Battleground Nevada holds its purple hue, as Republican ‘red wave’ fails to gain traction in midterm elections
#In the weeks before Election Day, Republicans across the country and in Nevada appeared poised for significant victories, buoyed by polls indicating GOP wins up and down the ticket.
#But as election returns slowly rolled in across the Silver State, the much-hyped red wave never materialized.
#Democratic incumbents in the Silver State emerged victorious in the U.S. Senate, three competitive congressional races and multiple statewide offices. Democrats also maintained and grew their control of the Legislature, gaining a supermajority in the Assembly and acquiring one additional seat in the state Senate.
#Out of all of the top-of-the-ticket races, Republicans only won one — with Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo’s victory in the governor’s race (Republicans also won in the Lieutenant Governor and Controller races).
#The election results, however, didn’t reflect the 2018 blue wave when Democrats won decisively in races that were supposed to be close. Nevada’s large segment of moderate and nonpartisan voters proved to be far from monolithic.
#Out of more than 1 million ballots cast in Nevada, thousands of voters made choices that defied party lines in the top-ticket races. These split-ticket voters propelled a Democrat to victory in the Senate race while replacing the state’s first Democrat-elected governor in more than two decades with a Republican.
#Despite issues with the economy and high inflation rates looming over the election, results and interviews with voters, political analysts and organizers indicate that many voters were motivated to protect abortion rights at the federal level. But with abortion access already codified in state law, the issue had lower stakes in down-ballot races such as the governor’s race.
#A Democrat in the Senate, a Republican in the governor’s mansion
#Though it took three days to call the race for governor and four to call the race for Senate, the results remained clear: a hair’s breadth separating the winners at the top of the statewide ticket.
#Cortez Masto defeated her Republican opponent, Adam Laxalt, by nearly 8,000 votes, and Lombardo bested Sisolak by more than 15,000 votes. Less than 0.7 percentage points separated the Senate race, with a 1.5 point margin in the gubernatorial race. The governor’s race also saw a higher share of voters who selected a third-party candidate or the “none of these candidates” option than in the Senate race.
#So how did a Democrat win one race, while the Republican candidate won the other?
#By the raw vote counts, Cortez Masto far outperformed Sisolak in Clark County — urban Las Vegas, a reliable Democratic stronghold and home to more than two-thirds of Nevada voters that has delivered the party its most significant wins with the vaunted “Clark firewall.”
#Shorthand for a winning margin of roughly 10 percent, the firewall has traditionally served as the necessary margin needed to offset the Republican spread through the rest of Nevada’s 16 counties, of which all but Washoe tilt reliably red.
#Such was the case in 2018, when Sisolak won the county by more than 86,000 votes in a race against Laxalt, then the state attorney general. But the firewall crumbled for Sisolak this year, when he received just 39,000 more votes than Lombardo — a known entity after two elected terms in charge of one of the country’s most high-profile police departments — in Clark.
#Cortez Masto, by contrast, beat Laxalt in Clark this year by roughly 53,000 votes — a margin of less than 8 percent. Though she received roughly 14,000 more raw votes than Sisolak, it was an underperformance relative to Joe Biden, who beat Trump in Clark by 9.4 points in 2020. Here, too, the Democrats’ firewall began to show cracks.
#In its place: a blue Washoe County. Northern Nevada’s most populous county backed Cortez Masto by a 4.43 percent margin, a difference of roughly 8,615 votes, and a tally nearly equal to the Democratic incumbent’s winning margin.
#And like in Clark, thousands of Washoe voters rejected the governor where they had backed the senator. Sisolak won Washoe by just 1.44 points, or 2,784 votes.
#How the Senate was held
#The loss of the Senate race, in particular, came as a surprise to a GOP that had oriented itself around flipping control of the U.S. Senate with a win in Nevada.
#Their chosen candidate, Laxalt, had entered the race as a foregone conclusion in the summer of 2021, after which he quickly earned the backing of former President Donald Trump and the financial support of the Republican establishment.
#For nearly all of the 2022 cycle, Laxalt and the Republican campaign apparatus more broadly sought to pressure Cortez Masto for her proximity to an increasingly unpopular Biden White House.
#“Nevada feels the economic factors more than any other state in the country,” Jeremy Hughes, a longtime Republican strategist in Nevada, told The Nevada Independent just days before the election. “And voters blame Joe Biden for those [factors] and believe Republicans will do a better job on the economy than Democrats.”
#Throughout the year, President Joe Biden’s approval rating hovered in the low 40s or high 30s. Meanwhile, Laxalt and Republican super PACs called Cortez Masto a “rubber stamp” for the Biden agenda, and cast her as the “deciding vote” on major legislative tent poles such as the Inflation Reduction Act and American Rescue Plan.
#On the periphery, Laxalt and Republicans also attacked Cortez Masto on crime and on immigration, often seeking to undermine the incumbent with her support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 or criticisms of “open borders.”
#Cortez Masto and her allies, by contrast, sought to make the election about all but the economy. They hammered Laxalt, flooding airwaves, mailboxes and the internet with ad after ad on abortion access — especially following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Her campaign also targeted Laxalt’s relationship to the oil industry and his links to Trump-backed election denialism and, by proxy, the Jan. 6 insurrection.
#These moves were backed by a historically large amount of money for Nevada politics.
#Cortez Masto, alone, set fundraising records quarter after quarter, cumulatively banking more than $54.5 million through mid-October, according to the most recent campaign finance filings with the Federal Election Commission. Laxalt, by contrast, raised just under $15.8 million.
#Cortez Masto was then boosted by tens of millions in super PAC spending, including $42.3 million from Senate Majority PAC, the Democrats’ chief super PAC.
#That funding difference was made manifest in the earliest days of the general election, as Cortez Masto began running negative ads on Laxalt just one day after the primary election in June.
#Laxalt, by contrast, saw a late-campaign boost from his own group of supportive super PACs. Though the most significant spending came via $28 million from the Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP’s top super PAC tied to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, he also saw a boost from $12 million from the Club for Growth, a billionaire-backed super PAC long aligned with the Republican Party’s economic conservative wing.
#But as the airwaves grew thick with attack ads, the Democratic ground machine accelerated its operation with a focus on blunting the damage increasingly poor economic conditions might do to what was expected to be already-low turnout for a midterm.
#That includes, notably, the Culinary Workers Union, long one of the most powerful political forces in Nevada and a driver of Democratic turnout in Las Vegas. Mobilizing a small army of volunteer canvassers in both Clark and Washoe counties, the union touted knocking on more than 1 million doors in 2022 — an increase from its previous high, 650,000, in 2020 — with a focus on housing affordability issues.
#But as Election Day drew closer, Democrats also began intensifying attacks related to election denialism and the 2020 presidential election. Cortez Masto’s campaign, for instance, began running ads about lawsuits Laxalt backed.
#Laxalt had softened his own stance on challenging the 2022 election results. He told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in October that Biden was legitimately elected, and the Reno Gazette-Journal that he would accept the results of the election.
#It was a marked shift from Laxalt’s early campaign, which centered criticisms of Nevada’s switch to all-mail voting as designed “in the middle of the night” to give Biden a “leg up,” and which touted efforts to sue over election results early, in part because 2020 election lawsuits came “too late.”
#When Laxalt eventually conceded the race — nearly three days after media outlets called it for Cortez Masto — he did not appear to embrace a narrative of fraud, saying “we need to better adjust to our new election laws or we need to work to fix them.”
#How the governor’s mansion was flipped
#In the governor’s race, the Democratic incumbent similarly had a major financial advantage, with Sisolak spending $13.5 million over the course of 2022, compared with $4.8 million for Lombardo. But spending from outside groups, including the Republican Governors Association (RGA), helped even the playing field. In late September, general election spending in the governor’s race totaling $54 million was nearly evenly split between the two sides, according to data from political ad tracking firm AdImpact.
#RGA spokeswoman Maddie Anderson told The Nevada Independent in a statement that the group’s “independent expenditure effort in the Nevada governor’s race was the largest in RGA history.” She added that Lombardo “stayed focused on the economic issues” throughout his campaign.
#Lombardo’s campaign also received a significant boost from Robert Bigelow, a Republican mega donor and the owner of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain. Bigelow gave $12.3 million to the RGA, as well as more than $13 million to a pair of Nevada PACs supporting Lombardo and several down-ballot Republican candidates.
#Several split-ticket voters interviewed for this story also pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which encompassed more than half of Sisolak’s term as governor, as playing a decisive role in separating him from Cortez Masto.
#Democrat David Dudar, 58, voted for Cortez Masto in the Senate race, but selected “none of these candidates” in the governor’s race. Despite sharing ideological similarities with Sisolak, Dudar said he couldn’t bring himself to pull the lever for the governor, mainly because of troubles with the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) that took place during the pandemic.
#Dudar, who works as a photographer and a ride-share driver, said it was Sisolak’s handling of DETR and problems with the state system for unemployment insurance that caused him mountains of paperwork, fraud charges and uncertainty that led him to mark “none of the above” on that portion of his ballot.
#“I would start using Tabasco as a contact lens solution before I voted for Sisolak,” Dudar said. “There were hundreds of thousands of Nevadans who did nothing other than slam into a pandemic. And then they got called ‘potential fraud.’ You were guilty until you were proven innocent in terms of getting your claims.”
#He added that his frustrations about the bureaucracy around the DETR claims process did not stem from Sisolak’s decisions to shut down the casinos during the pandemic or implement other COVID prevention measures.
#Though Cortez Masto backed major federal spending bills and legislation aimed at addressing the economic and public health effects of the pandemic, Sisolak became the public face of Nevada’s response to the pandemic, making decisions regarding the closures of businesses and capacity limits for public activities.
#Throughout his campaign, Sisolak defended his decision-making early in the pandemic when little was known about the spread of the virus. During an October debate against Lombardo, he tied his decision to shut down the Strip and “non-essential” business to expectations that the pandemic could lead to a high death toll.
#But with Nevada’s economy devastated by the pandemic — in April 2020, the state’s unemployment rate shot to a record high of nearly 30 percent, higher than in any other state — voters expressed dissatisfaction over Sisolak’s handling of the pandemic.
#Scott Sawamura, a 29-year-old travel nurse from Reno and a registered Republican, said he voted for both Cortez Masto and Lombardo, pointing to the negative effects of pandemic-era shutdowns on the economy and the state’s education system behind his choice in the governor’s race.
#That dovetailed with an assessment of the race from Chris Sloan, senior campaign advisor for the Democratic Governors Association. Sloan, in a statement to The Nevada Independent, pointed to a combination of three factors that proved to be too much to overcome for Sisolak, including “the fallout from the pandemic,” Lombardo’s name recognition in Clark County, where he won multiple county wide elections for sheriff, and massive amount of money poured into the race in support of Lombardo by a single donor (Bigelow).