Donald Trump has won his sixth battleground state of the 2024 election, flipping the state for the Republicans early on Saturday, by beating Kamala Harris in Nevada.
Trump won by 51% of the vote to the Democrat’s 47%, the first time the GOP has won the state in the presidential vote since the 2004 election won by George W Bush.
But Democrats took a crumb of comfort from the fact that Democratic US Senator Jacky Rosen won re-election in Nevada, which was also called early on Saturday.
The president-elect has 301 electoral college votes so far, well beyond the 270 point he surpassed early on Wednesday to take the White House, over Democratic rival Kamala Harris, and the Republican has now won six of the seven battleground states. On Saturday, morning only Arizona remained to be called.
The Associated Press declared Trump the winner in Nevada after concluding there were not enough uncounted ballots in the state’s strongest Democratic areas to overcome the former president’s 46,000-vote lead over the Democratic nominee.
The AP, which also called the Senate seat for the first-term Democrat, only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate can’t close the gap and overtake the vote leader.
Rosen’s defeat of a Trump-endorsed challenger gave some comfort to her party, although the Democrats have already lost their thin majority in the US Senate, while keeping hope alive that they can take a majority in the House. Rosen’s race was tighter than the one for the White House, and she held off Republican challenger Sam Brown with 48% of the votes cast to his 46%.
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Rosen, a former Las Vegas-area synagogue president and computer programmer, ran ads touting herself as an independent who doesn’t listen to “party leaders”.
“Thank you, Nevada! I’m honored and grateful to continue serving as your United States Senator,” Rosen posted on the social media platform X.
Rosen had been polling ahead of Brown throughout the campaign, though the race tightened as election day approached.
Rosen ran an energetic campaign, focusing on hyper-local issues in a state where more than a third of voters identify as non-partisan and attacking her opponent’s shifting stance on abortion rights.
Rosen was hand-picked to run for Congress and then the Senate – seemingly out of nowhere – by Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate leader from Nevada who helped reshape the state’s politics over his long political career. In 2018 – after serving just two years in Congress – she unseated the Republican senator Dean Heller with a five-point margin.
A former member of Nevada’s Culinary Workers Union, she maintained the support of the state’s politically powerful unions this time around as well, with the culinary union knocking on nearly 1m doors on behalf of her campaign.
In her closing message to voters, Rosen focused on abortion rights, positioning herself as a champion of reproductive freedoms, and pointed to her opponent’s waffling on the issue and refusal to voice support for the ballot measure. Though abortion remains legal in Nevada, a ballot proposal to enshrine the right in the constitution was deeply popular.
Meanwhile, Brown, a military veteran and Purple Heart recipient, was slow to gain traction and define his platform in the lead-up to the election. Having moved to Reno from Dallas in 2018, Brown had struggled to shake his reputation as a Nevada newcomer.
In the weeks before election day, several rural Republican officials endorsed Rosen, praising her as a political consensus-builder who had brought a wealth of federal funding and resources to the state.
At a debate last month, she told supporters she was “proud to be one of the most bipartisan, effective and independent senators”.
Most polls showed Rosen ahead of Brown for weeks before the election, and she maintained a three-to-one fundraising and spending advantage over her opponent. But the race tightened significantly before election day. Brown was boosted by a Pac linked to the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, which spent $6m on last-minute ads appealing to Maga voters: “President Trump and Nevada need Sam Brown in the Senate.”
Brown appeared alongside Trump during the president’s several visits to the state and had closely aligned himself with the former president’s policy platforms.
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