Joe Biden Projected to Carry Nevada on Way to White House

Former Vice President Joe Biden is projected to carry Nevada’s six electoral voters after narrowly edging out President Donald Trump, according to the Associated Press.

The call on Nevada came on Saturday shortly after numerous other networks determined that Biden had surpassed the 270 electoral college threshold required for victory. Currently, Biden leads Trump in the Silver State by nearly 25,700 votes with more than five percent of the electorate, an estimated 82,597 votes, still outstanding.

Nevada, which Trump lost narrowly on his way to the White House in 2016, was considered in play this cycle given the president’s improved standing among Latino voters. While exit polls from this year’s White House contest indicate that he did five percentage points better among the demographic than four years prior, Trump was unable to best the Democrats’ built-in advantage in Nevada.

For much of the past two decades, Democrats have relied on their allies within organized labor to register thousands of new voters annually to keep elections competitive in Nevada. Partly due to large-scale in-migration from other areas of the country, with transplants being drawn by work in the state’s gaming and tourism industries, Democrats have never been at a lack of new and willing registrants. Between 2000 and 2017, Nevada’s population grew by approximately one million individuals, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The majority of the population growth has been clustered around heavily urban Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas. Clark County, which now houses three-fourths of Nevada’s total population, is increasingly the epicenter of Nevada politics. The county’s Democrat skew, thanks to voter registration and engagement efforts by powerful unions like the Culinary Workers Local 226, provided the margin of victory in close races for the Senate and governorship in 2018.

Preliminary data from the presidential contests shows that a similar pattern repeated itself this year. Although Trump received a significant boost from high turnout in rural areas, he lost Clark County by around nine percentage points.

The Trump campaign, however, has disputed the validity of the Clark County results, arguing in a lawsuit filed this week that there are significant electoral irregularities, including alleged instances where deceased individuals have supposedly voted.