2022 Election Outlook: Nevada
Meet The Three Nevadas
Let’s start today’s issue with a personal touch: I moved from Washington, DC to Las Vegas, Nevada in the summer of 2021. At the time of writing, I’ve been living here for a little over a year and am eager to cast my first vote in a swing state next month! Nevada is a complicated swing state that’s incredibly difficult for outsiders to understand. I’ve found that the best way to think of this state politically is to divide it into Three Nevadas…
Meet the Three Nevadas:
Southern Nevada is the regional term for Clark County. Las Vegas, Lake Mead, and the entirety of Nevada’s stretch of Interstate 15 are contained within this singular county.
Western Nevada is a more loosely recognized region comprised mainly of five municipalities: Carson City, Douglas County, Lyon County, Storey County, and Washoe County, home to Reno.
Inner Nevada is a term I’m coining on the spot (credit me if you love it 😘), to refer to all of the other Nevada counties that makeup much of the state’s barren interior.
Clark County is the 11th most populous county in the nation, holding a population of 2.2 million residents. When looking specifically at citizens of voting age, Clark County alone holds 71% of Nevada’s voters. With such a large majority of the state’s voters Southern Nevada is a make-or-break region for Nevada political campaigns.
Typically in swing states, cities are pretty Democratic but often don’t hold enough voters to offset Republican voters in rural areas. Instead, the Las Vegas Valley is a rare case where even its urbanized areas are politically diverse. Clark County has bounced back and forth between parties in presidential elections, supporting Republican candidates throughout the 1980s and flipping to Democrats in the 90s and 2000s. Current registration numbers provide further evidence of Southern Nevada’s political diversity. While registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a slim margin, 1-in-3 voters are registered as unaffiliated with any party.
A key part of understanding Southern Nevada is the uniquely apathetic political atmosphere present on the ground. Like most swing states, Nevada voters receive an avalanche of political out reach as the election approaches. Campaigns place huge signs wherever they’re allowed and their advertising is inescapable. Surprisingly, that fevered excitement from campaigns translates to frustration for many Nevada voters. It’s incredibly common to hear Nevadans voice conscious disdain for anything political, in part due to how inescapable it becomes as elections approach.
That’s not to say that Nevadans don’t vote, in fact Nevada has above-average voter turnout compared to the country as a whole, in part because the state allows no-excuse mail-in voting. (No joke, every registered voter receives a ballot in the mail roughly a month before Election Day. As a new voter here, this is SO convenient!) In Clark County specifically, 76% of voters cast a vote in the 2020 presidential election a full 10 points higher than the national average. (…and that turnout is below most other counties in the state that averaged a turnout of 82%.)
Nevada’s US House Races
Three of Nevada’s four congressional districts intersect in Southern Nevada thanks to the new redistricting plan enacted by Democrats. These three districts tilt toward Democrats by slim margins, all less than 10 points. The Democratic incumbents representing these districts are all fairly moderate candidates who are trying their best to play the middle and peel off unsatisfied Republican voters. That is proving to be quite the difficult task as their Republican challengers are also campaigning toward the center, distancing themselves from Donald Trump and the far-right wing of the Republican party.
To be blunt, I’d be shocked if Democrats held on to all three House seats. Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in NV-3 is lagging in the polls behind her Republican challenger April Becker. Becker has been employing the “Youngkin playbook” of painting herself as a moderate via her focus on school choice in education and support for middle class workers. Reps. Titus and Horsford are both holding onto polling leads and face slightly less formidable challengers but the smallest shifts in voter preferences could easily lead to an upset for Republicans. As Election Day approaches, expect the national media to take a field trip to Las Vegas as all three of these races are pivotal elections that will determine the control of the US House.
Inner Nevada is a whole lot of nothing. Even though this region comprises the vast majority of the state’s land, it only holds 6% of the state’s voters. The region’s largest town, Elko in the northeastern corner of the state, barely holds 20,000 residents, so nearly all voters in this region live in areas with incredibly low population densities. These counties all vote heavily for Republicans: in the 2020 election most counties saw more than 75% of its voters support Donald Trump.
The problem for Republicans is that voters in Inner Nevada are too few in number to meaningfully upset votes in the state’s more populous regions. (For my math nerds, Inner Nevada holds a little over 100,000 registered voters, Biden’s winning vote margin in Clark County alone was 90,000 votes.) While the math works in states like Virginia where as many as 30% of voters live in the rural heartland, Inner Nevada’s far flung voting base simply can’t provide the boost the GOP needs to overcome deficits in Clark County.
Western Nevada is where Nevada elections are won and lost. While Clark County typically leans slightly toward Democrats, the five municipalities that make-up Western Nevada typically lean slightly toward Republicans. Winning often comes down to simple math: are Republican margins in Western Nevada enough to offset Democratic margins in Southern Nevada? Joe Biden’s 2020 win rests on his strength in the region’s most populous county, Washoe, as that allowed him to push Republicans’ lead in Western Nevada down below his lead in Southern Nevada. (He still lost the region as a whole but only by roughly 15,000 votes.)
Cortez-Masto v. Laxalt
Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt was born in the region’s largest city, Reno, theoretically giving him an edge over Cortez-Masto a Las Vegas native. Laxalt’s family upended this assumption as a whopping fourteen members came out against the Republican and endorsed his Democratic opponent.
Today we, the undersigned members of the Laxalt family, are writing in support of the re-election of Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto for the United States Senate. We believe that Catherine possesses a set of qualities that clearly speak of what we like to call “Nevada grit”.
Predicting voter attitudes in Western Nevada isn’t any easier than it is in Southern Nevada, partially due to its shifting population. While many voters here match the typical rural, conservative stereotype, there’s also been an influx of liberal voters from California who may shift established trends. Reno endured a tech boom in the 2010s as the city is only a short road trip from Silicon Valley. While California tech workers moved to Reno for its cheaper housing prices, that benefit has quickly eroded as Reno increasingly faces a housing crisis resmbling that of San Francisco. These new challenges have also created a bit of a conservative backlash that continues to muddy any political predictions for the upcoming election.
Like I mentioned at the top, Nevada is a complicated swing state that’s incredibly difficult for outsiders to understand. Hopefully this regional breakdown helps you understand political attitudes of Silver State voters a little bit better!