With Republican challenger Sam Brown leading Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) by a few thousand votes out of the more than 1.2 million cast, the Nevada Senate race — critical for the balance of power in the Senate — remains too close to call.
Brown, an Army veteran who lives in Reno, has a lead of 6,034 — or 0.5 percent — as of Wednesday morning. Whether he can maintain — or expand — that margin comes down to where the remaining vote is.
With less than 11,000 votes counted in Nye County — which still has not processed mail ballots — Brown will likely expand his lead.
The race will then be decided by the remaining mail vote in Clark and Washoe counties, which is expected to favor Democrats. But the size and margin of those votes remain unknown. Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day will be counted so long as they arrive by Friday. In the 2022 midterm, 6 percent of total votes in Clark and 3 percent of total ballots in Washoe were received after Election Day.
Currently, Rosen is winning Clark by about 5.3 percentage points, and Washoe by 2.4 percentage points. By comparison, in a smaller electorate, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) won Clark by 7.8 percentage points and Washoe by 4.3 percentage points — and she won in a nail-biter, by less than 1 percent overall.
If the margin is narrow, the race may come down to ballot signature curing. As of 3 p.m. on Election Day, the secretary of state’s office reported that 27,973 ballots are in need of a cure, or signature verification from the voter, which happens when election officials find a discrepancy between the signature on a ballot and the voter’s signature on other documents.
That figure does not include ballots that were returned Nov. 3 or later, including those placed in drop boxes on Election Day.
Of those, about 40 percent were cast by nonpartisans. About 35 percent were cast by Democrats, and 26 percent by Republicans. Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar also noted that ballots in need of a signature cure were disproportionately cast by younger voters.
If Brown wins, it will be a significant upset based on polling. Rosen had led in polls all cycle, including by large margins that both campaigns thought were unrealistic. While polling tightened at the end, analysts still expected that the race leaned toward Democrats.
Rosen is currently running more than 4 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris — a dynamic that polling predicted. But given that Trump’s lead in Nevada stands close to 5 percentage points — a wider margin than the dead heat predicted in polls — his overperformance in the state may be enough to bring Brown over the finish line.
If Rosen is able to hold on, it will be because too many Trump voters left the rest of the ballot blank, voted none of the above or for a third party, or split their tickets. Rosen is leading in Washoe County, for example, which Harris is losing. And while her raw vote totals are very close to Harris’, Brown is more than 60,000 votes behind Trump.
Currently, Republicans have flipped seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana. While the races remain uncalled, Democrats are in position to hold seats in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, while the Democratic incumbent in Pennsylvania looks poised to lose.
The outcome of the Senate race in Nevada will determine the size of the Republican majority — critical for confirmations of various Trump appointees and policies. In 2017, for example, Republicans held 52 seats but were unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act due to three Republican defections. The larger the majority, the easier a time Trump will have achieving his preferred outcomes.
It also matters heavily for the 2026 midterms. If Democrats lose four seats, they will need to win four to take back a majority — the path to do so is difficult but possible.
But if Rosen loses, and Democrats need five seats, the Senate map likely does not provide enough opportunities to do so, making the Senate Republican majority more durable for the duration of Trump’s term.
