Nevada may be the smallest of the six battleground states likely to decide the 2024 presidential election, but it remains critical to President Joe Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes — a key reason he’s set to visit both Reno and Las Vegas Tuesday.

Public polling  in Nevada has consistently found former president Donald Trump with leads of between 5 and 10 percentage points over Biden — meaning the president’s campaign has to work to rebuild the coalition that won the state for  him in 2020 by about 2.5 percentage points. At this point in 2020, Biden held a 6-point lead over Trump in aggregated Nevada polling.

To that end, Biden will engage with volunteers during his trip to crucial Washoe County, a traditional bellwether he won by 4.5 percentage points in 2020, and his aides are targeting a set of issues and voter groups they believe can improve Biden’s margins. The Biden campaign has nearly two dozen full-time staffers in Nevada, and are announcing several new hires in advance of the president’s visit, including deputy political and coalitions director Daniel Corona, a former mayor of Elko County’s West Wendover, who will help engage voters outside of Las Vegas and Reno.

To gain Nevadans’ support, the Biden campaign said in a Monday memo they are focusing on issues that they believe matter most to Western voters, including standing with unions, job creation, pushing against election denialism, securing the southern border and supporting abortion access. 

Despite weak poll numbers, Biden’s campaign strategists are optimistic and categorize Nevada as a union-dense state — union members account for 12.4 percent of wage and salary workers in the Silver State — that is overwhelmingly in support of abortion access — 69 percent of Nevadans described themselves as pro-choice in an October 2021 poll by OH Predictive Insights. In addition, Biden is likely to tout Nevada’s high rate of job creation in his visit — a metric in which the Silver State ranked first among all states in 2023 (despite retaining the nation’s highest unemployment rate).

In both Arizona and Nevada, states Biden will visit this week, the campaign also plans to highlight how election denialism has become a dominant issue among Republicans since 2020. 

“The state Republican Party in Nevada is run by Trump’s indicted fake electors,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez noted in a memo about the campaign's strategy in the Southwest. “Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans have come together to defeat the far-right candidates in these states who have parroted Trump’s lies.”

As an example, Rodriguez noted Republican former Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s failed challenge against Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) in 2022 after walking a “rigged election tightrope” in his role with the Trump campaign casting suspicion on the state’s election results in 2020. 

On immigration, an issue that has surged to be voters’ top issue — surpassing even the economy — for the first time since 2019, according to Gallup, Trump has consistently polled better than Biden as encounters at the southern border have spiked. Biden campaign aides said they plan to keep drawing contrasts between the president’s attempt to pass a border security bill, blocked by Republicans, and Trump’s past policies and dehumanizing rhetoric. 

Trump has made immigration a cornerstone of his rallies thus far, including saying over the weekend that some migrants accused of crimes are “not people.”

Chavez Rodriguez also noted that Democrats are better-financed and have broader infrastructure in place than their GOP counterparts. In Nevada, for example, the Democratic coordinated campaign is opening separate offices in north, east and southwest Las Vegas, in order to target Black, Latino and Asian American voters, respectively. The campaign is already up on television with ad buys, including in Spanish.

“Every national paid media campaign to date has included Arizona and Nevada, because they are core battleground states, and Spanish-language television,” Chavez Rodriguez wrote.

Amidst a bevy of stories suggesting voters of color might be moving towards Trump, Biden campaign aides were eager to draw that infrastructural distinction and point out that the Republican National Committee, facing financial woes, has closed several community centers first opened in 2022 and focused on outreach to minority groups across the country.

While Nevada has a number of demographic characteristics that have benefited Democrats in the past — including a highly unionized workforce and a large Latino population, which Biden won by about 25 points in 2020, registered nonpartisans have become the largest voter group, making winning independents key. And Republicans stand to gain from Nevada’s high percentage of non-college educated voters, which is similar to that of traditionally red states such as Alabama and Oklahoma.

Traditionally, the path to Democratic victory has been winning by large margins in Clark County, relying on voters in Reno to win swingy Washoe County and trying to keep their losses in rural Nevada manageable. Biden’s trip to Reno — where the administration has made significant investments in the region’s lithium and manufacturing industries — reflects the importance the campaign is putting on Washoe, particularly as Clark becomes less of a Democratic stronghold. 

Washoe County proved a difference maker in 2022, when Cortez Masto won the county by 4 percentage points while then-Gov. Steve Sisolak only won it by about 1.5 percentage points; Cortez Masto held her seat, while Sisolak ultimately lost.