Nevada could be Democrats’ biggest nightmare

The first thing Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto wants you to understand is that Nevada elections are always close.

“Nevada is a purple state and it’s independent and it’s strong,” she told me in early October, in a union hall she’d just used for a campaign event. “I also know a lot of the polling gets Nevada wrong, so I really don’t utilize or worry about that.”

If she sounds defensive, that’s because the country’s first and only Latina senator is quite literally the Democrat most at risk of losing her Senate seat next month.

But she’s also right about Nevada’s politics: In 2016, she won her first election to the US Senate by 2 percentage points, or about 27,000 votes, during a year that saw Donald Trump win the presidency and congressional Republicans hang on to control of both houses of Congress. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton won the state in their presidential races by a similar margin. A Republican held a Senate seat and the governor’s office as recently as 2019. And when a red wave swept through the country in the 2014 midterms, Republicans narrowly won unified control of Nevada’s state government.

Now, with a week until early voting begins in her state, most polls show a virtual tie between Cortez Masto and her Republican opponent, the Trump-endorsed former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt.