LAS VEGAS — Almost every imaginable convention has found its way to the Strip. There have been gatherings devoted to electronics, pizza, computers, kitchen equipment and concrete — not to mention guns, butter and pornography. But in the more than a century that there has been a Las Vegas, the city has never hosted a national political convention. Republicans and Democrats have kept their distance from a place that proudly has claimed the mantle of Sin City.

Now a group of Las Vegas civic leaders and Republican donors — among them, Sheldon G. Adelson, a casino owner who spent at least $98 million on Republican candidates in 2012 — are out to change that by starting a campaign to persuade the party to bring its 2016 convention to the Las Vegas Strip.

“Vegas has pitched us earlier and more aggressively than any city since I’ve been on the committee,” said Henry Barbour of Mississippi, who has been a committee member since 2005, as he recounted daily calls, emails and face-to-face conversations with the team that calls itself LV2016.

The prospect of the Republican Party, which for more than a generation has been identified with Christian conservatives and moral causes, choosing its next president on the Strip comes as Las Vegas is entering a new middle age, eager to broaden its identification beyond gambling, sex, alcohol and everything else that puts the sin in Sin City.