STEVE SEBELIUS: Will reality bite Democrats in a month?

On Thursday, a reporter asked U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto about an enthusiasm gap for Democrats, just a month before the 2022 general election.

“You know, in Nevada, there’s enthusiasm,” Cortez Masto replied. “The people that I talk to, the Nevadans that I would hear from every single day, they are paying attention to all these issues.”

Whether that was an assertion of fact or a hopeful prayer, it’s clear Democrats are not where they’d like to be with less than a month to go until Election Day. Most public polls show the top two races on the ballot are within error margins. And national reporters aren’t helping by penning stories about the plight of national Democrats writ upon the canvass of the Silver State.

Although Nevada has trended blue for most of the last decade, it’s far from a solid blue state. In fact, most statewide, top-of-the-ticket races in Nevada in the past 10 years have been decided by margins of 68,000 or fewer votes statewide. (That doesn’t include the political juggernaut that was former Gov. Brian Sandoval, who posted an 84,000-vote win in 2010 and an unbelievable 255,618-vote margin in 2014 against an opponent who had lost his primary to “None of These Candidates.”)

And when you subtract Sandoval and the equally popular former President Barack Obama from the mix, margins shrink even further, to between 49,000 and 12,000 votes. Landslides, they are not.

The New York Times, in a recent analysis of the state of play in Nevada, noted that this was the first election cycle when the vaunted Reid machine would be without its founder and patron. After the Nevada State Democratic Party was taken over by progressive activists in March 2021 — and was scarcely heard from again — the former staffers of the Reid machine formed their own group, to do the job that would have (and should have) been done by the party itself.

The extent to which the party-in-exile, now known as Nevada Democratic Victory, can turn out voters against a background of discontent fed by inflation, high gasoline prices, big grocery bills and dissatisfaction with the man at the top, Joe Biden, will be its toughest task yet.

And judgment will be swift: If Democrats lose all or even some of the congressional seats in the South, the 2021 redistricting plan rammed and jammed through the Legislature by Nevada Democrats and Gov. Steve Sisolak will be the cause of much second-guessing. And if they lose all the major races at the top of the ticket, Nevada’s 2024 prospects of being an early state on the Democratic Party’s nominating calendar could be tarnished as well.

And then there’s the Democrat’s nightmare scenario outlined by NBC News: the prospect of Latino voters — whom Democrats badly need to win — staying home out of frustration with jobs and the economy, or switching their votes to the GOP thanks to a renewed effort to court Hispanics. That brings to mind the disastrous 2014 election, in which many Democrats stayed home and the politically powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226 didn’t deploy its usual ground game until too late. The result: Republican wins from top to bottom, including the loss of the Legislature and every constitutional office.

That may not be the outcome this time around, but make no mistake: Republicans could foreseeably win the U.S. Senate race, the governor’s race, at least one of the U.S. House races and even a couple constitutional offices. And that prospect has to have Democrats worried as Election Day nears.

There are some X-factors, such as abortion, which was only a theoretical threat to Nevada until U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., proposed a national 15-week ban that would override Nevada’s voter-approved abortion rights law.

And there are the ballot initiatives, which function these days as get-out-the-vote tools: Question 1 promises to create an equal rights amendment in the Nevada Constitution, and Question 2 offers a $12 minimum wage in the state, which may excite some voters, although those questions have hardly been mentioned amid the rest of the political tumult.

But, as both the Times and NBC News pointed out, Democrats face a classic conundrum: the reality that voters see and experience every day, versus their message of recent accomplishments that will lead to better times ahead. In that matchup, even in a state with a history of close elections that leans slightly blue, reality wins every time.

Contact Steve Sebelius at SSebelius@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253. Follow @SteveSebelius on Twitter.