People line up to vote on the first day of in-person early voting in Las Vegas on Oct. 19.
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Julian Herrera knows who he’s voting for. The 22-year-old Las Vegas resident’s vote is largely motivated by taxes, the housing market and the cost of living.
That’s why he’s voting for former President Donald Trump, just like he did in 2020. He feels that Trump is best to handle the economy better than Vice President Harris would.
“It’s been much, much worse with Joe Biden,” said Herrera, who is 22 and works in real estate investment. “And I just don’t understand what would be different since [Harris has] already been the VP for three and a half years.”
But one thing is different for Herrera in 2024: he is no longer registered in the Republican Party.
“The people that are actually a part of that party, the everyday person that is you know, that extreme white right wing that’s just way too much like, ‘Oh my God, I hate liberals, I hate Democrats,’ and all that — that’s kind of what pushes me away from that,” Herrera explained.
Herrera is just one of what’s been an explosion of nonpartisan voters over just the last four years in Nevada.
There are more nonpartisan voters than both Democrats and Republicans in the state: four in 10 registered voters are not affiliated with either major political party — a jump of 11 percentage points from 2020. Meanwhile, the percentage of registered Democrats decreased by 7 points between 2020 to 2024, and registered Republicans dropped by nearly 4 points.
The rise in nonpartisan voters is partly due to a 2020 law in Nevada that automatically registers new voters who do business at the DMV — like getting a driver’s license — as nonpartisan, giving voters the option to manually register for a political party later.
But Sondra Cosgrove, a historian at the College of Southern Nevada, says that’s only part of the picture.
“There’s probably a lot of voters that just didn’t feel like reregistering,” Cosgrove admitted.
“But there is a large number of very young voters who are registered [as] non-partisan, who feel really disengaged and alienated from the political parties,” she continued.
Because it’s been so difficult figuring out which kind of nonpartisan outnumbers the other, Nevada has become one of the most unpredictable swing states in a matchup with razor-thin margins.
Jon Ralston, the editor in chief of the Nevada Independent, is often referred to as the state’s voting expert, but his presidential crystal ball has never been this foggy.
“It’s a big question mark,” Ralston said. “I usually have a feeling, even by this point, of who is going to win. I thought that about [Hillary] Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
“I am just not sure now,” he added.
There are other reasons why the state is a curveball. It’s using an all-mail voting system for the first time. There’s a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights, which Democrats hope will turn out voters. This is also the first election, though, since Nevada, which used to vote reliably for Democrats, toppled its sitting Democratic governor in the 2022 midterms.
Political parties pay attention
An attendee holds up a sign reading “NEVADA VOTE!” in an overflow area while waiting for former U.S. President Barack Obama to speak at a get-out-the-vote rally as he campaigns for Democratic presidential Vice President Harris in North Las Vegas, Nevada.
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“They’re going to play a major role,” said Tai Sims, communications director for the Nevada Democratic Party. “Which is why we’ve, you know, built an on-the-ground team.”
Six of the party’s 14 state offices are in rural communities, in order to court voters they don’t always reach.
“It’s because most of these people, we see as Democrats maybe being registered as those nonpartisan or as those independent voters,” he said.
But Republican pollster Bob Ward, who conducts polling on Nevada for AARP, has a different view on these unaffiliated voters.
“They are likely to be either disillusioned Republicans or Trump fans,” Ward said. “And these are not large margins.
”I don’t mean to say that all of these people are that way,” Ward continued, “but he has the advantage among these people.”
Campaign material is seen ahead of a Turning Point Action ‘United for Change’ campaign rally with former President Donald Trump in Las Vegas on Oct. 24.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Halee Dobbins is the communications director for Arizona and Nevada for the Trump campaign. She thinks nonpartisan voters will help Republicans keep that advantage.
“They know they trust President Trump on issues like the economy, on issues like immigration, on tackling the housing affordability crisis,” she said. “And so those are the things that we feel like will really turn out a lot of voters this election.”
Nonpartisans divided
That’s not going to turn out 54 year-old nonpartisan Vance Acevedo, though.
“I don’t believe for a minute that he would be able to take his ‘concept of a plan’ and actually implement anything,” Acevedo said, referring to a comment Trump made at the presidential debate against Harris.
“He’s had a concept of a plan for health care. Why didn’t he implement it for four years? He had a concept of this immigration wall. Where is it? Mexico is going to pay for it. Did they? No,” he said, chuckling.
Acevedo is most turned away from Trump because of his rhetoric, including that he wants to have generals like the ones Hitler had.
“I find it quite disturbing and concerning, and I think there would be less support for Trump if people actually thought maybe he was going to do what he’s saying he’s going to do,” he said.
So imagine Acevedo’s surprise when his partner, a fellow nonpartisan, told him he already voted for Trump. It was, as Acevedo put it, a “radical reversal of his prior position”: Acevedo, an ex-Republican, voted for Trump in 2016 while his partner voted for Hillary Clinton. Then, they both voted for Biden in 2020.
This time around, the couple still respects each other’s decision.
“We have to cancel each other out, I guess,” Acevedo joked.
Of course, there will be nonpartisan voters who simply choose not to vote for either candidate — including Roy Douglas. He likes to vote on the issues: He’s for voter ID laws, but cares about protecting abortion rights.
Douglas, who lives in Reno, knows he can’t vote for Trump. “I think Trump’s just a buffoon,” he said. And as for Harris? Douglas, who is 59 years-old, can’t vote for her because of the Biden administration’s policy on the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and as a maintenance supervisor at a prison, he criticizes her past policies on criminal justice while she was attorney general for California.
He doesn’t mince words when talking about the election.
“I’d rather chop my hand off with a rusty saw than vote for either of those two,” Douglas said.
