Nevada had voted Democratic for president four times running — Barack Obama twice, then Hillary Clinton by 2.4 points in 2016 and Joe Biden by 2.4 again in 2020 — before it turned. In 2024 Donald Trump carried the state by 3.1 points, his first Nevada win in three tries and a 5.5-point swing from 2020. The margin was narrow, 751,205 votes to 705,197, but the direction was new: Nevada had not voted Republican for president since George W. Bush in 2004. The state now sits among the closest in the country, with both 2016 and 2020 decided inside two and a half points.
The arithmetic runs through one county. Clark County, which holds Las Vegas, cast 1,031,223 of the state’s 1,484,840 ballots in 2024 — roughly seven in ten — and is the whole of the Democratic case. It voted Democratic by 2.6 points, but that was down sharply from 9.3 in 2020, a 6.7-point move that erased a 92,000-vote cushion and carried the state. Washoe County, around Reno, is the tipping ground: it voted Democratic by a single point in 2024, slipping from 4.5 in 2020. Together Clark and Washoe cast 87 percent of the vote; the other fifteen counties are heavily Republican.
Those rural counties run one direction. Eureka County voted Republican by 77.8 points, the state’s widest margin; Elko by 56.6; Lyon, the largest of them, by 44.4. Underneath the politics is a population shaped by the casino-and-service economy: Hispanic or Latino residents are 29.7 percent of the state, most of Mexican origin, and 20 percent of households speak Spanish at home, seventh-highest of the fifty states. Education runs low — 27.9 percent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree, 45th — and the state holds the fifth-largest Latter-day Saint share, at 5.9 percent. The 2024 shift ran with that working-class, heavily Latino electorate.
Akashic