Laxalt Optimistic About Early Voting, Growing Hispanic Support

Nevada Republican U.S. Senate candidate Adam Laxalt is optimistic about early voter turnout in the state, but he is not going to “take anything for granted” ahead of an extremely close race against incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), the former state attorney general told Breitbart News Saturday.

“The early vote numbers are good. They’re not a ten — they’re an eight. The polling has consistently had us up, but it’s all tight. I hate the fact that everybody just put this race in the bank and moved on to other races because they [Democrats] poured another $11 million into this little state in the last 10 days to try to shore her up,” Laxalt said. “I’m not going take anything for granted. We [have been] in every single county of the state over the last many days with our ‘Lead with Laxalt’ bus tour, and we’ve gotten some incredible enthusiasm and crowds. We’ve got a few more days of that. We’re going to run through the tape.”

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The Nevada Independent‘s Jon Ralston wrote on Sunday that Democrats only maintain a 1 percent lead in early voting, calling the election a “No Margin of Error Election on both sides.”

“It’s still close in ballots, and if the Republicans win Election Day by a substantial margin — you can see what’s happened previously in graphs from an earlier post — they will do quite well. Considering all the headwinds the Dems face this cycle, it’s almost amazing they are even in the game,” Ralston wrote. “Turnout, of course, remains key.”

Ralston also estimated that “how the indies vote will determine this election,” a voting bloc that has been heavily swinging toward the GOP. Recent polling from Insider Advantage showed Laxalt leading Cortez Masto with independents 52 percent to 36.7 percent.

Latino voters are another voting bloc under the microscope in a high-stakes election that could decide the balance of power in the Senate. Hispanics and Latinos notably make up roughly 30 percent of Nevada’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and a 2022 Nevada Latino Voter Profile report released over the summer estimated that one in five midterm voters in the state will be Latino.

A CNN poll from early October showed that only about half (52 percent) of Latino voters plan to support Cortez Masto, who is the first Latina to serve in the Senate, compared to the 61 percent she scored in 2016. A late October poll from Rasmussen Reports showed Laxalt ahead with Hispanic voters 49 percent to 37 percent — a shocking 12-point difference. Another recent poll shows Cortez Masto ahead with Hispanic voters, but also shows that Laxalt cut Cortez Masto’s lead among Hispanic voters to 7 points from 18 points in August.

“We have rising crime. We have 16 percent inflation, we have almost $6 gas. They [Democrats] shut down our schools. They shut down small businesses. It was a really, really bad environment here for a few years. And as long as they can’t just print money and just deceive voters — this was all Democrat policy. This Democrat policy created all this pain and misery in our state, And I think that that’s why you’re seeing this movement,” Laxalt explained.

“If I do my job and I win this race…this kind of movement could be permanent, which could mean that Nevada’s moving in the red direction in the coming years as opposed to the blue direction,” he added.

Disclosure: Breitbart News is represented by Cooper & Kirk, PLLC. Adam Laxalt is a partner at Cooper & Kirk. He is not actively engaged or working on any matters for Breitbart News.