What Went Down In The 2020 Nevada Caucuses
Nevada’s Dense, Urban Population Changes The Field Strategy
Understanding the field organizational strategies of the campaigns in Nevada’s caucuses starts with one fact: Nearly three-fourths of Nevadans live in Clark County and the Las Vegas metro area. As such, every campaign has located at least half of their offices there. With so many voters in one location, it makes less sense to branch out all over the state, and the highest-polling candidates have far fewer offices overall than in the previous contests.
That said, five of the six highest-polling candidates have offices in Reno, which is in Washoe County, home to just over 15 percent of the state’s population. Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren also each opened offices in Elko, population approximately 21,000, in the sparsely populated northeast area of the state.
There are a few differences worth watching, however. Sanders and Buttigieg each opened additional offices in northern Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District. Sanders’s is east of Reno in Sparks (population approximately 100,000), while Buttigieg’s is in Fallon (population approximately 9,000) in sparsely populated Churchill County. Sanders may be looking to appeal to Hispanic and Latino voters, who make up 29 percent of Sparks’ population. (Steyer also has an office there.) It’s unclear why Buttigieg opened an office in such a small town, but it could be part of a broader rural strategy: He also has an office in Pahrump at the southern tip of Nye County in the 4th Congressional District, the only campaign office in that town or county.
The Biden group just got the last of the realigning voters, which they are very excited about. Biden gets up to 45 votes on the final alignment, so he actually did decently among the Warren and Steyer voters.
What Ads Have Saturated Nevada’s Airwaves
A lot of the campaigning in Nevada has taken place not in person, but on TV. According to data from Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group, between Jan. 1 and Feb. 20, the current Democratic presidential candidates aired 24,230 TV spots in a Nevada-based media market at an estimated cost of $7.5 million.
Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV …
The estimated amount of money each Democratic presidential candidate spent on TV ads from Jan. 1 to Feb. 20, 2020, in Nevada-based media markets, and the number of times their ads aired
| Candidate | Estimated Spending on TV Ads | Number of Airings |
|---|---|---|
| Tom Steyer | $3,202,690 | 11,068 |
| Bernie Sanders | 1,056,030 | 4,832 |
| Elizabeth Warren | 1,199,870 | 2,617 |
| Joe Biden | 793,990 | 2,320 |
| Pete Buttigieg | 665,590 | 1,758 |
| Amy Klobuchar | 574,830 | 1,555 |
| Michael Bloomberg | 29,630 | 80 |
| Tulsi Gabbard | 0 | 0 |
The most prolific advertiser has been Steyer, who aired 11,068 spots for an estimated $3.2 million — and that’s on top of the 20,618 spots he aired for an estimated $8.2 million in 2019. One of Steyer’s most-aired ads features footage of Steyer from a debate where he laces into Trump’s immigration policies, calling him a “racist president” who is “break[ing] the laws of humanity.”
Sanders aired the second-most spots — 4,832 — at an estimated cost of $1.1 million. His most ubiquitous ad in Nevada is entitled “For All” and goes through the greatest hits of Sanders’s policies, including ending “tax breaks for billionaires” and achieving universal health care. (There’s also an unsubtle shot of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.)
Warren has spent even more on TV ads than Sanders ($1.2 million), but her ads haven’t aired nearly as many times (2,617). Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar round out the list of candidates with a notable TV presence in the Silver State, but they haven’t invested nearly as heavily as the other three.