Nevada is still the midterms’ swingiest Senate race – here’s why

The Democrats are fighting hard to hold ground in a state they only started winning in the 2000s – and this year’s Senate race will be a critical bellwether

Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto on the campaign trail (AP)

Inside Washington last month dubbed Nevada the Senate seat most likely to flip, and there are as many reasons as ever to believe that. The nonpartisan Cook Political report has labeled it as one of only two toss-up Senate races, alongside Georgia – and yet, the race has largely been overlooked.

That’s largely because neither candidate has an outsized personality in the way Georgia’s race does with incumbent Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Martin Luther King Jr’s church, and Herschel Walker, a former University of Georgia running back and Heisman Trophy winner. It lacks Pennsylvania’s (literally) outsized figure of John Fetterman and celebrity physician Mehmet Oz and it doesn’t feature the same fireworks that JD Vance and Tim Ryan’s tussle in Ohio does.

Rather, the race features incumbent Democrat Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, who despite being the first and so far only Latina Senator ever elected, has maintained a low profile, especially in comparison to her predecessor, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Her opponent, Adam Laxalt, is a former attorney general and the grandson of the late former governor Paul Laxalt. Yet, like Ms Cortez Masto, he lacks charisma or his grandfather’s outstanding personality.

Nevertheless, Nevada has huge national significance. Donald Trump made a stop there this weekend to campaign for Mr Laxalt and Republican gubernatorial candidate Joe Lombardo; if either or both can win, they would indicate that Republicans have a strong chance of winning the Silver State on the presidential in 2024 – a full two decades after they last captured it.

Barack Obama flipped the state in 2008 along with neighboring Colorado and New Mexico. He held it in 2012, albeit by a smaller margin; Hillary Clinton won it by an even smaller margin, and Joe Biden won the state by the same amount she did. In a neat measure of how Democrats’ hold on the state has declined, his margin was by almost ten points behind Mr Obama’s first victory.

The headwinds for Mr Biden’s party are not good. Nevada’s gaming industry took a significant hit during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the state is still reeling from the aftereffects. Friends of the newsletter Jennifer Medina and Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times reported that Nevada’s Latino voters, whom Democrats have reliably considered securely in their column, are frustrated by the economy and rising prices. And as The Times report noted, despite Democratic victories in the past few years, Republicans and non-partisan voters comprise about 60 per cent of the electorate in Nevada, meaning that Democrats have always had to play a game of persuasion.

As a result, it is entirely possible that Republicans could get lucky even as Democratic incumbents in other states appear to be holding out. And there are signs that Republicans have a legitimate shot.

As the GOP hopes to capitalize on Mr Trump’s improved performance with Hispanic voters in 2020, a new poll from OH Predictive Insights and The Nevada Independent (run by Jon Ralston, Nevada’s premier political journalist) found that Mr Laxalt has a slight lead against Ms Cortez Masto, 45 to 43 per cent – well within the survey’s 3.6-point margin of error, but with 7 per cent of respondents saying they remain unsure about who to back.

More alarmingly for Ms Cortez Masto, 52 per cent of those surveyed said they have an unfavorable opinion of her, this compared to 45 per cent who have a favorable opinion of her. And yet, NBC News’s Natasha Korecki reported that Latino voters dissatisfied with Democrats are less likely to defect to the Republican Party than to simply not vote, with Republican candidates like Mr Laxalt apparently repelling them.

If Ms Cortez Masto can take solace anywhere, it’s that Senate polling in her state hasn’t always been the best. In 2010, a Republican wave year in national terms, the Real Clear Politics average showed then-majority leader Harry Reid 2.7 points behind his GOP challenger, Sharron Angle, only for Mr Reid to end up winning by 5.6 points.

Our judgment for 2022, then, remains the same: this race is guaranteed to raise the blood pressure – quicker than a night at the crap tables at the Bellagio.