Today’s Democrats completed a sweep Friday of three key seats in the western battleground state of Nevada that Republicans had targeted in their bid to take control of the US House. Reps. Deanna Titus, Steven Horsford and Susie Lee fended off GOP challengers in close congressional races that drew tens of millions of dollars in outside spending in Las Vegas and surrounding southern Nevada. Ballot counting took several days, in part because of the vote-by-mail system created by the Nevada Legislature in 2020, which requires counties to accept postmarked ballots on Election Day if they arrive up to four days later. Horsford said on Friday it had “been one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime”. But despite deep divisions in the electorate and pre-election predictions that potentially big change was on the horizon, there will be no new faces in Nevada’s House delegation next year. Nevada’s lone Republican House member, six-term Rep. Mark Amodei, retained his seat by defeating Elizabeth Mercedes Krause in Nevada’s rural northern 2nd District, where no Democrat has ever won. Amodei, a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has had at least 58 percent of the vote since winning his first full term in a special election in 2011. His large district includes Reno, Sparks and Carson City, as well as rural areas from south of Lake Tahoe to the Utah line. Titus, who won re-election to a seventh term, fended off a challenge from Republican Mark Robertson in her party’s traditional stronghold of Las Vegas, where the GOP had hoped redistricting would help him win the 1st District seat for the first time since in 1998. The dean of Nevada’s congressional delegation, who faced a rare primary challenge from a Bernie Sanders supporter, Titus had complained that Democratic strategists had made her vulnerable for the first time in years by sacrificing some traditional turf in exchange for redistributive gains. in neighboring regions. But on Thursday night she was convinced she had survived the challenge and issued a statement thanking her supporters. “Voters sent a message loud and clear: They want someone in their corner who never backs down from a fight,” Titus said. Robertson, a retired Army colonel and business owner, conceded the race on Friday and made clear he would not allege voter fraud as former President Donald Trump and others have done in the wake of the 2020 election. “This is how Representative Democracy works,” Robertson said in a written statement. “Although we came close, in the end, we couldn’t overcome the ten-point write-in advantage that Democrats have in this district.” The other two seats have bounced between parties over the past decade and were both near the top of the GOP’s priority list this midterm election. Horsford won a fourth term, unseating Republican Samuel Peters in the 4th District that stretches from the edges of Las Vegas through suburbs and rural areas to the Utah border. He became the first black person to represent Nevada in Congress when he was first elected to the House in 2012. He lost in 2014 but has now won three straight. Peters, a war veteran, lost the GOP congressional primary in 2020. Among Nevada’s GOP congressional candidates, he was the one most closely aligned with Trump. Lee highlighted her staunch support for abortion rights to win a third term by defeating Republican April Becker in southern Nevada’s 3rd District, which stretches into the state of Arizona. He said voters “chose unity and respect over division and extremism.” Becker, a Las Vegas attorney, narrowly lost her bid two years ago to unseat the state Senate leader. He was supported by anti-abortion groups, but emphasized that abortion is legal in Nevada up to 24 weeks under a voter-approved measure. Lee told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday that she believed many of Nevada’s independent voters, about a third of the electorate, supported her. “These independents are seriously swing voters,” he said. “A lot of people predicted they would go right. But a lot of them are young … and reproductive choice was a big driver, and they were worried about inflation, but they recognized that a party was trying to deliver.” Lee acknowledged that voters in Nevada, like the rest of the country, are concerned about inflation, but argued that Democrats are the only ones who have faced it. Republicans “used it as a talking point and had no idea how to deal with it,” he told the AP. “Ask any Republican in Congress what they would do, and their only proposal was to cut corporate taxes and taxes on the rich … and cut Social Security and Medicare,” Lee said. “We made investments in the economy with the stimulus bill and infrastructure, and we made the largest investment in climate change in history.” Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo on Friday defeated incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak. In the crucial US Senate race in Nevada, Democratic Sen. Kathryn Cortez Masto was slightly behind challenger Adam Laxalt.
