Nevada shows all signs of being favorable for Republicans this year: The state has trended to the right, Latino voters are increasingly open to the GOP and polls show Donald Trump running competitively at the top of the ticket.
But down the ballot, the political situation is decidedly less rosy for Nevada Republicans.
The party’s congressional candidates are struggling to gain traction in a quartet of races that should, on paper, be competitive, threatening the GOP’s efforts to hold the House and win the Senate. Republicans in the state blame the fizzle on a combination of abortion’s continued resonance with voters, aggressive Democratic campaigns and underfunded GOP nominees.
The GOP’s bleak outlook is most acute in a trio of House races — in the 1st, 3rd and 4th Congressional Districts — where Republicans have almost written off a trio of underfunded nominees, Mark Robertson, Drew Johnson and John Lee, respectively. But the party’s pessimism also extends to Nevada’s higher-profile Senate race, where the party’s candidate, Sam Brown, is competitive but faces a steep uphill climb in the race’s final month after being heavily outspent by Democrats.
“I think the majority of Republicans in the state probably feel hopeless,” said Amy Tarkanian, former chair of the state GOP. “And that they’re just going to hold their nose and hope for the best.”
Brown faces Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, while Robertson, Johnson and Lee face incumbent Reps. Dina Titus in the 1st District, Susie Lee in the 3rd District and Steven Horsford in the 4th District.
“I can see and I can feel and I can hear what’s going on on the ground,” Tarkanian said. “And you’re going to have the party devoted, who are going to push as hard as they can to the very end despite the outcome, but I truly feel every [Democratic incumbent] is going to be reelected.”
Tarkanian angered Nevada Republicans when she endorsed a handful of Democratic candidates in the state in 2022. But her view of the situation for GOP candidates in the state isn’t unique.
“Sam Brown has run a very, very, very bad campaign, one of the worst campaigns we’ve seen in Nevada in a while,” said one Republican operative in Nevada. The strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s chances in a key race, added they thought Rosen could win by 6 or 7 points even if Trump carries the state.
Democrats caution that they expect the Senate race will tighten in the final weeks. And national Republicans have continued some spending in the state, a signal that they continue to see the Senate race as competitive.
In a statement, a Brown spokesperson said Rosen’s agenda has enriched herself at the expense of raising the cost of living for the state’s voters, which the Republican candidate has a plan to lower if elected.
“Voters continue to feel the pain at the gas pump and in the grocery store, but Sam’s plan resonates with them and the momentum is on our side,” said Raegan Lehman, a Brown campaign spokesperson.
A spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans’ political arm, pushed against the idea that the trio of races in the state were out of reach for the party.
“Donald Trump running strong in Nevada creates opportunities for Republicans down ballot, and we are keeping a close eye here,” committee spokesperson Delanie Bomar said. “Nevadans are exhausted by Democrats’ high cost of living and border crisis, and they’re ready for change.”
None of those House races, however, have attracted outside group spending that usually marks the most competitive seats. The Cook Political Report says Democrats are favored to win each of the three, with the 3rd District rated “lean Democratic” while the 1st and 4th Districts are rated “safe Democratic.”
None of the trio had raised $1 million by the start of July, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Recent polls of the Senate race, meanwhile, show Rosen holding a significant lead over Brown, including one survey released this month that found her winning by 7 percentage points, 48% to 41%.
That comes even as the same surveys show Kamala Harris with a much narrower edge over Trump, though she’s in a much stronger position than Joe Biden was.
Democratic officials think Biden’s decision to drop out of the race had the biggest impact in Nevada, where they say party polling had him trailing Trump in the high single digits over the summer. Among Democrats in Nevada, there was a widespread fear that the state was most likely one of the seven battleground states (a list that includes Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona) to be abandoned by the Biden campaign.
Harris has since emerged with a lead in the state of just over a single point, according to an aggregation of polls from 538. But the state has shifted to the right relative to the country in recent elections: After Barack Obama won it by nearly 7 points in 2012, Hillary Clinton won Nevada by little more than 2 points four years later. Biden again won the state by just 2 points in 2020, despite faring far better than Clinton nationally.
Latino voters, who make up nearly one-fifth of the overall electorate in Nevada, have also shifted toward Trump, according to polls.
That hasn’t translated to success in House races for Republicans, however, and it hasn’t yet helped Brown close the gap against Rosen. The GOP Senate candidate’s struggles are in part due to the sustained attacks against Brown over abortion rights.
Brown made national headlines earlier this year when, in an interview with NBC News, his wife revealed she had once had an abortion. The interview was widely seen as part of the party’s new approach to the issue this election, one that focused on Republican candidates trying to aggressively respond to it with empathy for the women involved.
But Democrats say now that they think the effort backfired on Brown, arguing that it made his past support of tight restrictions around the medical procedure look hypocritical, according to voters in focus groups they conducted.
“You can run a spot that has Sam looking into the camera, stressing himself as a pro-choice candidate,” one Democratic strategist said. “But he’s got to be able to stand in that space in the long term. And that’s a real problem for him.”
Some Republicans countered that Brown’s problem wasn’t his effort but the lack of resources his campaign had to respond to the attacks from Rosen and other Democrats.
“She’s pretty much been up nonstop since the spring,” the Nevada Republican strategist said. “And Sam doesn’t have the resources to do that and didn’t compensate for that by going out and campaigning.”
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Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS.