How Nevada could doom Democrats' hopes of holding Senate

Nevada knows how to put on a good show. But in a year of buzzy U.S. Senate races, the Silver State is far from the top of the list.

Georgia has a local college football hero and political neophyte challenging the South’s first-ever Black Democratic senator. Pennsylvania has a Republican celebrity TV doctor going up against a hoodie-wearing champion of the populist left. In Arizona, the young, hard-right protegé of Trumpist tech billionaire Peter Thiel is challenging Gabby Giffords’s astronaut husband. And in Ohio, a Rust-Belt Democratic congressman could beat a wealthy Republican whose hardscrabble upbringing was the subject of a Ron Howard movie.

In contrast, Nevada has one all-too-familiar politician (former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, a Republican) trying to unseat another all-too-familiar politician (Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina to serve in the Senate).

Yet despite its relative lack of pizzazz — and the scant attention it has received as a result — the Laxalt-Cortez Masto contest could very well determine control of the Senate next year, according to former Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

“It’s a dead-heat important Senate race,” Plouffe said last week on his Campaign HQ podcast.

In fact, Nevada might secretly be the most important Senate race of 2022. Why? Nearly every other marquee clash is some sort of colorful outlier where the GOP’s well-publicized “candidate quality” problems are threatening the party’s hopes of flipping the Senate. But the Silver State is the rare place where two evenly matched professional pols are facing off amid a confluence of crucial trends: the impact of inflation, the abortion rights backlash, the rise of independents and the rightward drift of Hispanics.

As such, Nevada has the potential to be November’s truest bellwether — as well as “the single best pickup opportunity for Republicans in the country,” as Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas put it over the summer.

Or as Laxalt likes to say on the stump, “This race is the 51st seat. That is not a stretch. It’s not an exaggeration. The entire U.S. Senate will hinge on this race.”

Perhaps. Either way, the polls couldn’t be tighter. Despite massive spending by Cortez Masto and an early onslaught of negative ads designed to disqualify Laxalt, the Democratic incumbent now leads by just 0.7 percentage points, on average, with the support of a mere 44% of voters — well short of a majority.

In July, an Emerson College survey found Cortez Masto ahead of Laxalt by 3 points among registered voters. But Emerson’s latest poll, conducted earlier this month, put Laxalt on top by 1 point among those likely to turn out in November. According to the respected FiveThirtyEight forecast, Cortez Masto’s odds of victory grew steadily throughout the summer; over the last week, however, they have rapidly reversed course as three new polls have shown Laxalt leading: one by the progressive think thank Data for Progress (+1), one by the Republican Trafalgar Group (+4) and one by the GOP-affiliated Insider Advantage (+3). No other Senate race is closer.

“There are reasons people think that Nevada is going to have a red wave,” Jon Ralston, Nevada’s top political reporter and founder of the Nevada Independent, told Yahoo News. “And there may be one — I just don’t know.”

In short, Nevada is worth watching — even if it hasn’t been particularly weird or wacky.

Now if only Laxalt can keep it that way.

In many respects, the question that will decide who the Silver State sends to the Senate next year is this: How “normal” Laxalt can act when Republican politics are anything but?

“Laxalt is trying to pivot back into a more generic Republican and make this a referendum on the Democrats rather than on Trump and abortion,” David Damore, chair of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Yahoo News. “It’s a jump ball now, so I think you’re going to see resources shift to Nevada on the Republican side as some of those other states that they have been hoping for don’t pan out. Nevada becomes a must-win for them."

Unlike Walker, Oz, Masters or Vance — all non-politicians and rookie candidates — Laxalt has a head start here. His roots couldn’t be more establishment Republican. His grandfather was Paul Laxalt, the legendary Nevada governor and senator who was so close to President Ronald Reagan that the New York Times dubbed him the “first friend.” His mother is Paul’s daughter Michelle, who was working as a Reagan operative when Adam was born in 1978 and later opened her own high-profile lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. And in 2013, Michelle revealed that Adam, then 34, was the illegitimate son of longtime New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici.

“One night’s mistake led to pregnancy more than 30 years ago," she said when the secret came out.

At the time, Adam Laxalt was very much not a politician — or a Nevadan. He was born in Reno but grew up in D.C., graduated from a posh prep school in Alexandria, Va. and worked for John Bolton, then an undersecretary of state, and Virginia Sen. John Warner while earning bachelor's and law degrees from Georgetown. After graduation, Laxalt completed a five-year stint in the Navy, including a deployment to Iraq as a judge advocate general.

“I have lived my entire life as a private citizen and intend to remain one,” he told the Washington Post. But at that point Laxalt had already moved to Las Vegas and started practicing corporate law. Within a year, he had launched a campaign for attorney general.

“Preternaturally ambitious,” one Republican told Ralston. “If his name were Adam Smith, this race would be a total joke,” said another.

The young Laxalt had long been an outspoken conservative, railing against the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and breaking with Nevada’s more moderate governor and attorney general to defend the state’s ban on gay marriage. But he was still considered a mainstream conservative with an impeccable pedigree, and the mainstream rallied around him.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney called him “courageous” and said electing him was “of the highest priority.” Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s first secretary of defense, cut him a $5,000 check. A host of other Republican luminaries — former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese — all climbed aboard.

Laxalt won by about 5,000 votes. He quickly became one of the most aggressive anti-Obama administration AGs, suing the federal government over immigration enforcement, land management, labor rules and more. He also signed Nevada — where a 1990 statute protects abortion rights from “legislative amendment or repeal” up to 24 weeks of pregnancy — onto at least four lawsuits supporting restrictions in other states.

“Republican AGs were almost single-handedly holding back the executive-order era of the Obama administration,” Laxalt recently told National Review. “This was a place where you could make a difference in the Obama era fighting for federalism and our constitutional system.”

In true “preternaturally ambitious” fashion, Laxalt tried in 2018 for higher office: the governor’s mansion. He lost by 4 points to Democrat Steve Sisolak amid a blue wave. In his concession speech, Laxalt pledged his support to the governor-elect. “We need to come together as a state and make sure we can move Nevada forward,” he said.

So far, so “normal.” But then came Donald Trump. While Laxalt favored Cruz early in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, he became increasingly devoted to Trump once he took over the GOP, going on to co-chair his 2016 and 2020 Nevada campaigns. It wasn’t until after Trump lost, however, that Laxalt’s loyalty really took off. Embracing the former president’s “big lie” that the election was rigged and stolen from him, Laxalt waged a seemingly endless campaign alleging that “thousands of illegal votes” had cast “grave doubt” on Nevada’s results.

Yet when Nevada’s Republican secretary of state reviewed 3,963 alleged election integrity violations submitted by the state GOP, she found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Still, Laxalt persisted. In August 2021, he filed to run against Cortez Masto; the “big lie” was a centerpiece of his primary campaign. “There’s no question that, unfortunately, a lot of the lawsuits and a lot of the attention spent on Election Day operations just came too late,” Laxalt told conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root. “With me at the top of the ticket, we’re going to be able to get everybody at the table and come up with a full plan, do our best to try to secure this election, get as many observers as we can, and file lawsuits early.”

In June, Laxalt won Nevada’s GOP Senate primary by more than 20 percentage points.

Since then, Cortez Masto’s strategy has been simple. Buoyed by a $22 million fundraising advantage at the mid-year mark — plus an additional $8.4 million investment from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee — she has unleashed a barrage of attack ads slamming Laxalt as the charmed scion of an elite family who has become a pol in the pocket of Big Oil and Big Pharma as well as “the proud face of the Big Lie in Nevada” — and who has now “made it clear he wants to make abortion illegal” to boot.

“Adam Laxalt praised the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade,” a second DSCC spot intones. “Adam Laxalt even called Roe v. Wade a ‘joke.’”

“Cortez Masto is a very disciplined candidate,” Ralston told Yahoo News. “She’s arguably running the best campaign in the state.”

Laxalt has struggled to keep up — by his own admission. “The Democrats have unlimited money,” he said at a July fundraising luncheon, according to audio obtained by the Daily Beast. Cortez Masto is “on TV now because she has money and we don’t.”

But in contrast to, say, Blake Masters in Arizona, Laxalt hasn’t countered accusations of extremism by embracing ever more outlandish tactics. Instead, he appears to be trying to morph back into a baseline — even “boring” — Republican in the hope that Nevada’s underlying dynamics will carry him across the finish line.

Even beyond the usual midterm trends, which almost always cut against the president’s party, several forces seem to be working in Laxalt’s favor. With Trump’s full-throated endorsement, Laxalt has the GOP base locked down. Likewise, Cortez Masto enjoys solid support among Democrats. But voter registration statistics have shown for most of this year that more Democrats have been switching their party affiliation to Republican than vice versa.

For now, registered Democrats (34.78%) still outnumber registered Republicans (30.4%) in the state. But for the first time, non-major party voters (34.8%) — including a growing number of independents (about 26%) — outnumber them both (in large part because of a new rule that automatically registers certain residents through the Department of Motor Vehicles unless they opt out).

Nevada experts and operatives now believe this independent surge could determine the outcome in November — especially if they break against the incumbent (as tends to happen in midterm elections).

“There’s so much uncertainty because of these independents,” Ralston said. “It's the cliché of clichés, but this time it really is resonant. It’s going to come down to turnout, and I really believe that whichever campaign finds the independent voters who lean their way and turn them out, they’re going to win.”

And that’s especially true in Clark County, home to Las Vegas (and the bulk of Nevada residents).

“The general rule is that for a Democrat to win, they have to win Clark County by 10 points or more,” Ralston explains. “[President] Biden won by about nine and still managed to eke it out. But Democrats’ Clark County numbers are lower now than they ever have been; they only have a 9.5 point edge there now. It’s going be much more difficult for them to build up the firewall they need in southern Nevada.”

The Hispanic vote, meanwhile, is just as critical. Nevada is a working-class state with lots of in- and out-migration and a huge, lower-income service sector that is disproportionately Hispanic. Pandemic restrictions and recent price increases have hit this part of the population hard — and recent analyses have shown that Hispanic men in particular are drifting to the right.

That could be a big problem for Cortez Masto in November. Two years ago, Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton’s vote share in every state in the country — except Nevada and Florida. As Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira noted in April, “the Democratic margin in Nevada went from 2.4 points ... to 2.4 points.” Teixeira continued:

In 2012, Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney by 40 percentage points among Hispanic voters nationally, according to Catalist, a political research firm. In 2016 — the year Cortez Masto was elected — Clinton did even better, winning the Hispanic vote by 42 points. But in 2020, Biden’s margin among Hispanics shrank to 26 points — and recent Nevada polls have shown Cortez Masto leading by as little as 19.

“The Republicans have done a much better job than they’ve ever done before, but that’s a really low bar,” said Damore, the UNLV political scientist. “They’re not going to win the Latino vote. It’s a matter of whether they can cut the margin.”

“It would be amazing if the first Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate cannot hold the Hispanic vote by a sizable margin,” adds Ralston. “One poll put Cortez Masto at 44% to Laxalt’s 25% among Hispanics. That means there are a lot of undecideds, and there’s still a lot of time. But if she can’t get above 50%, she’s going to lose. She needs to win Hispanics by more than 19 points.”

And so rather than feeding the culture wars, Laxalt has been retreating from them — and doubling down on (you guessed it) the economy instead. (He also rarely talks to non-conservative media outlets, and he and Cortez Masto are unlikely to debate.)

Laxalt’s campaign has accused Cortez Masto of voting to raise taxes (misleadingly, according to independent fact checkers) and providing a “rubber-stamp support for Biden’s big spending proposals [that] saddled our state with 15.4 percent inflation, costing each Nevada family $10,000 this year.” Despite the fact that he endorsed a state referendum banning abortion after 13 weeks of pregnancy — and still “stand[s] by that view” — Laxalt nonetheless has tried to take the issue off the table by saying it should remain up to each state and “that means the only people who can alter Nevada’s abortion policies are the voters of Nevada.”

“In Nevada, abortion will still be legal,” Laxalt added in a recent TV spot. “Abortion rights are protected under current state law.”

He even told the Washington Post that he will accept the results of the November election — unlike Masters in Arizona or GOP Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin.

The shift has been stark. Last year, Laxalt launched his primary campaign with a video accusing "the radical left, rich elites, woke corporations, academia and the media" of "taking over America.” In contrast, Laxalt’s soft-focus general-election ads portray him as the once-wayward son of a single mother who overcame alcoholism to become the “protector” of his own young children. “I turned my life around,” Laxalt says. “That taught me helping others gives life meaning.”

They’re the kind of ads, in other words, that are meant for the mainstream — not the fringe. And that’s precisely the point. The less made-for-TV drama Laxalt can stir up between now and Election Day, the more dramatic Nevada’s results might be.