LAS VEGAS — Registered Republican voters have — by the narrowest of margins — overtaken Democrats in the pivotal battleground state of Nevada for the first time in nearly 20 years.
As of January, there were 187 more active voters registered as Republicans than Democrats, according to a monthly report released Tuesday by the Nevada Secretary of State’s office. The last time Republicans had an edge over Democrats in voter registration was in 2007. Both parties, meanwhile, remain outnumbered by nonpartisan voters, who now make up 33% of Nevada’s 2.1 million active registered voters.
The shift helps cement its status as a purple state and could make it more difficult for Democrats to defend two U.S. Senate seats and win back the presidency. That hurdle comes as the party faces a growing challenge to regain power in Washington.
Since the pandemic, Democrats have watched with alarm as their advantage in the state has eroded. Registered Democrats in January 2020 made up 38% of the state’s electorate, leading GOP voters by more than 83,000. Republicans since then had been slowly closing that gap.
Now, the latest Nevada report shows, each party accounts for just under 30% of the state’s registered voters — 618,539 are Republican, while 618,352 are Democrats.
Not every state registers voters by party, and it can be difficult to compare trends in those that do because of differences in voter registration procedures and state political histories. Still, there’s evidence of Republican registration gains in other swing states, too.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats hold their narrowest voter registration edge in at least a half-century. What was an advantage of 1.2 million voters in 2008, the year Barack Obama won the presidency, is now a gap of fewer than 200,000, according to state statistics. And in Arizona, where Democrats had been closing a registration gap with Republicans for the past decade, that trend reversed after 2022 and the party again lost ground.
Dan Lee, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the shift in Nevada serves as a reminder that it is a swing state, even if it voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 2008 until President Donald Trump flipped it in November.
“It’s not turning into a deep-blue state,” he said.
Trump carried Nevada narrowly in the 2024 presidential election. Data from AP VoteCast showed that self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaners outnumbered Democrats voting in that election, though self-identified party can differ from party registration.
The Nevada GOP credits its recent gains to voter outreach in 2024, including conservative organization Turning Point’s get-out-the-vote efforts. Alexander Watson, executive director of the state party, says that they plan to build on these efforts in 2026 and beyond by “promoting policies that resonate with Nevadans.”
Hilary Barrett, the Nevada Democratic Party’s executive director, says they are “laser-focused” on broadening support with nonpartisan voters, as well as inviting moderate Republicans into their party. AP VoteCast found that a majority of self-identified moderates voting in the state, including nearly 2 in 10 self-identified moderate Republicans, supported Kamala Harris in 2024.
Experts say the reasons for the shift in Nevada’s voter registration are varied and cautioned against placing too much weight on the numbers because they can be easy to misinterpret.
Chuck Muth, a longtime conservative campaign consultant in Nevada, pointed to routine voter roll maintenance and changes to the way the state registers its voters.
After the November election, for example, Clark County, a Democratic stronghold that is home to Las Vegas, removed nearly 130,000 inactive voters. More voters registered as Democrats than as Republicans tend to be inactive in Nevada, according to historical statewide voter data.
The Nevada Secretary of State’s office says there is usually a drop-off in active voter registrations across parties in the months following an election because the National Voter Registration Act prohibits county election officials from removing inactive voters in the 90 days leading up to an election.
Adding to those changes is that Nevada in 2021 began automatically registering people to vote when they apply for a driver’s license or ID card from the DMV. Under that system, people are registered as nonpartisan if they don’t pick a party on their application. Within two years of this new system, nonpartisans became the largest voting bloc in the state, and it continues to grow.
“The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how a person is registered so much as whether or not you turn your voters out,” Muth said.
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Associated Press journalists Emily Swanson in Washington, D.C.; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Jonathan J. Cooper and Gabriel Sandoval in Phoenix contributed.
