JD Vance outlines state of presidential race in Las Vegas campaign stop

“I think that all President Trump and I have to do is remind the American people that she (Harris) is fundamentally a San Francisco liberal who supports policies like banning fracking,” Vance told the Review-Journal on Tuesday afternoon before a rally in Henderson.

“Of course, the name of the game here is not just to win the race, but to govern and improve people’s lives,” he said. “I think we just have much better ideas for how to do that, and Kamala Harris doesn’t.”

In what marked his first trip to Nevada since Donald Trump named him as his running mate, the Ohio senator compared and contrasted Trump’s record with Harris’ as vice president, saying she “owns every failure” of the Biden administration.

“In just a few short months, from Nevada to everywhere else, we are going to lead a great American restoration,” he told the crowd of several hundred at Liberty High School. An energized crowd seemed unfazed when Vance mispronounced Nevada a few times, though he corrected himself throughout the nearly 30-minute speech.

“We’re going to bring strength back. We’re going to bring common sense back. We’re going to bring prosperity back to the American people,” Vance said, “and it’s starting in Nevada.”

Immigration a campaign focus

Vance leaned heavily into illegal immigration, repeating a claim that Harris had been put in charge of the border under the Biden administration (she’d actually been asked to work with Central American nations to explore ways to eliminate the root cause of northward immigration). He contrasted Trump and Harris’ record on immigration, calling Harris “disloyal.”

“Loyalty to this country is closing the border, not opening it up,” Vance said. “Loyalty is safeguarding Medicare for American citizens, not bankrupting it by giving it to illegal aliens.”

He spoke about murder victim Laken Riley in Georgia, whose suspected killer had previously been deported from the U.S. He claimed that millions of undocumented immigrants claimed asylum under false pretense and that those “fraudsters” were “stealing American jobs and undercutting American wages.”

Vance also claimed a Harris administration would give people “who shouldn’t even be here” the right to vote, while a Trump administration would implement the “largest deportation program in American history.”

“And my question to the American people is, ‘do you want a president who was disloyal to this country, or do you want one who was willing to take a bullet for it?’ I think I know the answer,” Vance said, receiving cheers from the audience.

While immigration has become a major talking point from the GOP, Democrats counter that Congress tried to pass a sweeping bipartisan border package, but it’s passage was blocked by Senate Republicans.

“If JD Vance is going to campaign in Nevada, he should learn how to pronounce it and learn what we stand for,” said Maddy Pawlak, the Harris 2024 Nevada communications director, in a statement.

“This November, voters across the Silver State will come together to elect Vice President Kamala Harris, defeat Donald Trump and his extreme agenda, and ensure that Vance’s time spent campaigning in Nevada is short,” Pawlak said.

In his speech, Vance also highlighted manufacturing and energy as major issues, saying Trump would bring more manufacturing and oil drilling to the U.S.

Calling her a “wacky San Francisco liberal,” Vance took a shot at Harris’ record as a prosecutor, alleging that dangerous criminals had been released under her tenure.

At a campaign speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris said when she was California’s attorney general, she prosecuted transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers who entered the country illegally and “won” her cases.

“Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk,” said Harris, who served as the border state’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017.

Where are young voters heading?

An Axios poll published last week found Harris at a strong advantage over Trump among young voters, with her at 60 percent and Trump at 40 percent. Amid rumors — which the Trump campaign has denied — that the former president regrets his vice presidential pick due to a lack of electoral value, Vance thinks his appeal to millennials is what he brings to the Republican ticket.

“I’m the first millennial candidate, right? So I do see the perspective of young families maybe a little bit differently than somebody who’s 20, 30, 40 years older than I am,” the 39-year-old said.

He also said his perspective as an Ohioan from the industrial Midwest, which had a reputation of building and manufacturing the country’s products, will also help.

“I can speak to those issues because I saw what happened when bad policies lead a manufacturing facility to close down or causes the hemorrhaging of jobs in your hometown,” he said. “It destroys everything. It breaks apart families, it gives financial stresses to young kids that didn’t exist before.”

Vance said Harris is more radical than Biden, but young voters don’t know it. He said he and Trump will show young voters how Democrats’ policies have failed, specifically on the economy, he said.

“I think that our pitch to millennials is, you deserve the American dream of homeownership,” Vance said in an interview with the Review-Journal. “You should be able to build wealth and build a life. Kamala Harris’ policies have not made that possible, but Donald Trump’s policies will.”

Cole Parrish, 19, told the Review-Journal he volunteered for the Trump-Vance campaign because both he and Vance are Catholic.

“I really want to save our generation,” he said. “A lot of those kids are voting the opposite way. They don’t seek Jesus. They don’t seek the truth. … Our generation is in danger.”

Mark Flowers, 38, is part of a group of called “Gays for Trump.” The two issues that matter the most to Flowers in the upcoming election is border policy and cost of living.

“The border policy, that’s got to stop,” Flowers said. “It takes a lot of resources away, like stuff for the elderly. Everything costs so much. It’s so expensive, like groceries and gas. … I’m a veteran, so I like to work for a living and not accept handouts.”

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.

Staff writers Ricardo Torres-Cortez and Annie Vong contributed to this report.