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“This has never happened, not even close, in The Reid Machine Era,” Ralston remarked, referring to the period when the late Senator Harry Reid held substantial influence over Nevada’s political landscape.
Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, has become a focal point for Republican efforts to turn the state red for Donald Trump. In this county, Republicans have outperformed Democrats by nearly 9%, a stark contrast to the Democratic stronghold typically seen here.
The Democratic firewall in Clark County appears to be crumbling as Ralston highlights this unprecedented voter behavior. “This is a unicorn year. We have never seen this,” he adds, noting the surge in GOP enthusiasm that could help Trump regain momentum in a state that has eluded Republicans for nearly two decades.
Nevadans, many of whom work in the state’s struggling service sector and face a housing crisis, may be growing tired of Democratic leadership, especially after years of economic instability. A Politico report earlier this month revealed that Trump now holds a 5-point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris in the Silver State, a shocking development given that Trump lost Nevada by about 2.5% just four years ago.
This lead isn’t isolated to Nevada. Trump has also gained ground in key battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia—states crucial to deciding the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, the Nevada Supreme Court recently rejected a Republican challenge that aimed to restrict the counting of mail-in ballots. The court ruled that ballots received up to three days after Election Day could still be counted, even if the postmark was unclear or absent.
The Hill reported that the state’s high court upheld a lower court ruling allowing ballots without a postmark to be counted, provided they arrived within the three-day window. Republicans had argued that only ballots with illegible postmarks should be counted, but the court disagreed, stating that a properly cast vote should not be discarded due to postal errors.
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“If a voter properly and timely casts their vote by mailing their ballot before or on the day of the election, and through a post office omission the ballot is not postmarked, it would go against public policy to discount that properly cast vote,” read the court’s majority opinion.
This ruling dealt a significant blow to Republican efforts to tighten election rules, with the court stating that the GOP had failed to present sufficient evidence of potential voter fraud or inadequacies in existing security measures. The court also dismissed the notion that mail-in ballots inherently favored Democrats, despite Republican concerns about election integrity.
Republican National Committee Spokesperson Claire Zunk expressed concern over the ruling, stating, “Requiring ballots to be postmarked on or before election day is a critical election integrity safeguard that ensures ballots mailed after election day are not counted… By allowing Nevada officials to ignore the law’s postmark requirement, the state’s highest court has undermined the integrity of Nevada’s elections.”
As the election draws closer, pollster Nate Silver has forecasted that Trump could sweep all the critical battleground states in the 2024 election. According to Silver, Trump has a 24.4% chance of winning all seven key swing states, the most likely outcome. In contrast, Harris has just a 15.6% chance of capturing all the battlegrounds.
FiveThirtyEight also shows a shift in Trump’s favor, giving him a 51% chance of winning the election compared to Harris’s 49%. Meanwhile, RealClearPolitics predicts Trump will win all four key swing states, securing him 312 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 227.
In a state like Nevada, where the unexpected can happen, these numbers could spell trouble for Democrats as Republican enthusiasm reaches new heights.
