Brookings Mountain West News
Current Brookings Mountain West News
A collection of stories highlighting UNLV experts and their analysis of all things politics in 2020.
Great places are made of great people. Here are a few who made the news in 2020.
A collection of news stories highlighting the election, COVID-19, and scientific discovery at UNLV.
UNLV students share their stories in a thought-provoking Brookings podcast series exploring immigration in the U.S.
A collection of news stories highlighting UNLV’s commitment to community, health care, and research.
UNLV research team explores the population and politics of 13 swing states, pushing beyond the old blue state-red state model and painting a new picture where changing suburbs influence outcomes.
Brookings Mountain West In The News
Nevada lawmakers hope this session will be the one where they resolve a “vexing” problem that has lingered since 2017 — it’s legal to consume marijuana recreationally, but not in a public place.
For decades, the order of the presidential primaries and caucuses has caused consternation.
As the United States prepares for a COVID-19 recovery, policymakers need to understand why some cities and communities were more vulnerable to the pandemic’s economic consequences than others. In this paper, we consider the association between a city’s core industry, its economic susceptibility to the pandemic, and the recession’s racially disparate impact across six select metropolitan areas. We find that areas with economies that rely on the movement of people—like Las Vegas with tourism—faced substantially higher unemployment at the end of 2020 than cities with core industries based on the movement of information. Further, we find the hardest-hit areas have larger Hispanic or Latino communities, reflecting the demographic composition of workers in heavily impacted industries and susceptible areas. We conclude by recommending targeted federal policy to address the regions and communities most impacted by the COVID-19 recession.
Last week, commotion broke out in North Ogden over Maria Montessori Academy’s decision allowing parents to opt out of a social studies unit spotlighting Black History Month. School director Micah Hirokawa “reluctantly” made this concession, yielding to parental pressure for exemption from the curriculum.
Overlapping geography with race reveals the pandemic recession’s dramatic economic impact on Hispanic or Latino communities, reports Brookings Mountain West in a report comparing a half-dozen U.S. metropolitan areas, including Las Vegas.
Since at least the 2000 presidential election, pundits, scholars, and the general public have conceptualized the country’s partisan landscape using the blue states, red states, and swing states framework. But despite its ubiquity, this structure ignores how intrastate regional tensions and political competition imbue the divisions between red and blue America. Differences within states also anchor the long-standing urban-rural divide—a salient feature of American politics since the country’s founding.
