Las Vegas: On a suburban street in Las Vegas, about 20 minutes from the neon-soaked hotels and casinos that draw in tens of millions of visitors every year, Maria Polanco and Brian Torres Suazo are going from house to house, trying to mobilise voters in the hope that Donald Trump never returns to power.

As the mercury rises to almost 40 degrees, plenty of doors are knocked, but few are opened. Then, just before the pair is due for lunch, a man wearing a singlet with the stars and stripes of the American flag comes out to get his mail, giving them a much-needed breakthrough.

“We’re from the Culinary Union, and we’re just gathering support for Kamala Harris – I promise we’re not selling anything,” Polanco, 52, says politely in Spanish, as she hands the somewhat sceptical resident a pamphlet spruiking the Democratic candidate.

“We just want to make sure you know about the election.”

With 35 days until Americans choose their next president – and polls suggesting Harris and Trump are currently neck and neck – Polanco and Suazo believe nothing should be left to chance, particularly in a critical battleground like Nevada.

After all, the so-called “Silver State” has leant left in recent years, but only by narrow margins, thanks to urban centres such as the largely Democratic Las Vegas and the evenly divided Reno, in the north-west.

But the bulk of Nevada is made up of smaller, rural areas that lean Republican, and a third of the state’s voters are registered independents.

This means either Trump or Harris could win in November depending on who can mobilise more people to turn up on election day to vote on issues that resonate.

And in a battleground fuelled by tourism, gaming and hospitality, few issues matter more to voters than the economy.

“Nevada’s DNA is tinted blue, but all the toplines point to the same conclusion: this race is extremely close,” says David Byler, the chief of research at Noble Predictive Insights, whose latest poll had Trump and Harris at 47 per cent each.

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll released last month, more than a quarter of Nevada voters named the economy as their top issue, citing it nearly twice as often as any other concern.

This is hardly surprising: Nevada has the highest petrol prices in the country (up to $US5 a gallon – or $1.91 a litre) and the second-highest grocery prices ($US294.76, or $425.44 on average per week).

Housing affordability is also an issue, partly due to the influx of people moving from neighbouring California, pushing up the median home price, which is now almost $US500,000 – an increase of 6 per cent since August last year.

And while the state has bounced back from the pandemic – which led to the unemployment soaring to a whopping 30 per cent at its peak – the collective trauma still lingers, particularly among the tens of thousands of hospitality workers who drive the local economy: from cooks to waitstaff to guest attendants.

Not surprisingly, both candidates have vowed to eliminate federal tax on tips, which could save the average server a few thousand dollars a year.

Trump led the charge in June, inspired, he said, by a conversation he’d had with a waitress in Las Vegas.

“For those hotel workers and people that get tips – you’re going to be very happy because, when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips!” he told a campaign rally a few weeks before President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.

Harris later followed suit, pairing the promise with a pledge to eliminate the sub-minimum wages that tipped employees are paid and to raise the federal minimum wage, which is $US7.25 an hour – although some states have raised their minimum wage beyond the federal amount (Nevada’s is now $US12 an hour).

But while “no tax on tips” makes a catchy slogan, experts say the policy is likely to prove ineffective, and would almost certainly need congressional approval to become a reality.

According to Yale University’s policy research centre, The Budget Lab, there were roughly 4 million workers in tip-reliant occupations in 2023 – which constitutes only 2½ per cent of all employment in the US.

What’s more, the vast majority of tipped workers make such little money that they don’t pay any federal income taxes under current law.

Polanco, who works as a cashier hostess at the Rio Hotel & Casino, says the promise to eliminate taxes on tips nonetheless resonates with many people in Las Vegas, who are struggling with cost-of-living pressures more broadly.

“I went to the store last night for an avocado and grabbed a few other small things too – some vegetables, a bit of meat and shrimp – and it cost over $US120,” she tells me as we traverse the palm lined streets of suburbia. “I said to my husband: that was an expensive avocado!”

But as a mother of three women aged 31, 26 and 22, Polanco says the issue motivating her the most this year is women’s reproductive health, an issue that exploded into the political discourse after the US Supreme Court – made up largely of Trump-appointed justices – overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.

“They’re trying to take away women’s rights, and I have three daughters and a granddaughter,” she says. “So that’s the reason I’m here, trying to fight for Kamala Harris to become president because I feel like she cares about women’s rights, and she’s going to protect ours.”

Suazo, 26, is a food runner at the Westgate Resort, about five kilometres from where Polanco works. He’s also a proud homeowner, something he says would not be possible without the help of his parents, who “raised me on a union pay cheque”.

“I’ve grown up knowing that it’s important to get out there and fight for workers’ rights,” he says. “That’s why I’m supporting the Democrats because they are the pro-union party in this country.”

Meanwhile, across the state in Reno – where Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch appeared in court to fight for the future of his company – Bob Conrad hopes that whoever wins office addresses an often ignored crisis: homelessness.

The editor of local publication This Is Reno still remembers moving to the city in 1990 as a graduate student for a place that cost about $US275 in monthly rent. Now, the same type of apartment goes for about $US1500.

But as higher rents and housing costs have priced more low-income residents out of their homes, successive governments have failed to tackle what he describes as a “very complex and severe problem”.

“The city was not prepared for the influx of people moving here,” says Conrad, who recently made a documentary, A City in Crisis, about the issue. “The infrastructure wasn’t keeping up, and still isn’t.”

Back in Las Vegas, it’s almost 8pm and Harris is on stage, making her economic pitch to voters in the same venue Trump held a rally two weeks earlier.

In addition to no taxes on tips, her yet-to-be-costed policies include increasing federal funding for affordable homes; boosting tax credits for people who spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent; and banning “price gouging” by food suppliers and grocery stores in a bid to lower the cost of food.

“As you say here in Las Vegas, I’m all in,” she told the crowd. “I will always fight for middle- and working-class families.”

Trump, meanwhile, spent the day in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, although his presence looms large in Nevada, too, in the form of the impossible-to-miss Trump International Hotel: a bright gold 64-storey building on Las Vegas’ Fashion Drive.

On Friday, an equally hard-to-miss 13-metre-tall nude statue of the former president was assembled – presumably as a new piece of art – just outside Las Vegas and now towers over Interstate 15 on the way to Utah.

In a bid to appeal to Nevadan voters, Trump has also pledged to deregulate industries and lower corporate taxes – something that would appeal to employers and to the state’s retail and tourism industries.

But as both candidates attempt to convince voters they are better placed to handle the economy, polls consistently show that more people trust Trump to do a better job than his Democratic rival.

“She’s young, strong, vigorous, and she’s a fighter, but the truth of the matter is that folks seem to think that Trump has the advantage when it comes to tackling the economy,” says Culinary Workers Union secretary-treasurer Ted Pappageorge, whose group has embarked on a mass mobilisation program, particularly targeting Nevada’s Latino, black and Asian communities.

If he were a gambler, would he put his chips on Harris to win?

“I think the election is completely up in the air right now, so we all need to do our job and get people out to vote. That’s the path to victory.”

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