According to election results certified by the Nevada Supreme Court on November 26, President-elect Donald Trump won Nevada by 46,008 votes. He’s the first Republican presidential candidate to win the state in 20 years.
Surprisingly, early voting was an early indicator of the win, bucking past trends where Democrats turned out in higher numbers than Republicans. The two-week early voting period saw 247,263 Republicans, 150,160 Democrats and 145,518 nonpartisans or third-party voters participate, according to secretary of state data.
But if you look at the Trump campaign’s messaging on early and mail voting, it explains how Republicans—who traditionally preferred to vote on Election Day and have distrusted mail voting (following Trump’s false claims that the method is rife with fraud)—established a ground game that ultimately led to victory in the Silver State and in five other battleground states.
Take Vice President-elect JD Vance’s unorthodox pitch to supporters at a rally at Treasure Island in the final days of the campaign.
“We are now in a world where early voting, mail-in voting, Election Day voting, these are all the methods that we have to vote,” Vance told the crowd at Treasure Island in the final days of the campaign. “And if Kamala Harris’ team is using everything and we’re only using one of those methods of voting, then we’re gonna get killed.”
Michael McDonald, chairman of the Nevada GOP, seemed like a sports coach when talking to the Weekly about the ground game in July at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He was optimistic—maybe even a tad confident.
“We have more lawyers involved. We have more volunteers involved. We’re doing ballot harvesting,” McDonald said in July. “The focus now, we want (Republicans) to vote early, stay engaged, we want them to volunteer more in their community.”
In 2024, Nevada Republicans recognized the need to learn from the success of Democrats. After witnessing the power of the “Reid Machine”—an established Democratic edge manufactured by late Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid—Republicans sought a stronghold of their own.
Jesus Marquez, a political strategist who served on the National Hispanic Advisory Board for Trump, joined calls to emulate the Nevada Democratic ground game.
“(Democrats are) good at one thing and that’s reaching the voters and the ground operation they have, the grassroots operation,” Marquez says. “The old Harry Reid Machine is still well alive, and they’re really strong there. But this time, Republicans are getting more organized.”
Democrats in Clark County have relied on an army of local groups to help with outreach and motivate residents to vote, such as the Culinary Union Local 226 and Bartenders Union Local 165 knocking on 900,000 doors in support of Democratic candidates in the run-up to election day.
To match that effort, Republicans had to take a deep look in the mirror to upgrade the ways the party communicated with voters. The resolution included increased door knocking, phone calls and embracing the methods Vance mentioned.
That strategy helped pave the way for Trump to receive 62,122 more votes in comparison to 2020 in the Democratic stronghold of Clark County.
Jesse Law, the chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, says he tried to make “a firewall to keep the Nevada GOP stable.”
“Keeping our stability at the county means that Michael McDonald gets to do what he does very well, which is marshal resources,” Law says. “And in a stable environment, it means that people who are back East and looking at the landscape in Nevada know what they can rely on, which means they can plan to invest and give resources.”
Embracing ballot harvesting and early voting wasn’t an overnight fix. Law recalled a meeting last year where vice chairman Devin Livziey pitched early voting plans to a group of party members who wrongly claimed Trump won the 2020 election because of fraud. (Those claims have repeatedly been proven false in court challenges.)
Law said attendees began yelling at the newly seated Livziey, calling him “part of the problem” with the electoral system. “Not everybody got involved, but that was a very small minority,” Law says. “We just took the lead on it.”
Despite initial pushback, the Clark County GOP’s efforts to get people on board with early voting and voting by mail moved the needle, as indicated by secretary of state data that showed Republicans outnumbering Democrats in early voting. Those efforts were also supported by messaging from Trump and the Trump campaign.
Nevada State Democratic Party chairwoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno tells the Weekly Democrats knocked on more than 2.5 million doors in Nevada, made 25.5 million calls and cured more than 11,000 ballots.
“I don’t know if there’s anything that I would do differently,” Monroe-Moreno says.
She also embarked on a statewide tour for a week in the summer, touching all 17 counties.
The result was more than a consolation prize: All four Nevada Democratic candidates—Jacky Rosen in the U.S. Senate, and Steven Horsford, Susie Lee and Dina Titus in the U.S. House—won reelection.
“We are that battleground state and races are won here by razor thin margins. But it’s my job as party chair to make sure that I sing the praises of the work that our elected officials are doing from the top all the way down to the bottom,” Monroe-Moreno says. “I think that’s how we were successful in our slate of candidates here in the state.”
WINNING THE RURALS
Rural counties in Nevada traditionally support Republican candidates, with Trump the past two elections winning 15 of Nevada’s 17 counties but losing the urban counties of Clark and Washoe.
Trump again won the rurals, but this time won by a larger margin in cementing his battleground-state win.
In Nye County, which has less than 56,000 people, the ground game included 300 volunteers and a partnership with Turning Point USA, the nonprofit organization for youth engagement in conservative politics.
Nye County Republican Party chairman Leo Blundo says the effort employed mail, texting and campaign assistance to candidates.
“I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel,” Blundo says. “I think you can just change some of the spokes or the rubber or some of the gears out and improve the wheel, improve how your methodology is and how you’re executing.”
Trump received 18,946 votes in Nye County; he had 17,528 in 2020. Those 1,418 votes may seem like a small figure, but they certainly were beneficial in helping Trump break the Republicans’ two-decade drought in presidential elections in Nevada.
“[Trump] loses [Clark] County, but he loses by less, which now makes our impact here more profound,”Blundo says. “And then when we do better than expected [in Nye County], it gives us even more fluff and cover.”
Blundo recognized why Clark and Washoe counties received more resources from the state Republican party. But he feels Nevada’s rural counties go underestimated at times and says investing more into these areas would “energize a base that is hungry and wants to be engaged, wants to be active.”
“In Vegas or Reno, it’s easy to have rallies there, but you have a rally out in Pahrump and these people come out. You’ll shut the whole town down,” Blundo says. “Can you imagine if Trump came out to Pahrump? It’s over. There’s no town. It’s over. It’s like a madhouse.”
Trump excelled with young voters, a push Blundo says was solidified last February in Las Vegas when the Republican National Committee held a winter meeting.
Blundo adds that the collaboration with Turning Point stemmed from the winter conference. The group offered paid volunteer opportunities for those who would assist with phone calls among other outreach. He immediately saw the value in pursuing a partnership, he says.
Turning Point’s involvement, particularly its youth outreach, proved to be a success. Trump made stronger connections with 18 to 29-year-olds with support among the demographic increasing by 7% from 2020 to 2024, according to CNN exit polling.
“When Nye goes red, Nevada goes red, and I think we proved that this cycle,” Blundo said the week after Election Day. “We went red with Trump, and it was because of the efforts here.”
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