JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In presidential elections, a swing state is one that could reasonably be won by either party. This year, there are seven, including Nevada. But beyond being a swing state, there's another wrinkle that makes the vote difficult to predict. In Nevada, nonpartisan voters are the largest group of registered voters in the state. They make up almost a third, and they outnumber Democrats and Republicans. And that's one of the reasons Morning Edition host A Martínez is in Nevada this week. Hey, there.
A MARTÍNEZ, BYLINE: Hey.
SUMMERS: So A, tell me - what have you learned about why so many Nevada voters choose not to align with either of the major parties?
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, it's something I've been wondering about. I asked Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent. He's been writing about Nevada politics all the way back since 1986.
JON RALSTON: A lot of them were auto registered as nonpartisan voters under an automatic voter registration law that was passed a few legislative sessions ago. And so that explosion of voters may be misleading, in the sense that a lot of these people either may not know that they were registered or may not care that they were registered and may not actually participate in politics.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, so Ralston says that, in order to win in Nevada, a candidate needs to really know and exactly identify who these voters are because, even if their official status is nonpartisan, they're human beings. They either lean left or right, so a candidate needs to know where they're leaning.
And one more thing, I mean, it's the West. It's Nevada. It's a state where there's a really fierce, independent spirit that fuels a ton of skepticism of politicians and all their promises.
SUMMERS: What do you mean by that?
MARTÍNEZ: Alright, so from Las Vegas, where I'm at right now, all the way up to Reno, where I was earlier this year, Nevada's economy relies on tourism and hospitality, and that's powered by workers whose income is either supplanted or entirely based off of tips. So both Trump and Harris support eliminating taxing those tips. You would think, great - bipartisan presidential candidate agreement. Well, Kimberli Yelle is a server at a winery in Pahrump. She is not buying it.
KIMBERLI YELLE: If you look in the past and stuff, presidents and elections, saying they're going to do this; they're going to do that; they're going to do this. Yeah, whatever. Ninety percent of the time, they don't follow through. So that's why I'm suspicious about it. I don't - yeah. I'm not going to put all my eggs in one basket (laughter).
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, and this week we're going to hear a lot from other tip workers who share her pessimism and also believe that not taxing their own tips is going to cause more problems than it solves.
SUMMERS: Interesting. I mean, A, I covered politics for a long time before I got into this job, and I got to tell you - I feel like anything that could possibly happen in an election cycle pretty much seems to have happened this time around. How are voters there in Nevada feeling about how all of this has been going?
MARTÍNEZ: So, you know, I mean, you've gone reporting. When we go out and do this, and we talk to a lot of people, we listen for recurring themes to try and get a sense of the vibe - if people are saying the same thing. So one of the things I'm asking people here is simply, how are you feeling about the election? And while we were shadowing some canvassers who were going door to door in Las Vegas, I asked that exact question to Darren Squires.
DARREN SQUIRES: I'm ready for it to be over (laughter).
MARTÍNEZ: His face - you should have seen it. It was, like, just tired - I've-had-enough-of-it-all kind of face. He just wants to be free of this.
So Darren was the last person that we spoke to that day before we started to head back to the hotel. So once we settled on a place to go have dinner, we called an Uber. And we're radio journalists, so you know that we brought our mic and our recorder...
SUMMERS: Right.
MARTÍNEZ: ...With us just in case. And I'm glad we did because we asked our driver, Decameron Granger, the same exact thing that I asked Squires - how are you feeling about the election?
DECAMERON GRANGER: I can't wait till it's over.
MARTÍNEZ: The same response - I mean, exhaustion, frustration, suspicion. I mean, just some of the things that Nevada voters have been telling us, but also maybe with a little dash of hope - because a lot of people were saying that, regardless of how the election goes, they're hoping that we can be a more unified nation once it's all over.
SUMMERS: That's A Martínez, one of the hosts of NPR's Morning Edition. A, thank you so much.
MARTÍNEZ: Thanks lot.
SUMMERS: A Martínez is reporting from Nevada all week. Listen on Morning Edition as he explores the housing crisis and hears from voters at a rodeo in rural Nye County.
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