A presidential candidate with a unique ability to turn out low-propensity voters. A Nevada senator running a state-specific campaign and keeping her party leaders at arm’s length. And an electorate much more interested in third-party candidates and the “none of the above” option in the Senate race than in the presidential race.

In Nevada, 2024 proved to be somewhat of a 2012 redux — with the results flipped. 

Twelve years ago, then-President Barack Obama carried Nevada by a nearly 7 percentage point margin. But his coattails were limited — Democratic voters left the rest of the ballot blank, split tickets or voted third-party in the Senate race, and Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) won re-election by 1.2 percentage points.

This year, the contours of the race were similar, but it was former President Donald Trump who turned out infrequent voters to win the state by about 3 percentage points. Republican Senate candidate Sam Brown was unable to reap the benefits, earning close to 10 percent fewer votes than Trump, in a race that only saw about 1.4 percent fewer votes than the presidential race. 

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), meanwhile, barely saw any dropoff from Vice President Kamala Harris, and even received more raw votes than her party leader in Washoe County and in the rural areas of the state.

Like 2012, votes for non-major party candidates, including the “none of the above option,” were a relatively small percentage of the presidential race, but enough to change the outcome in the Senate race.

The freshman senator attributes her success to localizing the Senate race, emphasizing her Nevada roots and commitment to bipartisanship and painting Brown as too extreme for the state. This allowed her to win even in a national environment that favored Republicans and keep enough registered nonpartisan and soft Republican Trump voters from picking Brown as well.

“My race was always about me versus Sam Brown,” Rosen said in an interview. “I think that Nevadans knew me. [I’m] no stranger to being on the news, no stranger to being out there. I've lived in Nevada 50 years, and so I think that was the difference for me.”

Brown was not available for an interview.

Rosen’s margin of victory — 1.65 percentage points as of Nov. 17 — meant she outran Harris by 4.75 percentage points. Polls showed Rosen leading all cycle, often by double digits, even when they found Trump to be leading President Joe Biden by healthy margins. When Harris entered the race, polls found the presidential race to be a dead heat, with Rosen still winning outside the margin of error.

In the last few weeks of the race, public polling showed the race getting closer — which internal polls in both campaigns had predicted all along — with Rosen still in the driver’s seat. The final polling averages showed Trump favored by 0.6 percentage points and Rosen by 4.9. 

As it turned out, polling did account for the gap between the presidential and Senate races, but was about 3 percentage points too far left. Ultimately, Trump won by about 3 while Rosen held on by about 1.5 percentage points.

Given the presidential margin, Rosen’s campaign believes that there was a lane for Brown to win. But the lack of much outside Republican spending until the fall — allowing Rosen to positively define herself on the economic issues that could have been a bigger weakness and negatively define Brown before he could introduce himself to voters — meant that the Republican push in the last few weeks was insufficient.

And a combination of Trump-only voters and those who split tickets — either by voting for a third-party candidate, none of the above or for Rosen while voting for Trump — secured the race for her, despite the challenging presidential environment. The strategy was well-executed — and instantly familiar to Republicans who worked on Heller’s campaign, when a significant number of Black voters selected Obama and then a third-party candidate.

“It wasn't that her ballot number with independents was something crazy,” said Jeremy Hughes, a Republican strategist who worked on Heller’s 2012 campaign. “It’s that his number wasn't. [They] made him not a choice. It was very similar to what we did to [Democratic candidate Shelley] Berkley in 2012. Berkley wasn't an option for people, and so they just were like, oh, I’ll vote over here.” 

The Rosen strategy

Like most Democratic campaigns around the country, Rosen had a significant financial advantage. She decided to press it early — releasing her first campaign ad in April, while Brown was still mired in a primary, to positively define herself as a bipartisan dealmaker. She soon went on the attack, painting Brown as an extremist, particularly on abortion.

In solo campaign expenditures, the Rosen campaign dropped $32.7 million on advertising to the Brown campaign’s $11.7 million, per ad tracking firm AdImpact. That cash disparity was especially notable during the summer, with the Brown campaign back in fundraising mode after the primary and most Republican outside groups yet to enter the fray. From mid-June through mid-August, Democrat-aligned groups spent at least $300,000 more than Republican groups each week; some weeks, their advantage was about $3 million.

Brown’s campaign believes Rosen’s summer ad blitz helped boost his name identification, but that her unchallenged advertising created an advantage. It created a dynamic where Rosen was always on offense, and Brown was stuck perpetually playing defense.

While leaning on her bipartisan reputation, Rosen was also unafraid to run on economic populism, touting her opposition to the Kroger-Albertson’s grocery merger, corporate home buying and high prescription drug costs. In a state as heavily working class as Nevada, where voters routinely ranked the economy as their top issue, it appears to have been the right message.

“I don't care where you come from, what language you speak, what religion you have, whether you're young, old or somewhere in between, it's all about what happens around your kitchen table … to the people that you care about and that you worry about,” Rosen said, mentioning food prices. 

“You go to the market, the eggs, the chicken and the beef are too high,” she continued. “The rent — we have the corporate investors coming, jacking up the rent or the gas prices. So, [it’s about] talking about getting those big companies who are clearly ripping us off, making the profits. How do we fight that? Because that's hurting us at the kitchen table.”

It was a similar strategy to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who won Nevada in 2022 in an even closer race (less than 0.8 percentage points) as gas prices surged. Cortez Masto and Rosen laid the blame for high costs at the feet of corporations, while their opponents blamed the Biden administration. And while voters at the presidential level clearly resonated with the Republican interpretation, Rosen was able to separate herself and her race from the White House enough to win.

Because the presidential race looked out of reach for Democrats when Biden was on the ticket, the Rosen campaign intentionally built a message to attract independent voters, preparing for the scenario that ended up occurring — a Trump victory in Nevada.

In focus groups, they found that undecided voters, regardless of their personal belief on abortion, resonated overwhelmingly with their criticism of Brown’s support of a Texas abortion ban at 20 weeks that had no exceptions for rape or incest. Thus, Rosen constantly had ads spotlighting Brown’s past abortion position — even as he announced in February that he would not support a national abortion ban and supported exceptions. 

Although abortion may not have swung the presidential race, in Nevada, where more than 60 percent of voters supported a ballot measure to enshrine abortion protections in the state’s constitution, the Rosen campaign believes the candidates’ contrast on the issue was meaningful.

Rosen also tried to keep the Senate race turning on Nevada, rather than national, themes — the goal being to emphasize the relationships she had built throughout her lifetime in the state, and particularly in the past eight years as a politician, compared with Brown’s six years as a resident of the state. Keeping it Nevada-specific, the campaign believes, also helped insulate her from the presidential red wave. 

“Rosen ran a really quintessential Nevada Senate race — problem solver, non-ideological, bipartisan, bringing home goods and services for Nevada,” said David Damore, a political scientist at UNLV. 

Multiple Republican strategists agreed. One, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Rosen ran a “very smart” campaign reminiscent of the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) in his pre-leadership days, when his motto was “Independent like Nevada” and he looked for votes all across the state.

In the north, she touted her successful efforts to partner with Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) and Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) to keep the U.S. Postal Service from moving its Reno mail processing operations to Sacramento. In the south, she lamented the cost of housing and hyped up her efforts to secure public funding for the Brightline train from Southern California to Las Vegas, a project expected to bring significant job and economic growth. And in rural areas, she ran ads about her support of ranchers and miners.

The Rosen campaign also found in focus groups that independent voters were more likely to support her after hearing about times that she had stood up to Democrats, including on Nevada issues such as mining and solar energy. To that end, an ad in which Rosen pledges to stand up to leaders of either party on behalf of Nevada was her opening and closing pitch of the cycle.

The Brown campaign, meanwhile, struggled to pick one lane. At one point, it focused its attacks on Rosen’s 2017 violations of the STOCK Act, when she was late to publicly disclose automatic stock trades. Brown spent much of the debate pillorying Rosen for her campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies and her personal wealth. In October, after the UNR women’s volleyball team forfeited a match against an opponent with a transgender player, Brown pushed that issue.

But the Rosen campaign never cut a direct-to-camera ad addressing any of those issues, though they did respond to the STOCK Act hit — partially, a staffer said, because the Brown campaign never stuck with one line of attack long enough to warrant it, and mostly because the Rosen campaign knew that the strongest argument against her was not about her as a person, but about people’s frustrations with the economy. 

And a Rosen staffer also noted that she centered union labor throughout her campaign. While exit polling data is often unreliable, early returns suggest that at the top of the ticket, Democrats bled support among union voters throughout the country. Rosen, who filed for re-election, held a post-debate rally and gave her victory speech at different union halls, kept organized labor close — to say nothing of her longtime alliance with the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which she was a member of as a young adult.

Of course, all of the Rosen campaign’s savvy would have been moot if Brown had been able to reduce the Trump undervote by even half — a source of great frustration to his campaign and Republicans nationally. The “none of these candidates” vote, a Nevada-only option that has oft played spoiler and that received 3.03 percent — nearly double Rosen’s margin of victory — stings in particular.

A Brown campaign staffer said the campaign knew there would be an undervote — the amount was just larger than anticipated. Rosen only received 4,092 fewer votes than Harris; Brown got 74,159 fewer than Trump. 

Rather than evidence of a superior Rosen strategy, the Brown staffer said the Nevada Senate race is more indicative of poor voter education. The staffer recalled talking to voters who announced they had voted for Trump and skipped over the rest of the ballot, assuming that would solve their problems, without understanding that majorities in Congress matter.

“Really what it came down to was just people not checking the box,” the staffer said.

The Rosen campaign argues that they’re responsible for some portion of the undervote — by negatively defining Brown as an extremist before he could define himself, the campaign believes it was able to remove Brown as a viable option for enough voters to make a difference.

“I don’t think that happened in a vacuum,” said Stewart Boss, Rosen’s campaign manager. “That was the product of conscious campaign decisions to make sure that Brown was not an acceptable choice for enough voters in Nevada.”

Throughout the race, without the financial parity to compete with Rosen on the airwaves for long stretches, the Brown campaign tried to get creative with its outreach, focusing on generating organic media interest and hosting events and conversations with Latino voters, Asian American and Pacific Islander voters and union members, feeling that Republicans were underperforming with those groups. While the Brown campaign believes that they likely did improve their margins with those groups, the race ultimately followed a standard formula — the Democrat winning by big enough numbers in Clark County and narrowly winning Washoe County to offset rural losses.

The GOP was optimistic about Brown’s candidacy at the very end of the race, when registered Republicans were turning out at higher rates than registered Democrats throughout early voting. They were so encouraged, in fact, that the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC linked to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), pumped over $6 million into the race to support Brown, its first Nevada expenditure of the cycle. But the electoral cake may have already been baked.

“I think he got stronger in the last three weeks of the campaign or so, but by that time, people were already voting and had made up their mind,” Damore said.

Crunching the numbers

Rosen received nearly identical vote share to Harris in each of the state’s regions. But Brown lagged behind Trump everywhere. In Washoe County, for example, Harris won by 1 percent, but Rosen won by close to 6 percent, because Brown’s vote share was more than 4 percentage points lower than Trump’s.

As in 2012, the disparity between the presidential and Senate contests was driven by votes against the non-major party candidates. This trend was most prominent in the rural counties, where more than 6.6 percent of voters chose neither Rosen nor Brown. Thus, Rosen only lost the rurals by 34 points instead of the 40 that Harris lost by. 

The 2024 Senate race is also drawing comparisons to the 2022 midterm.

“What I saw in Jacky’s race was similar to mine,” Cortez Masto said. “There's a new baseline that we’re seeing now, moving forward, and we have to understand, most importantly, the nonpartisans, independents.”

In each, the Democratic senator relied on Election Day and late-arriving mail ballots to put them over the edge. In an expanded universe of voters, Rosen’s margin was a little more than double double Cortez Masto’s slim 0.77 percentage point advantage. 

So despite their historic win in the presidential race in Nevada — the party’s first in 20 years — Republicans still have work to do to figure out how to win a Senate race in Nevada, which has eluded them since Heller’s victory in 2012.

The Brown staffer said that future campaigns should learn that political outsider types such as Brown can run plausible, competitive races in Nevada, without buy-in from the Republican establishment and years spent working one’s way up the ladder.

But some experts and operatives argue that a more savvy Republican operation in the state is needed to improve candidate quality for statewide races in the future — and to establish a better bench. 

“Until the Republicans can develop stronger candidates — I guess they’ve got four years until [Cortez Masto’s] back up — [there will be] a lot of missed opportunities,” Damore said.