When I drilled through the House election results, I saw a lot of very encouraging trends. A lot of areas where the Democrats hadn’t come close in recent memory had margins in the low single digits.
But one race piqued my interest where the margin was, on paper, not really that close. Namely, Nevada’s 2nd District, anchored by Reno and Carson City and stretching across the more rural northern part of the state. The incumbent Republican, Mark Amodei, was one of the few bright spots on what was a really bad night for the GOP in the Silver State. He secured a fourth full term with 58 percent of the vote.
But upon closer inspection, Amodei’s victory didn’t look all that impressive. How’s that, you ask? Well, NV-02 may look rural on paper—in fact, it’s the fifth-largest district in the country that doesn’t cover an entire state. However, two-thirds of the district’s population lives in Washoe County, home to Reno. Amodei only won that county over Democratic challenger Clint Koble 51-49—a margin of just over 4,100 votes.
Amodei ran it up in the more rural areas of the district, winning the other 11 jurisdictions in the district (Carson City, the state capital, is an independent city) by well over 60 percent. But he may not be able to get away with that for much longer. After all, Washoe County is exploding—though not quite at the same rate as Clark County, home to Vegas. There are 460,000 people there as of 2017, and it’s very likely it will pass the 500,000 mark by 2020.
Reno isn’t just getting bigger, it’s getting bluer. From 1944 to 1988, it went Republican in all but one presidential election—the lone exception being LBJ’s landslide. At every other election, the Republican usually carried it going away. But since then, the GOP has only once won it by more than four. In 2008, it swung dramatically to Barack Obama, who won it by 13. It’s gone Democratic in every presidential election since then.
Jon Ralston, who knows Nevada politics as much as anyone, noted in his early voting blog that Washoe is almost tied in registration, with Republicans only holding a two-point edge. He thought that the GOP would ultimately win early voting there, despite the Democrats going gangbusters there early on. But the Democrats ultimately won early voting in Reno by just over 1,000 votes. Combined with a 47,000-vote bulge in Vegas, it turned out that Dean Heller and Adam Laxalt were staring down a deficit they couldn’t overcome.
The numbers don’t lie—Reno is definitely trending Democratic. And the Democrats now have an almost unbreakable hold in Vegas, allowing them to pile up enough votes there to prevail statewide, or at least keep it close if they lose in Reno. Remember, Nevada is one of the most centralized states in the nation. Clark County accounts for over three-fourths of the state, with Washoe accounting for 15 percent. No other county-level jurisdiction has more than 60,000 people, and ten counties have fewer than 20,000 people. It’s going to get to the point that the GOP can’t just run it up in the rural counties anymore. And if Reno goes all the way blue, no Republican will ever win Nevada statewide again.
All of this should make Amodei very nervous. The numbers don't lie—the ground is shifting out from under him, albeit ever so slowly. We already know that the Democrats can make a race of it in this district with the right candidate. Since the district was formed in 1983, we’ve gotten over 40 percent only three times—but two of those times came with strong showings in Reno. And as I mentioned earlier, Reno has gotten a lot bluer since then. If we can find and fund a credible candidate for 2020, we can at least give Amodei heartburn—and erase the last red blob from Nevada’s congressional map.