A lot has happened since Nevada Democrat Jacky Rosen won a close US Senate race in November 2018. A pandemic that has killed at least 12,000 state residents and rocked Nevada’s key tourism industry. A bitter presidential election in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated a Republican incumbent, Donald Trump—only to have Trump try to cling to the White House, aided by a violent attack on the US Capitol. A Nevada gubernatorial election in which the Republican squeaked past the incumbent Democrat.
For all those headline events, though, it is a quieter change that looms as the biggest wild card for Rosen’s reelection this fall, a factor that is uniquely Nevadan: As much as 30% of the electorate is expected to be different from what it was six years ago, according to strategists who have run multiple statewide races. “It’s a transient state, to a large degree more than other states,” a Rosen insider says. “It’s the most interesting thing about Nevada, politically, and it’s the hardest thing about Nevada. As a candidate, you’re introducing yourself all over again.” What’s worrisome for Rosen isn’t simply the large numbers of people who may be casting a Nevada ballot for the first time—it’s the demographics of many of those expected new voters: younger, less educated, and Latino. Nevadans in those groups are generally more vulnerable to price increases—the average mortgage interest rate in the state, for instance, has about doubled in six years. Another common complaint, among Latino and white voters, is about immigration.
These frustrations add up to prospective new voters trending toward Trump, creating a possible headwind for Rosen: She has been leading her likely Republican opponent in most polls, but could be burdened by Biden, who in a recent New York Times/Siena survey trailed Trump by 14 points among registered voters in Nevada (a snapshot that Biden’s campaign says is misleading because of the difficulties of polling accurately in the state, particularly when it comes to Latino voters). “Jacky Rosen is a freshman senator who has to run in a purple state where Biden’s numbers are not good. And she’s going to be linked to Biden in every ad,” says Jon Ralston, a veteran Nevada political journalist and the founder of The Nevada Independent.
Rosen is fighting back by setting records for campaign fundraising, $5 million in the first quarter of 2024, more than double the haul of Republican front-runner Sam Brown, and campaign spending, with a $14 million ad buy scheduled for late July through Election Day. That cash will try to sell a positive message about Rosen’s role in lowering prescription drug prices and in trying to expand access to affordable housing. It will also be used to pound Brown (assuming he wins the June 11 GOP primary) on national issues (he led a group that advocated for stringent antiabortion laws, but his campaign told Axios that Brown’s work with that group was focused on issues like human trafficking) and local ones (Brown has recently backtracked on supporting using Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository).
The ties between Nevada labor unions and Democrats should help Rosen, especially in and around the state’s largest city, Las Vegas. She may also benefit from a voting shift in Washoe County, which includes Reno, where Republican voter registration is down and independent registration is up. Yet the trickiest dynamic for the senator to navigate might be the spillover from the presidential race. “She is consistently overperforming the ticket,” a Rosen ally says. “So she’s going to be talking about ways that she’s stood up to the president and ways that she’s broken with her party. But Nevada is also not a state like Montana or Ohio, where you have to totally keep the president at arms’ length.”
Not that Rosen could even if she wanted to. Biden won Nevada by slightly more than two points in 2020, and he is deploying large amounts of campaign money and personnel to the state again, including five trips this year by Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden himself visited in March, stopping in Las Vegas but also visiting Reno. “It’s a swing district that usually doesn’t get a lot of attention until maybe July or August of a campaign cycle, but he was like, ‘Nope, we need to go,’” a senior Biden campaign strategist tells me.
Two years ago in the midterms, when Trump wasn’t on the ballot, Nevada’s other Democratic senator, Catherine Cortez Masto, was reelected—by less than one percentage point. “Cortez Masto has been around a lot longer in politics than Rosen; she ran a very good campaign against a very bad candidate and still only barely won,” Ralston says. “Rosen’s vulnerabilities have a lot less to do with her as a senator or as a candidate and more to do with the fact we’re a very purple state. It’s likely to be very close.” Biden’s campaign will continue to assemble a significant infrastructure in Nevada, and the president himself is likely to return before November–a presence that could also help determine whether Rosen returns to Washington next year.
