Vice President Kamala Harris is facing possible “serious danger” in Nevada as Republicans have opened what amounts to an unprecedented-in-modern-times lead in early voting over Democrats.
Jon Ralston of the Nevada Independent, reporting on the early vote numbers showing a GOP lead, flashed the warning to Democrats late Monday evening out west. Ralston noted that since the rise of the political machine that the late former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid built for Democrats this has never happened.
“Republicans lead statewide in Nevada after three days of early voting and mail ballot counting,” Ralston wrote in a blog post on his outlet’s website recounting the first few days of voting in the Silver State. “This has not happened in a presidential year in The Reid Machine Era, which encompasses the races since 2008. This could signal serious danger for the Dems and for Kamala Harris here.”
The key for Democrats to regain their footing in the coming days, Ralston noted, will be building up a bigger “firewall” of mail votes in Clark County, which includes the most populous city in the state Las Vegas. But for now, Republicans have in his words “reduced” that “Clark firewall to almost nothing” and are running up the score in more rural counties.
Ralston’s post explains that Democrats in the Las Vegas area have seen their lead in Clark County evaporate to just about 4,500 votes while Republicans run up the totals elsewhere in Nevada. Republicans, he wrote, have even erased a deficit in Washoe County which includes Reno.
“It’s too soon to call it a trend, but this was a huge day for Republicans in Nevada (they are ahead in Washoe now, too, erasing a deficit). A few more days like this, though, and the Democratic bedwetting will reach epic proportions,” Ralston wrote on Monday evening.
Republicans have not won Nevada in a presidential election since then-President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004. The state has, however, been extremely close in recent presidential elections, almost breaking for now former President Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton won by just over 27,000 votes. In 2020, Democrat President Joe Biden won by just over 33,000 votes.
But the state has also been trending redder in recent years, especially since the 2020 election. In the 2022 midterm election, Nevada was the only state in the union where a Republican–now-Gov. Joe Lombardo–flipped a governor’s mansion from Democrat hands into GOP control.
Voter registration swings in Nevada have significantly cut into Democrats’ advantage in the state. In a mid-October report, The Hill newspaper revealed that Nevada previously had about a 5 percent advantage in voter registration for Democrats in 2020 but that has almost all vanished now to just a 1 percent advantage. The state has seen a swing of nearly net 50,000 voter registration towards Republicans and away from Democrats, as the Democrats in 2020 had a registration advantage of about 79,000 that has been cut down to just about 29,000 now.