When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket in July, Democrats in Nevada were ecstatic.
Something needed to change. Throughout the year, former President Donald Trump — who had never won Nevada in two prior attempts — was leading Biden in polling by significant margins. On the day that Biden dropped out, Trump’s lead in the polling average was nearly 6 percentage points.
Even the mighty Reid Machine — the political operation built by the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) that has built durable Democratic majorities — couldn’t overcome the red national headwinds and a Trump campaign that both parties agreed was better executed than his prior two — though the machine likely prevented further Democratic losses down the ballot.
The Trump campaign’s — and its allies’ — all-in focus on low-propensity voters was the right strategy. A Republican operative familiar with the race, given anonymity to speak candidly, said the issue matrix gave the campaign endless opportunity to capitalize. To do so, Republican operatives made contact multiple times with those voters.
The issues they heard about were the exact ones that Trump was running on — frustrations with the economy, concerns regarding immigration and fears about public safety. The operative said this was particularly common among people who work on the Strip, including union members.
With an opening there — and armed with Trump’s promise to end taxation on tips — Republicans were able to turn skepticism about the Biden economy into votes for Trump through repeated contact. Republican voter targeting, multiple operatives said, was better this cycle than it had been in the past.
“I just saw more organic support in Nevada than I've seen in a long time,” the operative said. “That is, for Republicans — specifically Trump.”
Nevada, strategists agreed, is fertile ground for national headwinds in any direction, with relatively low political engagement and a high population of true swing voters. Given its demographic similarity to the nation, the state has typically swung with the popular vote — and 2024 was no exception. For the first time this cycle, registered nonpartisans outnumbered voters of either party, and, combined with registrants of third parties, ended up being more than 30 percent of the electorate.
And, given the results, a clear theme emerged — voters, especially nonpartisans and those who are less engaged, were mad about the economy. And Trump had a clearer, simpler message than Harris — the people in power made prices high, and he would fix it. Add in high housing costs and an unpopular president, and it was the right formula for a red wave at the presidential level.
“It's really hard to pinpoint any one particular factor, but I do think we had a bloc of voters who were still surly about the economy, still surly about inflation and prices,” said Peter Koltak, a Democratic strategist who worked on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign in Nevada. “Democrats, by being the incumbent party, we're always going to pay some penalty for that.”
Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV), who won in a swingy Clark County district despite Trump’s victory, put it succinctly.
“You can talk until you’re blue in the face about what the causes of inflation are,” she said. “But when people's rents are going up and they can't afford it, and the cost of groceries are going up, and their paychecks are just not making it month to month, that's what they care about.”
Changing Clark
The story of Nevada’s shift from 2020 to 2024 can be told in its most populous county — Clark.
In 2020, Biden won Clark by 9 percentage points. By 2024, key elements of its electoral composition had changed.
For starters, Democrats’ voter registration advantage shrunk considerably. In November 2020, there were 12 percent more registered Democrats than Republicans, and the county had 1.32 million active registered voters. By 2024, with Nevada having implemented automatic voter registration, Clark has nearly 1.49 million registered voters. Democrats’ registration advantage was cut down to just 6 percent.
The explosion of registered nonpartisans owes to the change, but the raw vote totals demonstrate how far more Democrats changed their registration than Republicans. There are about 54,000 fewer registered Democrats today in Clark County than there were four years ago; Republicans, meanwhile, have about 10,500 more voters in their party.
Harris still won Clark County, but the margin showed why a statewide victory was impossible. As went Clark, so went the state — each moved about 6 percentage points to the right in the presidential race, relative to 2020.
Harris had the worst performance by a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.
David Damore, a UNLV political science professor, said “I thought I’d never see the day” when the presidential margin in Clark would be so close.
There was also far less turnout in Clark —just over two-thirds of active registered voters had turned out, while turnout exceeded 80 percent in eight rural counties.
“There has to be something there about enthusiasm,” said Nevada Republican strategist Greg Bailor.
Some of that can be attributed to a national environment that clearly favored Republicans, given nearly every state shifted to the right vis a vis 2020.
Koltak said the election results show a “backlash on economic issues and on cost of living issues,” which spelled trouble for Democrats.
“Those issues bounced back in Trump's favor and sort of hit the incumbent party,” he said.
But experts in both parties also say Trump improved with Latino voters and Asian American Pacific Islander voters, who combined are close to 30 percent of the voting population.
“Just like Florida saw a surge in GOP registrations post-COVID, we seemed to have had a mini surge as well,” said Republican strategist Jeremy Hughes. “It was a rapid acceleration of Republicans. I think some of that is probably due to our neighbors in California moving over, given the state of that state.”
The Republican operative familiar with the presidential race agreed, saying that the in-migration to Clark County of Californians fed up with the state’s taxation and regulatory regime cannot be understated. The operative believes Trump’s margins could have been even closer in Clark County had the campaign and its affiliates spent more time chasing nonpartisan voters.
A Democratic operative, given anonymity to discuss the race candidly, said that some signs of the party’s struggles with working class voters were present in past cycles. In 2020, Nevada was the only battleground state where Biden did not improve on Hillary Clinton’s margins. In 2022, it was home to the closest Senate race in the country, and the only blue-to-red gubernatorial flip.
And given the economic pressures on the Nevada economy — which was hit harder by the pandemic than nearly any other state — it tracks that the electorate is highly sensitive to costs and inflation, the operative said.
While Hughes said the shifts in voter registration should have been the “canary in the coal mine” for Democrats, he and others believe that a large portion of Nevadans are still truly swing voters, who don’t have a sticky partisan identity. For those voters, Hughes said that Trump’s campaign this go-around had the best messaging it has had in three attempts. The focus on the economy and immigration dovetailed with swing voters’ concerns — frustration with high prices and record border crossings.
The result suggests that swing voters were successfully persuaded — and that the Trump campaign, as it had been targeting all cycle, was effective in turning out low-propensity voters, especially those who voted for Trump at the top of the ticket and then did not vote for Republicans down ballot.
Lee was the beneficiary of that trend. Lee said that she thought Harris was put in a “virtually impossible” position of trying to distinguish herself from Biden, the target of many voters’ anger regarding the economy and the border. (Harris was an active part of the administration as vice president for four years, and as the “border czar”). She said Democratic messaging on the economy was never clearly communicated, and that the border was mismanaged until an executive order this year brought the number of crossings down.
She said her messaging was centered on having a record of bipartisanship.
“I spent the last several weeks calling undecided voters and having these conversations with them,” Lee said. “It's not a black and white issue, especially when it comes to the economy. I just think that the messaging got away from President Biden, and [Harris] had no ability to distinguish herself from them.”
And the GOP wave wasn’t confined to any age group. Turnout data shows that Republican voters turned out at higher rates than Democrats across almost every age group.
Jeremy Gelman, a political science professor at UNR, said this should dispel the notion that young voters sitting out of the election were responsible for Harris’ defeat.
“Don't blame the young Democrat,” Gelman said.
But operatives on both sides cautioned against assuming that the state is red now. George W. Bush famously won Nevada in 2000 and 2004 — and then the state didn’t vote for a Republican in the presidential race for another 20 years.
Republican operatives said that nonpartisan modeling showed that among those who actively vote, they often agree with Republicans on the issues but are turned off by the national brand. The political future of Clark County — in the immediate term — may be determined by how those voters react to an economy and border that’s now Trump’s responsibility.
Trump’s strength was in persuading low-propensity voters not just to turn out, but to vote for him — and the inability of other Republicans to do so down-ballot suggests the phenomenon is somewhat limited to the former president.
“We've got to keep pressing on our advantage,” Hughes said. “Just as soon as it went one way, it can go the other.”
Current, not a wave
Despite Harris losing Nevada, Democrats had success down-ballot.
Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) eked out a closer-than-expected victory over Army veteran Sam Brown, and the three Southern Nevada members of the U.S. House all retained their seats. And while Democrats failed to secure a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature, they prevailed in most of the swing districts.
The contingent of voters who were effectively Trump-only voters is perhaps a silver lining for Democrats — and what kept other federal races in Democratic hands and kept Democratic incumbent losses in the Legislature to just one seat, despite the top-of-the-ticket red wave.
While Koltak tipped his cap to Republicans, who he said clearly made improvements this cycle, particularly in urban areas, he believes Democrats still have an advantage in the suburbs — where midterm voters are more likely to reside.
Koltak said the biggest question moving forward — for both parties — will be to see if the voters who cast a ballot for Trump but didn’t vote down-ballot this election cycle return to vote in two years.
“There are a lot of Trump voters who are perhaps not otherwise, particularly partisan Republicans,” Koltak said. “Trump's strength is not necessarily — historically, or this year — transferable to other Republicans.”
Implications for the Reid Machine
This was the first time that Nevada has gone red in a presidential race in the era of the “Reid Machine” — the massive Democratic political operation built under the late senator.
A combination of a well-organized state party and an array of unions and interest groups doing massive get-out-the-vote operations, with the powerful Culinary Workers’ Union Local 226 at the center, the political machine Reid built in Clark County has delivered Nevada to Democrats before under tough circumstances.
But with the state moving 6 percentage points to the right in just four years, was the machine broken?
Experts and operatives in both parties were quick to dispel any thoughts of its demise.
“I think the ground game is still incredibly important,” said Lee, who credited the Reid Machine’s focus on undecided and independent voters for keeping her in office. “I don't think the message is, for me, that the Reid Machine is broken. The message is that there was a [Trump] top of the ticket.”
Lee’s two closest races have been in 2020 and 2024 — both times when Trump was at the top of the ticket, turning out voters who otherwise would stay home.
The Reid Machine, according to the Democratic operative, prevented the red wave from extending down the ballot. As always, it identified likely Democratic voters and turned them out across the various voting methods.