LAS VEGAS — Drag performers led revelers at “the gayest destination” on the Vegas Strip to fete Kamala Harris at a campaign event Saturday in battleground Nevada, where Donald Trump leads by as much as 9 points.
A crowd of about 100 supporters gathered for bingo in the veep’s honor at the Queen Bar Las Vegas, a hot spot adjacent to the Viva Las Vegas drive-thru wedding chapel, where a woman in a translucent wedding minidress and veil stood outside as the campaign festivities got under way next-door.
“A lot of drag queens — we’re very important,” said Angel, the Harris event’s MC and a drag performer.
“I think we are like the voices of our community,” Angel said. “So I think that we as queens owe it to share our voice and encourage people to share theirs and get out and vote.”
Angel said the “overwhelming amount of support that’s come in within the hours” after President Biden dropped out of the race and Harris announced her presidential bid “makes me feel a lot more hopeful” about Democrats retaining the White House.
The performer did a searing dance to kick off the evening, while two other performers shimmied and cheered along with the audience. Angel soon started calling bingo numbers, with prizes of wine and a whiffle ball paddle on offer.
But behind the festivities — which did not visibly include children in the audience — the enthusiasm for Harris bumped up against potentially bruising reality.
Decision Desk HQ disclosed the major polling gap between the two candidates — a difference of up to 9 points — in this crucial swing state in a post on X. RealClearPolling’s July 21average of battleground polls puts Trump ahead 5.6 points in Nevada.
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), a national Harris campaign surrogate, said he came to the Vegas event to inspire voter turnout.
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“We’re here for a ‘Drag Bingo Night,’ which just shows that in this campaign, we’re going everywhere to organize, and we’re going to organize anywhere,” he told The Post after a rousing speech followed by a string of photo-posing with supporters.
Frost told the crowd he “used to” call his home “the great state of Florida” but now maintains it’s lost its luster under the administration of GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who the audience booed.
“Yeah, f–king boo,” the congressman said.
He excoriated state “leaders who, because of their failures, want to blame the people’s problems on marginalized communities,” including immigrants, black people “and, yes, the queer community in the state of Florida.
“You know, the rightwing wants to act like they’re the patriots … Patriotism is beer, bald eagle and plaid. That’s bulls–t,” Frost said.
Instead, he argued, “[p]atriotism is loving the people who live in the country, and I don’t know about you, but in the face of adversity, tell me a community that knows more about love than the LGBTQ+ community.”
The freshman Democrat urged the crowd to “use every tool in our toolbox, and we will win this race.
“We will reject fascism in the form of Donald Trump, and we will elect Kamala Harris,” he promised.
Frost said he believes a Harris victory is at hand despite Silver State polling that shows Trump with a solid lead outside the margin of error.
“I know we’re going to win if we just look at No. 1, the energy, and we look at the trajectory and the trends,” he said. “If we continue this work — which we will — she will win the campaign.”
Longtime Harris supporter Chris Miller, a Las Vegas real-estate agent who sported a rainbow-hued “Kamala” baseball cap at the event, praised her “no-nonsense, get-it-done approach to government.”
He said he believes that Harris will triumph in Nevada despite the poll numbers, explaining that polling in the Silver State is “extremely hard” because it is difficult to get accurate numbers from Nevada’s rural areas.
“I don’t have a lot of faith in polls these days,” Miller said. “Polls have misread a ton of elections.”