‘Uncertainty reigns’: How Nevada became the swing state campaigns can’t figure out

LAS VEGAS — Nevada’s diverse, working-class and highly transient electorate — difficult to model and even harder to poll — has long confounded Washington’s political class.

This year, campaign operatives on the ground here are fumbling in the dark, too. And as they work to model the electorate, it’s a significant problem for Republican and Democratic strategists who are, with three weeks until Election Day, eyeing how this smallest of battleground states could be decisive to either a Donald Trump or Kamala Harris victory.

“Anybody that says they’re certain about where Nevada is going in this election is making it up,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who has long worked in the state. “Uncertainty reigns.”

Changes to the state’s voter registration process in the state and broader frustrations with the two-party system have over the last four years sparked an explosion in the ranks of registered independents, who now outnumber both Democrats and Republicans here. And a confluence of factors that make those voters difficult to find and poll have left strategists more flummoxed than usual about which way the state is likely to swing.

“That’s the funny thing about the mysteriousness of Nevada and the ‘ We Matter ’ bullshit. We actually might matter,” a GOP strategist in Nevada, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamics of the race, said. “It could be a scenario where it is the linchpin for whoever wins.”

Targeting and modeling built on swaths of voter data have helped both Democrats and Republicans mitigate uncertainty caused by the boom in what Nevada refers to as nonpartisan voters. But because this is the first presidential election with so many of them, strategists in both parties concede their plans are based on what amounts to a highly educated guess.

“The term ‘nailbiter’ comes to mind,” said Leo Murrieta, Nevada state director of Make the Road Nevada Action, a group that mobilizes Latino voters to the polls. “I’m stressed.”

And with good reason: There are scenarios in which Nevada and its six electoral votes could decide the outcome of the presidential race. If Harris were to lose Pennsylvania, for instance, she’d need one Southern and one Western battleground, like Nevada, to win.

Nevada hasn’t swung in the presidential election for a Republican since George W. Bush in 2004, and, until 2022, Democrats held not only a trifecta in state government but also the two Senate seats and three of four House seats. But the results were always relatively close, with Democrats relying on the storied Harry Reid machine and its sophisticated turnout operation to grind out victories.

Two years ago, it wasn’t enough. In the midterms, then-Gov. Steve Sisolak became the only sitting Democratic governor to lose his election to now-GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo, even as Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto eked out a win against Republican former Attorney General Adam Laxalt.

“Nevada is not a blue state. It’s barely purple. When you look at registrations, it’s roughly a third Democrat, a third Republican and a third independent,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, a powerful force in Democratic politics here.

Daniele Monroe-Moreno, chair of the state Democratic party, said that registration breakdown is why Democrats, as part of their coordinated campaign to elect candidates across the ballot, have been “laser-focused” all cycle on talking to nonpartisans — who data shows demographically look more like Democratic voters than Republican ones.

Nearly half of all voters under the age of 35 and more than a third of those between the ages of 35 and 44 are nonpartisans, with the most growth happening in the state’s most diverse legislative districts, according to an analysis by the Democratic data firm NevaData, shared with POLITICO.

“We know that nonpartisan voters will play a major role in deciding this election,” Monroe-Moreno said.

Polling, meanwhile, has long been challenging — and mostly suspect — in Nevada. That’s owing to the complexities of an electorate, of which significant chunks primarily speak a language other than English, such as Spanish or Tagalog, and have unpredictable schedules driven by shift work and the state’s 24/7 tourism economy. The growth in nonpartisans, operatives here say, means that polling this year is even less reliable than usual.

Recent polling has swung from Trump up 6 in a recent Wall Street Journal poll — which strategists on both sides of the aisle here think is unlikely — to Harris up by 4 in a Morning Consult survey.

“Polling ain’t real,” Murrieta added. “Nevada is that black box. People look into the abyss and say, ‘I know what I see,’ but you’re not on the ground, you’re not talking to voters here.”

The changes to the voter registration process, which were approved by voters in 2018 but not implemented until two years later, were pushed by Democrats and progressive activists who argued they would increase access to the ballot box — but who also thought it might make it easier to find and register new voters. (Voters are now automatically registered when they get their driver’s license at the DMV.)

But Democratic operatives here say they didn’t fully anticipate just how many people wouldn’t select their party affiliation at the DMV, instead automatically registering as nonpartisan. It means they’ve had to lean more on costly and time-consuming door-to-door canvassing work, supplemented by data, to figure out who those voters are.

"Look, 25 percent of our electorate, roughly, is a new Nevada voter today. That’s hard for anyone, right? That is the black box,” said Gariety Pruitt, Nevada state director for For Our Future.

Despite the meager signs of a Republican ground game in Nevada and across the country this cycle, Republican registration numbers here have remained relatively even since 2020, while Democrats have lost about 75,000 registrants and nonpartisans and other third-party registrants have grown by more than 265,000. Both Trump campaign officials and longtime GOP operatives in the state believe that gives Republicans a leg up this cycle, as their voters generally turn out at higher rates than Democrats.

“It significantly hampers the Democrats,” said Jeremy Hughes, a GOP strategist who has long worked in Nevada. “We haven’t lost as much altitude as they have.”

And Halee Dobbins, a Trump spokesperson in Nevada, said those voters are “eager for a return to President Trump's successful policies that made our state safe and affordable.”

Still, it’s proving a challenge for less-resourced GOP candidates down ballot in the state, who are not coordinating with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and also don’t have the benefit of hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on the sophisticated targeting and modeling that top-of-the-ticket candidates have.

Further complicating matters, this will be the first non-pandemic presidential election in Nevada in which all registered voters will be sent a mail ballot. While the midterm elections showed that mail ballots largely replaced in-person early voting, rather than significantly expanding the electorate, strategists are not sure how it’s going to play out in a presidential election, which tends to see higher levels of turnout from less committed voters than the midterms.

“How are people going to vote? Will they vote in person, vote by mail, do early, do Election Day? We don’t know. How are they going to do that? When are they going to vote? This is truly the new baseline election because how much has changed. That’s truly the interesting thing,” the first GOP strategist added.

In short, even the smartest and most plugged-in people in Nevada have no idea who the state is going to swing for this cycle.

“It’s gonna be close. Nobody should freak out. Anything right now from Trump up two to Kamala up two or three is entirely believable,” said Peter Koltak, a Democratic strategist who works in Nevada. “Like every election for the past at least eight years in Nevada, it’s going to be a grind it out type of deal.”

Still, he acknowledged that wasn’t saying much.

He said, “That’s a super unsatisfying answer.”