PAROCHIAL POLITICS — Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t been very forthcoming with policy proposals so far, but this weekend she laid down one clear campaign promise: No more taxes on tips for service or hospitality workers. During a stop in Las Vegas during her swing state tour, buttressed by members of the city’s powerful Culinary Union — which endorsed her less than a day prior — Harris laid out the plan, pitched as a boost for the bottom line of many of the state’s residents. The issue is no small matter in Nevada. A 2023 report showed that 43 percent of Nevada’s gross domestic product is generated by the state’s tourism industry, centered around Las Vegas and staffed by a veritable army of service workers who live in and around the city. The supremacy of the industry — and the downstream effect of many of the state’s jobs catering to hospitality — means that many of the voters in the swing state are particularly concerned with how their taxes are broken up between tips and other wages. The Nevada-friendly proposal represents a familiar presidential election year feature: the parochial state priority that shapes national policy outcomes. Former President Donald Trump was actually the first in the campaign to endorse the no taxes on tips concept. In a peevish response to Harris’ plan on Truth Social , Trump wrote that “this was a TRUMP idea - She has no ideas, she can only steal from me.”
PROPOSED BY ALEX ACOSTA THE CLOWN WHO NEGOTIATED JEFFREY EPSTEIN'S CUSHY PRISON DEAL... Trump's New Rule Could Take Billions in Tips From Workers and Give It to Their Bosses
The proposal, however, is less about good policy than the politics of winning a key swing state. Nevada was decided by just 27,000 votes in 2016. In 2020, it was decided by 34,000. If modern presidential elections are won among a sliver of voters in a sliver of swing states, then it makes political sense to cater to the interests of those battleground states — even if some economists and tax-policy experts worry that halting taxation on tips will have little impact on the taxes that service workers pay while hampering their longer term eligibility for programs like Medicare and Social Security. It’s a feature, not a bug, of the presidential landscape. Before the no taxes on tips proposal, White House hopefuls were forced to pay lip service to a potential nuclear waste site in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, located just about 100 miles from Vegas, or suffer the consequences. In 2008, Hillary Clinton ran ads suggesting she was the only Democratic candidate who could be trusted to shut it down. In 2020, after Trump’s own energy department put together plans to make Yucca Mountain a permanent nuclear waste site, Trump himself appeared to reverse course in a tweet . This year, Harris’ changed circumstances appear to have colored her judgment in Pennsylvania, one of the fracking hubs of the U.S. In the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris came out against fracking as much of the Democratic field raced to capture a resurgent left wing of the party. But in 2024, with the left exerting less influence over the party and — more importantly — with Pennsylvania emerging as the most essential swing state, Harris quickly insisted that her views had evolved on the issue. If Iowa and Florida were more competitive this year, it’s likely there would be a more fulsome discussion of their hot-button issues. Iowa’s position as a key early presidential state has long influenced ethanol policy — Iowa is the top corn producing state in the nation — just as American policy toward Cuba has long been shaped by Florida’s treasure trove of electoral votes. After President Barack Obama attempted to normalize relations with Cuba’s government, Cuban Americans who live largely in South Florida — and have no love for Cuba’s dictatorship — mostly shifted towards Trump, who thrust the U.S. and Cuba back into a period of hostility during his time in office. As Harris’ policy platform trickles out ahead of the DNC, it’s worth paying attention to what her priorities are and where she’s announcing what — necessity is the mother of political reinvention. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
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