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 Nevada, which is more than a quarter Latino, was one of the states
worst affected by the 2008 financial meltdown, with hundreds of
thousands of families unable to pay their mortgages and forced to
move in a crisis that by some estimates hit minorities twice as hard
as whites.
With the foreclosed homes often switching hands multiple times -
from homeowner to bank to investor and back to another homeowner in
just a few years - keeping up with voters who at some point lived in
those homes is difficult.
(For a graphic, click here: http://tmsnrt.rs/20OgmO4 )
The Nevada Democratic caucus on Feb. 20 has emerged as an unusually
important test of Sanders' and Clinton's political strength. Clinton
is under pressure to keep her wide lead among Latinos, while Sanders
must erode it to show he has a path to the nomination that does not
rely mainly on the young white voters who make up the core of his
support base.
"This ongoing (foreclosure) crisis makes reaching potential voters
more difficult," Sanders' campaign said in a statement emailed to
Reuters. The Clinton campaign said the voter lists supplied by the
Democratic Party needed "significantly" more work to update, forcing
them to spend valuable canvassing time building up their own private
data.
Las Vegas, Nevada's biggest city, has seen some of the country’s
highest foreclosure rates since 2008, hitting No. 1 among more than
200 U.S. metro areas from 2009 to 2011, according to RealtyTrac, a
provider of real estate data and analytics. Even now, the city and
its surrounding area rank No. 17.
Data that might have been corrected in the 2012 general election
has, in many cases, already fallen out of date again because the
Nevada housing market has continued to see wave after wave of
foreclosures, the campaigns said.
The Democratic party's voter file is based primarily on voter
registration records across the country. But the time between when a
person moves and when their voter registration file gets updated can
vary because different states and counties have different rules
about how to handle those changes, which are not automatic.
"Not just our modeling and turnout operation but our recruitment
operation is based on having very clean data," said Jorge Neri,
Clinton’s Nevada organizing director.
THE LIFEBLOOD OF CAMPAIGNS
Underscoring the problem, about a fifth of the 1 million voters
registered in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, are tagged
as inactive, according to Joseph Gloria, the county’s registrar of
voters - meaning their mail has been returned to the county
elections office as undeliverable.
Latinos make up almost 32 percent of Las Vegas.
Personal information on voters forms the lifeblood of modern
election campaigns. It can be used for just about every aspect of a
ground operation - from building the so-called turf packets that
volunteers scoop up to go knock on doors, to guiding the thousands
of phone calls made by volunteers.
Campaign strategy is often based on the voter file, which can tell a
campaign everything from where they need to turn up more supporters
to what areas they can consider strongholds – or weak points.
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Clinton staffers first arrived in Nevada last April, campaign
officials said, targeting the state early because it has the third
nominating contest in the presidential race for the Democrats.
But because so much of the file was out of date, the Clinton
campaign had to work harder just to find voters and make sure their
information was correct. Door knocking, for example, was often much
more time consuming: People listed at certain addresses might have
moved, requiring volunteers to engage with new residents from
scratch and, perhaps, find out where the previous occupants had
gone.
That brand-new information, in turn, created more work as volunteers
were forced to spend time inputting the new information into the
campaign’s own database.
The problem complicated normal operations, Neri said. "Had we had
cleaner lists, had we had not such a transient population, we would
be focused more on the volunteer recruitment," he said.
The Sanders campaign is also knocking on doors and phone banking,
said Joan Kato, the state director. But, she added, the campaign was
using community outreach efforts too, such as house parties and
speaking to student groups, to gather data from attendees. Kato did
not say how much extra work the voter file problem had created for
the campaign.
Latinos make up about 27 percent of Nevada's population and they
lean heavily Democrat, meaning they are a prize voter bloc for
Clinton and Sanders.
There hasn't been enough polling in Nevada recently to show who is
ahead among Latinos. But nationally Clinton has the advantage: Among
Latinos who describe themselves as Democrats, 54 percent support
Clinton and 37 percent back Sanders, according to Reuters/Ipsos
polling from Oct. 1 to Feb. 12.
Latino Decisions, a polling and research firm, said Latinos are
expected to form up to 20 percent of the voters in Nevada this year
up from 8.4 percent in 2012, as tallied by Pew Research Center.
The importance of a good voter file can't be underestimated,
according to Ethan Roeder, who was President Barack Obama's data
director in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
"You can run a campaign without a voter file. You just can’t run a
successful campaign," he said.
(Additional reporting by Chris Kahn, editing by Richard Valdmanis
and Ross Colvin)
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