In the past few years, voters in Nevada who aren’t registered with a party have become the largest voting group in the state.
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Nevada is about as purple as a swing state can get. Four in 10 registered voters there are not affiliated with either major political party. Nonpartisan voters are the largest single group in the state. And as NPR’s Jeongyoon Han reports, it’s unclear what curveball those nonpartisan voters will throw.
JEONGYOON HAN, BYLINE: Julian Herrera knows who he’s voting for, and it’s Donald Trump. He thinks Trump would handle the economy better than Vice President Harris would.
JULIAN HERRERA: It’s been much worse with Joe Biden, and I just don’t understand what would be different since she’s already been the VP for 3 1/2 years.
HAN: Herrera, who’s 22, voted for Trump in 2020 as well. The only difference is that he has since unregistered himself from the Republican Party.
HERRERA: 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.
HAN: The rise in nonpartisan voters is partly because in 2020, Nevada decided to automatically register new voters who do any sort of business at the DMV, like getting a driver’s license, as nonpartisan. They can 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.
SONDRA COSGROVE: There’s probably a lot of voters that just didn’t feel like reregistering, but there is a large number of very young voters who are registered nonpartisan who feel really disengaged and alienated from the political parties.
HAN: The jury’s still out over which kind of nonpartisan outnumbers the other, and that makes Nevada one of the most unpredictable swing states. 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. And Nevada, which used to vote reliably for Democrats, toppled its sitting Democratic governor in the 2022 midterms. That’s where nonpartisan voters come in.
TAI SIMS: They’re going to play a major role, which is why we’ve, you know, built an on-the-ground team.
HAN: That’s Tai Sims, communications director for the Nevada Democrats. They’ve put nearly half of their offices in rural communities in order to court voters they don’t always reach.
SIMS: Most of these people, we see as Democrats maybe just being registered as those nonpartisans or as those independents.
HAN: But Republican pollster Bob Ward, who conducts polling on Nevada for AARP, has a different view on these unaffiliated voters.
BOB WARD: They are likely to be either disillusioned Republicans or Trump fans. These are not large margins. I don’t mean to say that all of these people are that way. But he has the advantage.
HAN: Halee Dobbins is the communications director for Arizona and Nevada for the Trump campaign.
HALEE DOBBINS: They trust President Trump on issues like the economy, on issues like immigration, on hackling the housing affordability crisis. And so those are the things that we feel like will really turn out a lot of voters this election.
HAN: But 54-year-old nonpartisan Vance Acevedo, who lives in Las Vegas, doesn’t buy that argument.
VANCE ACEVEDO: 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’s gonna pay for it. Did they? No.
HAN: But what Acevedo has found most disturbing is Trump’s rhetoric, including that he wants to have generals, like the ones Hitler had.
ACEVEDO: And I think there would be less support for Trump if people actually thought maybe he was going to do what he was saying he’s going to do.
HAN: So imagine Acevedo’s surprise when his partner, a fellow nonpartisan, told him he already voted for Trump.
ACEVEDO: Which is a radical reversal of his prior positions.
HAN: 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 and even joke about their votes.
ACEVEDO: We have to cancel each other out, I guess.
HAN: But that’s not stopping Acevedo from volunteering for Democrats. Jeongyoon Han, NPR News.
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