed by the Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom effort. “Having an abortion question on the ballot in Nevada could help boost Democratic turnout in the presidential election by tapping into the fervor around the issue, which played a key role in the 2022 midterms nationally and in Nevada, where a Democrat won a U.S. Senate race last year by fewer than 8,000 votes.” Added to the fact that a citizen’s initiative would need to pass twice in order to be enshrined into the state constitution means this isn’t as clean an opportunity. But that didn’t mean those Nevadans i met with were less enthusiastic. Like Arizona, the Ohio results energized them.
They didn’t agree with the broad consensus that Nevada is “likely Democratic” in the Electoral College nor even that it will be more competitive (see the Senate map above) for Senator Rosen’s re-election. Not the first time, though, that locals disagreed with the “national consensus.”
Volunteers i talked to last week were thrilled that we added eight extra weeks of canvassing to our efforts in Nevada and almost doubled the number of doors knocked this year. This despite the fact that we had numerous weeks where the heat wave prevented canvassing in the Las Vegas area. In my Clark County groups we talked at length about how we could start earlier when afternoon temperatures were projected to be in the 100s next Summer. I did point out that we have fewer doors opened (and, thus, a smaller percentage of actual conversations with voters) when the media was warning everyone about a heat wave.
Still, Hope Springs volunteers were happy to know that we had identified more Abortion single-issue voters there than in Arizona. Despite the fact that we have knocked on fewer doors and talked to fewer voters in Nevada, we have found 48,824 voters who self-identified as Single-Issue Abortion voters OR identified Reproductive Healthcare as their Top Issue for the nation OR their Top Issue in Nevada (in Arizona, the number was 33,150). In one Las Vegas area group, volunteers “high fived” at that news.
But there was definitely a consensus to start earlier this coming year so that volunteers, like those in Ohio, could carry the petition with them when we started knocking doors again.
The campaign is collecting signatures and must submit 102,362 by June 26. A district court judge last month struck down the group’s petition, saying it covered more than a single subject, but abortion rights advocates are hopeful the state’s all-female Supreme Court will rule in their favor on appeal.
Nevada requires two consecutive votes of the people to amend the state constitution through a citizen-initiated ballot measure — meaning that, if the ballot measure passes with a simple majority in 2024, the question will return to the ballot in 2026. If it passes again then with a simple majority, the state constitution will be amended.
Biden narrowly carried Nevada in 2020, and the battleground state continues to produce extremely tight races: Last year, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto won reelection in Nevada by 0.77 percentage points. Having an abortion measure on the ballot in 2024 could boost Democratic turnout that would help Biden as well as Sen. Jacky Rosen (D), who is facing a similarly tough race for reelection next year.
This was a big discussion in all 3 groups. We talked a lot about the mechanics and how soon it was practical to start in 2024. The presidential primary will be an all-mail ballot, striking opportunities to collect signatures on February 6th at the polls. Different counties will probably have different rules about the possibility of collecting signatures at drop boxes but we did discuss different hacks around possible rules.
Hope Springs volunteers knocked on 413,587 doors in Nevada this year, talking to 31,808 voters. They registered 108 New Voters and recorded 619 voters who updated their addresses. About 50% of the new voters we registered had moved into the state. Like Arizona, Constituent Service Reports are very popular among voters. We collected 1,140 CSRs this year.
We have more voters who file Incident Reports with us to complain about Election Issues, Suppression and Intimidation. Our volunteers collected 34 IRs this year. Most of them were about incidents they witnessed since Summer 2022.
One last thing i have to say about my visit to Nevada. Although i met with slightly fewer than 50 people, i heard no complaints about the new Democratic Party organization in the state. We do have Bernie supporters among our volunteers (and had a couple of Bernie voters at last week’s meetings), so it was interesting to see that they seem to have put the internal conflict behind them. I may be wrong, i can only report what i see and heard here, and personal impressions of that internal conflict was something that a number of volunteers brought to my attention in numerous ways. But that was good to not see there.
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