Nevada: A Top Hispanic Media Group Was Set To Honor Catherine Cortez Masto With a Coveted Award. She Didn’t Even Show Up.

WFB: LAS VEGAS—Around 8:30 p.m. Friday night, three of Nevada’s top Latina Democrats posed arm-in-arm at the Factory of Dreams banquet hall in Las Vegas, with the women eager to show off their newly won Hispanic Community Leadership Appreciation Awards. But one honoree was missing from the photo op—Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D.), who snubbed the event.

Cortez Masto often invokes her status as “the first Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate” in her tight reelection bid against Republican Adam Laxalt, which could determine who controls the Senate next year. That title in part prompted El Concilio Hispano, a Hispanic media group that runs a top Latino talk radio program in Nevada, to honor the Democrat at its 2022 Hispanic Heritage Month Leadership Awards. The event’s other three guests of honor—Las Vegas city councilwoman Olivia Diaz, state assemblywoman and Nevada AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Susie Martinez (D.), and Lieutenant Governor Lisa Cano Burkhead (D.), who is also on the ballot this November—accepted their awards in person. Cortez Masto sent a surrogate.

Cortez Masto’s decision to ditch the event, which included an array of Hispanic community leaders, is a curious one with Election Day just weeks away. Hispanic voters may very well decide Cortez Masto’s political fate—roughly 20 percent of Nevada midterm voters are expected to be Latino, according to a National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials report. Years ago, that stat would have been music to Cortez Masto’s ears. The Democrat in 2016 enjoyed 61 percent of the Latino vote, exit polls show. Six years later, however, Cortez Masto’s Latino support appears to have diminished considerably as many working-class Nevadans sour on President Joe Biden’s economy. An October poll from USA Today and Suffolk University found that just 49 percent of Hispanic voters back Cortez Masto. more