RENO, Nevada — Jim DeMartini bought his new McLaren free of charge. Or not less than, that’s how he’s labored out the maths in his head.
“I used to be paying $200,000 a yr in state earnings tax [in California],” he tells me at his kitchen desk of his dwelling within the foothills of western Reno. “I paid $440,000 for that automobile, and two years dwelling right here, we bought it free of charge, proper?”
For 46 years, earlier than he settled in Nevada, DeMartini operated a farm that at its peak totaled 1,100 acres exterior of Modesto, California. However in 2020, he picked up and moved throughout state traces.
“California simply bought to be a communist state,” he instructed me. “[It was] Kamala Harris, it was Governor Newsom, it was a leftist, anti-business legislature who simply felt they needed to management the whole lot. They even went as far as banning straws.”
Strolling via the entrance door of DeMartini’s palatial dwelling confirms his political get together of alternative. He has two big, metallic elephants guarding the doorway, like sentinels on watch. A hat resting on a coat hanger reads “I’m voting for the convicted felon.” Mail aimed toward Trump supporters dots his kitchen desk. All that, in fact, is in the event you missed the Trump flag on the veranda and the Trump indicators in his driveway.
DeMartini is a part of a rising demographic that would jeopardize Harris’ probabilities of successful this battleground state: Ex-Californians who hate their former dwelling state’s politics.
Since 2020 alone, over 150,000 Californians have moved to Nevada — California expats right this moment make up over 20 p.c of Nevada’s inhabitants. County to county migration flows from the final census present that of the highest 16 counties supplying new residents to Reno’s Washoe County, 11 of them are in California.
It’s not clear precisely what number of of those voters are Republicans. Nevada definitely has its fair proportion of California liberals who’ve moved into the state — many conservatives right here complain that liberal “refugees from Commie-fornia” have pushed Nevada politics leftward over the previous twenty years.
However the hole between registered Republicans and Democrats within the state has shrunk from 111,000 in 2020 to 71,000 in 2023, and the variety of nonpartisan voters has exploded. In a state that was determined by lower than 34,000 votes in 2020, a bloc of extremely motivated, California-hating ex-Californians with an axe to grind might play a pivotal position in shaping the end result this yr.
“I feel ex-Californians might definitely be a big assist [to making Nevada red in November],” says Nevada Republican State Sen. Jeff Stone — a former California state legislator who now runs the web site “Assist Me Flee California.” “They will additionally clarify to Nevadans what Kamala Harris did as a district lawyer in San Francisco, because the lawyer basic within the state of California.”
Not like Las Vegas, Nevada’s largest metropolis, Reno exists within the shadow of California. It’s lower than an hour’s drive from the California facet of Lake Tahoe, dwelling to tony ski resorts, multimillion greenback houses dotting the panorama and a complete lot of Harris/Walz garden indicators. For a lot of California refugees, they’ve discovered a brand new, extra accommodating dwelling right here that’s inside spitting (or driving) distance of their previous one.
On the outskirts of Reno, a tech increase spurred on by a Tesla gigafactory has introduced a collection of younger, typically Democratic tech professionals to the state. However the metropolis and the state are additionally dwelling to a rising variety of Republicans, a lot of whom are tax refugees or see Nevada GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo’s victory in 2022 as a welcome signal that the state is trending proper.
Joe Dutra, the self-proclaimed “cowboy Willy Wonka of Nevada,” is a kind of Republicans. He comes from a household whose Sacramento roots date again to the 1800s. When he began his sweet enterprise, he did so out of the again of a 20-foot trailer in California’s capital metropolis, packing up chocolate-covered sunflower seeds. In 2006, although, because the enterprise was rising and California taxes have been getting onerous, Dutra purchased a constructing in Reno to facilitate a budding sweet empire that he thought he might sooner or later hand over to his youngsters.
Now, after some massive upgrades, he has a 47,000-square-foot manufacturing facility producing vats of sweet in Reno day-after-day — and he says he might must increase much more quickly.
“In California, you have been only a enterprise,” Dutra says in his workplace, which is adorned with photographs of him assembly politicians of each events, together with Donald Trump in 2017, and a hat that reads ‘Make Sweet Nice Once more.’ “Right here, you’re any person that’s bringing jobs to the neighborhood … [Nevada’s government] was straightforward to work with, as in comparison with doing one thing in California.”
In line with Dutra, most ex-California enterprise individuals he is aware of are similar to him — staunch Republicans who “simply imagine in much less laws and decrease taxes.” And he thinks there are extra of these reliably Republican voters right here now than ever earlier than.
“I feel I’ve seen much more individuals shifting out within the final 4 years,” he says. “It’s been a giant push.”
Chuck Muth, a longtime Republican marketing consultant in Nevada, thinks these voters exited the state exactly to get away from California politicians like Harris. “There are Californians who fled California and moved to Nevada as a result of they needed to get away from [Harris’] varieties of insurance policies … there completely is potential in a messaging marketing campaign that means, ‘hey, that is what you fled in California, you positive as hell don’t need it in Washington, D.C.’”
Nevada hasn’t precisely welcomed the flood of Californians with welcome arms. Many listed here are satisfied the newcomers are driving up housing costs, exacerbating social ills and even driving like maniacs. T-shirts and bumper stickers in downtown Reno learn “Don’t California My Nevada.” A ballot carried out earlier this yr confirmed that 51 p.c of Nevada residents stated the federal government ought to make it tougher for Californians to maneuver into their state.
“We bought to a sign gentle after we first moved right here [in 2009], and there was a automobile in entrance of us and it had a bumper sticker,” Kathy Benson, a retired CPA initially from the Bay Space, instructed me within the patio of Centro Bar & Kitchen, a small-plate restaurant in downtown Reno. “The bumper sticker stated ‘we don’t give a shit how you probably did it in California.’ So [my husband] and I checked out one another and stated ‘we’re going to like this state.’”
Nevada Republicans see this group as ripe for Trump’s message — and primed to vote in opposition to Harris, a former California senator and lawyer basic. Trump has been unstinting in his criticism of California’s governance, regularly attacking California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and validating the newcomers’ choices to flee California’s excessive state earnings taxes for a state with none, and its liberal state authorities for one headed by a Republican governor.
All of it dovetails with nationwide Republican messaging attacking Harris particularly for her “California-ness,” calling her a “California radical” and a “San Francisco liberal.”
“I feel the theme of the message is, do you need to ‘California’ the USA? It’s the best way most cancers metastasizes,” says Stone. “Folks have been uninterested in it, and they also’re coming right here, they usually’re telling their neighbors why they moved right here. And I feel it is having an impact on individuals that do not have firsthand information of what Kamala Harris has stood for and what she’s performed up to now to say no the standard of lifetime of people who reside in California.”
That’s a message that the Republican Celebration and the Trump marketing campaign in Nevada are hitting as nicely. In mailers, they’ve singled out insurance policies from her time as San Francisco district lawyer and California lawyer basic in an try to show simply how liberal she is, together with her opposition to hid carry permits and her “protect[ing] of convicted crack sellers.”
“I really imagine that the individuals which can be shifting from California may help flip the state [red],” says Erica Neely, who grew up in south central Los Angeles however is now a Nevada resident working for the state Meeting.
Her marketing campaign for workplace highlights how Nevada is starting to look extra just like the troubled, high-cost-of-living state she fled. On her marketing campaign web site, Neely options an article that speaks on to her message: “Escaped from California: I am Working to Save Nevada from the Identical Destiny.”
Stone insists Harris is inextricably tied to her dwelling state in native voters’ minds, regardless of successful election as vice chairman 4 years in the past.
“[Crime in San Francisco] is a shining instance of one in all California’s failures, and it’s bought Kamala Harris’s title written throughout it,” he instructed me. “And so there’s a deep affiliation with the failures of San Francisco and Kamala Harris, and I feel these are going for use in opposition to her as she runs for president of the USA.”
