AMAC EXCLUSIVE
In an indication of both his growing weakness with Hispanics and general polling woes, Joe Biden is slipping further behind Donald Trump in Nevada, a state that could tip the scales nationally this November.
According to the latest RealClearPolitics average, Trump holds a 4.3 percent edge over Biden in Nevada, a lead outside the margin of error for many polls. After Biden carried the state 50 percent to 47.6 percent in 2020 (translating to just over a 30,000-vote edge) a Trump victory there this year would put the former president in prime position to oust Biden.
Clearly recognizing the significance of winning the Silver State, Biden delivered two speeches in Reno and Las Vegas on March 19 where he attempted to blame Trump for skyrocketing housing costs, a major issue for Nevadans, and blatantly lied about his predecessor’s economic record.
In Sin City, Biden accused Trump of enacting “a $2 trillion tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the very wealthy and biggest corporations” and “exploding the federal deficit.” Biden also claimed that he has “cut the federal deficit by $1 trillion” and that his “bipartisan budget deal” would “cut another trillion dollars in the next decade.”
In reality, the deficit that Biden referred to was largely a result of government spending to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is Biden who has repeatedly blown out the budget and made trillion-dollar deficits the norm.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), despite tax revenues being $237 billion higher than anticipated, the deficit for Fiscal Year 2023 was 76 percent higher than projected before Biden took office. In January, the national debt hit a record $34 trillion, fueled by Biden’s trillion-dollar spending bills.
Moreover, IRS tax data shows that the Trump tax cuts mostly benefitted middle- and working-class Americans. Meanwhile, the 40-year high inflation brought on by Biden’s policies has hit working families the hardest.
Biden also lamented during his Vegas speech the fact that, “for too many people, the dream of having a home – it feels out of reach.”
That is indeed the case, and is something that Trump has made a point of emphasis in his 2024 re-election campaign. But the culprit of the current housing unaffordability crisis is Biden himself. It is his runaway spending policies that have caused inflation and subsequently interest rates to soar.
As the state’s Republican Governor Joe Lombardo pointed out in a letter to Biden dated March 18, the administration has also contributed to Nevada’s housing shortage by refusing to open up more public land for development.
“The federal government continues to arbitrarily restrict statewide growth, inhibiting our communities from realizing their vision for the future,” Lombardo wrote. “Despite spending billions on laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the federal government still struggles to efficiently deliver on public land conveyances due to a lack of resources and manpower.”
During another speech in Reno before arriving in Vegas, Biden also claimed that he had “created tens of thousands of good-paying jobs right here in [Nevada].”
But Nevadans have serious reason to doubt that claim, as the jobs numbers have been revised significantly down from the estimates initially offered by the Biden administration. In 2023 alone, the government overstated nationwide job growth by at least 439,000 jobs. A record high 8.7 million Americans also now hold multiple jobs, making the employment situation far less rosy than Biden is letting on.
In short, many voters in Nevada and throughout the country simply aren’t experiencing the phantom economic boom Biden keeps talking about.
Biden also baselessly claimed in a radio interview on March 19 that Trump “despises Latinos,” a reflection of how desperate the president is to stem the tide of Hispanics abandoning the Democrat Party for Trump. Hispanics comprise around 30 percent of the Nevada’s population and 19 percent of the voting population.
In 2020, Biden won the Latino vote in Nevada 56 percent to 37 percent over Trump. While there has not been Latino-specific statewide polling in Nevada this year, a new survey out from The New York Times on March 2 shows Trump leading Biden by six points with Hispanics, 46 to 40 percent – a devastating collapse in support after Biden won 66 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide four years ago.
There is still a long way to go until November, and if history is any guide many disaffected Democrat voters may come back to Biden as the election draws near.
But if the Times poll results are even close to accurate, Biden faces a steep uphill climb in Nevada and likely Arizona as well, which would greatly narrow the path for the president on election night. No matter how much Biden attempts to spin his tenure as a great success, fewer and fewer Nevadans and Americans are buying it.
Neil Banerji is a proud Las Vegas resident and former student at the University of Oxford. In his spare time, he enjoys reading Winston Churchill and Edmund Burke.
