Former President Donald Trump has won Nevada’s six electoral votes, becoming the first Republican to win the state in two decades and riding a wave of discontent over the economy and an embrace of voting methods that Nevada Republicans have previously eschewed.
Nevada, with its six electoral votes, proved not to be a decider — Trump appears to have swept the seven swing states, with races called for him in all but Michigan and Arizona, where he currently leads.
Despite losing his prior two attempts in 2016 and 2020 — by margins of about 2.5 percent both times — Trump, bolstered by strong turnout among registered Republicans and the erosion of Democrats’ traditional advantage in populous Clark County, finally won the Silver State on his third try.
The race against Vice President Kamala Harris was seen as a dead heat in the Silver State, and while the final margin is yet to be decided, Trump appears to have won relatively comfortably. While Harris leads in Clark County, Trump’s performance in the populous vote center appears to be Republicans’ strongest in recent memory. Republicans had been optimistic about their chances in the past couple of weeks, buoyed by strong early voting and mail voting turnout after the party finally embraced the legal voting methods after years of casting doubt on their reliability.
Trump’s victory was also bolstered by high turnout in Nevada’s 15 rural counties, which are heavily Republican and offset Harris’ marginal lead in Clark County. And he leads in Washoe County — typically a bellwether — by about 2.5 percent points. By comparison, Biden won the county in 2020 by 4.5 percent.
Though counting in the state still continues, Trump’s margin of victory stands at close to 5 percent. Even though there are outstanding mail votes in Clark County, Harris will not be able to make up the deficit, given the size of Trump’s lead.
After the initial ballot dump of just over 1 million votes, the race was too close to call, with Trump leading by 2.7 percentage points. But as more votes trickled in from rural counties — where Trump dominated — and new results from Clark and Washoe came in, it became clear that Harris was not seeing the margins in the state’s urban areas that she would need to overcome Trump’s lead. Instead, they grew.
The Trump victory represents an exciting moment for Nevada Republicans. Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald, who has supported Trump through all three of his presidential runs and even attempted to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf, congratulated the former president.
“It has been an honor of my life to be by your side since 2015,” McDonald wrote on X. “This has been one hell of a ride.”
Throughout the cycle, Trump made frequent appearances to Nevada, with most of his rallies featuring his freewheeling style of hurling insults, doubling down on anti-immigrant rhetoric and mixing anecdotes with vague policy proposals, such as slashing energy bills in half within a year or immediately ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. However, at a Las Vegas rally in June, he made a notable pledge to end taxes on tipped wages, an effort to win over the state’s thousands of hospitality workers, and Harris followed suit months later.
Despite the Harris campaign’s significant financial advantage — Democrats outspent Republicans in the presidential race in Nevada by a more than 2-to-1 margin — Trump campaign officials were confident that the fundamentals of the race favored them. Nevada has persistently had the highest unemployment rate in the country throughout Biden’s term, a trend of rising housing costs exacerbated by the pandemic and continual voter frustration over inflation.
The Trump campaign also believed that his message would resonate more with voters of color — particularly Latino men — in the majority-minority state than it had in elections past.
Though Democrats have traditionally benefited from a superior ground game, Nevada Republicans had been increasingly encouraged by election results since 2020. Nevada was the only state where Democratic President Joe Biden won but did not improve on 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton’s margins; the percentage of college-educated voters — among Democrats’ best-performing demographic groups — is lower in Nevada than any other swing state.
And with a Trump sweep of the swing states likely, it appears that strong Democratic ground games — in Nevada and elsewhere — were not the salve that Democrats were hoping it would be.
And the Trump campaign and state surrogates fully embraced early voting, encouraging Republicans to “bank [their votes]” early, which helped the party build a significant lead as a majority of votes poured in in the pre-Election Day period.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo’s 2022 victory, despite the low turnout, provided a pathway for Republican statewide wins — keep the Democratic margin of victory in populous Clark County low, keep Washoe County competitive if not win it outright and run up the score in the red rural areas. Trump replicated that formula — and appears to have overperformed Lombardo’s 1.5 percent victory, a function of much higher turnout and improvement in Clark County.
Trump’s victory was propelled by a surge in the share of voters who are registered as Republicans since his defeat by about 33,000 votes four years ago. At the time, Democrats had a roughly 5 percentage point registration advantage that has since fallen to less than a percentage point. A plurality of the 2024 electorate is now registered as nonpartisan, a result of the state’s implementation of automatic voter registration in 2020, with the default option being nonpartisan.
While it is unclear exactly how registered nonpartisans split their votes, Democrats’ confidence that the nonpartisan population leaned Democratic appears to have been unfounded. Given registered Republicans’ turnout advantage in the pre-Election Day voting period, Harris would have needed to win nonpartisans to be competitive in the state. With more than 1.26 million votes in and Trump leading by nearly 5 percent, it’s clear that independents did not break for Harris by any meaningful margin.
Overall, Nevada proved a signifier of Trump’s performance around the country. His improvements relative to 2020 were not concentrated in any one region, be it the Southwest or swing states as a whole. He’s on track to win the popular vote as well — a feat that, like winning Nevada, no Republican had done since 2004.