Something Big Just Happened in a Crucial Swing State

By now, you've probably heard about a thousand times that Donald Trump won the popular vote in last year's presidential election, sweeping the seven battleground states, and earning 312 Electoral Votes. Six of those votes were furnished by the people of Nevada, who opted for Trump over Kamala Harris by approximately three percentage points (a margin of around 46,000 raw votes) in the Silver State. Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee to carry Nevada in two decades; George W. Bush last accomplished the feat in 2004. Trump had come tantalizingly close in 2016 and 2020, losing each time by a small handful of percentage points, and Republicans watched a Senate seat slip away in 2022, as late-counted votes allowed the Democratic incumbent to stave off a tough challenge from a GOP candidate who was slightly favored in the polls. In short, Nevada always seemed to be the one that got away. Until 2024.

Political observers started to see the writing on the wall over the course of the cycle, with early voting patterns foreshadowing that this time could be different. It was, indeed, different. And as of yesterday, Nevada is now looking even more different:

NEWS: For the first time in decades, the Republicans now lead the Democrats in Nevada voter registration. (Non-major-party voters still are well ahead of both parties.) https://t.co/EECZMzyz1M
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) January 27, 2025

Trump touted the news on social media, and RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende thinks it shouldn't be dismissed as insignificant:

For a long time, we've been (correctly imo) dismissing this type of evidence because it just reflected people updating their registration to fit their voting patterns. But at a certain point, and I think we're at least awfully close to there, that explanation no longer cuts it. https://t.co/yaY5FwM3VE
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) January 27, 2025

It's an extremely thin advantage, to be sure -- just a few hundred across the entire state. But any lead for Republicans on voter registration is significant, given the history Ralston highlights. Sometimes, these achievements are short-lived, and that may eventually prove to be the case here. But sometimes registration shifts are signs of future outcomes, as we've seen quite dramatically in a place like Florida. Pennsylvania's movement was also notable and significant last year (more on that to come, below). Needless to say, Nevada Republicans shouldn't get over-confident, or even regular confident, as a result this development. They've lost nail-biters in the state over recent cycles, Democrats swept the contested US House seats in November, and a major Republican under-vote allowed another Senate race to slip from the party's grasp. Nearly every single Harris voter also supported Democrat Jacky Rosen for Senate, but nearly 75,000 Trump voters didn't bother pulling the lever for Republican Sam Brown. Rosen narrowly edged Brown as a result, one of several excruciatingly close Senate losses for the GOP in an overall strong year.

In the state legislature, Democrats maintained their majorities in both chambers in 2024, keeping divided government in place (Nevadans elected a Republican governor in 2022, who pulled off one of the only defeats of a statewide incumbent anywhere in the country that cycle). So in a number of ways, Nevada remains a slightly blue-tinted battleground state, despite Trump's success. For the party to continue to build momentum, the GOP will need to keep plugging away on the registration front, while also impressing the independents who dominate the electorate's composition. Meanwhile, since we mentioned Pennsylvania, there's been some discussion about whether the Keystone State is on a demographic and electoral trajectory to look more like Ohio than a true swing state. Democrats have taken to insisting that isn't true. Maybe they're right; maybe they doth protest too much. One person who is certainly acting like he needs to distinguish himself from his party in the state is Sen. John Fetterman. These are not merely one-off panders. This is a strategy, as he'll be up during the next presidential year:

President-elect Trump’s Electoral College victory is actually bigger than it appears. The Census Bureau admitted that it made major errors in its census counts, shorting states like Texas & Florida of the congressional seats and electoral votes that they were due.@HvonSpakovsky pic.twitter.com/9m5ldStAWS
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) November 19, 2024

Friendly reminder that if the errors identified by the Census Bureau's Post Enumeration Survey had not occurred, Florida would have two more electoral votes and Texas one more, with Colorado, Minnesota, and Rhode Island each having one less. https://t.co/h3Dkv24ehu
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 24, 2024

A much closer election could have magnified the significance of these admitted errors.