Trump Flips Nevada, Nears Sweep of Swing States

Voters head to Allegiant Stadium to cast their ballots in the presidential, as well as other races in Henderson, Nev., on Nov. 5, 2024. Jacob Kepler for The Epoch Times

LAS VEGAS—President-elect Donald Trump has flipped Nevada, nearly three days after he was declared winner of the 2024 race to the White House.

The race was called at 9:15 p.m. PT on Nov. 8. Trump has now won six of the seven swing states and appears poised to capture them all. He is leading in Arizona, the final battleground that has not yet been called.

With this win, Trump becomes the first Republican to win the Silver State since 2004. He lost the 2016 race here to Hillary Clinton by 2.42 percentage points and the 2020 contest to candidate Joe Biden by 2.4 points.

Republicans had reason to believe Trump’s third time would be the charm after posting a robust in-person early vote lead and registration gains since 2020.

While Harris has consistently, but narrowly, led in Nevada polls since succeeding Biden as the Democrat’s nominee in July, two of four late surveys showed Trump suddenly surging as a clear favorite.

An Atlas Intel Nov. 1–2 survey of 782 likely voters had Trump leading by 5.5 percentage points and a Susquehanna Oct. 28–31 poll of 400 likely voters had Trump up by a breakaway 6 percentage points.

Meanwhile, a NY Times/Siena Oct. 24 to Nov. 2 survey of 1,010 likely voters had Harris up 2-to-3 percentage points and an Emerson Oct. 29 to Oct. 31 poll of 700 likely voters put her up by 1 percent.

Many media outlets had declared Trump the winner of the battleground state’s six Electoral College votes for days before the AP formally finally did so.

AP called the race with 96 percent of statewide ballots counted. Trump had 724,498 votes, 50.7 percent, to Harris’s 678,399 votes, or 47.4 percent.

He led by 3.3 percent, or by 46,099 votes.

There had been as many as 13,000 mail-in ballots, including more than 11,000 from Clark County, flagged for discrepancies, primarily mismatched signatures. Elections offices had been frantically scrambling to contact affected voters to “cure” or verify those votes by Nov. 9.

Trump was not only winning Washoe County—which includes Reno and is Nevada’s second-largest voting constituency—by about 1,600 votes but had garnered more than 478,000 votes in Clark County, where 71 percent of the state’s 3.2 million residents and 2.03 million active voters live, and where Democrats need to run up big numbers to win statewide races.

That doesn’t appear to have happened in 2024. While Harris was leading in Clark County with 504,828 votes late afternoon Nov. 8, that was only 26,000 more than what Trump had received in the blue county, significantly below the threshold needed to overcome GOP votes across the state.