(NewsNation) — With 47.7% of the vote, NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ has called the race for the U.S. Senate seat for Nevada in favor of Sen. Jacky Rosen. See all Nevada race results here.
Democratic incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen’s reelection bid against Republican challenger Sam Brown was considered one of the most competitive U.S. Senate races of 2024, threatening to upset the razor-thin majority held by Democrats in the upper chamber of Congress.
Rosen won election to the Senate in 2018, becoming the only Democratic challenger at the time to defeat a Republican incumbent senator during the 2018 midterm elections. Prior to that, she represented Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House.
Rosen has touted her record as one of the members of Congress who breaks with her party the most, releasing ads throughout her campaign that portray her in a moderate light. In the U.S. Senate, she has sat on several committees including armed services, homeland security and governmental affairs. As part of her reelection campaign, Rosen emphasized combatting antisemitism, bipartisan immigration reform to secure the border while protecting DACA and TSP recipients and creating a pathway to citizenship and supporting and advocating for tribal communities among other issues.
Meanwhile, her challenger Brown is a Purple Heart veteran who medically retired from the U.S. Army as a captain in 2011 after being wounded in an IED explosion in Afghanistan in 2008. He started a small business with his wife providing critical services to veterans, a selling point for some voters whose top priority is veteran affairs.
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Brown beat out 11 other Republican candidates in the party’s state primary to advance to the general election, a huge success for the political newcomer who ran an unsuccessful bid for Nevada’s other U.S. Senate seat in 2022. Brown was endorsed by Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo.
The Republican challenger built his platform on immigration reform and increased funding for border security including finishing the border wall, being a champion for fiscal responsibility in Washington, “making school choice a reality across America” and passing election integrity legislation, among other issues. After his wife revealed in an interview with NBC that she’d had an abortion in her 20s, he said he would not support a federal abortion ban. Abortion access is expected to be a motivator for Nevada voters who will also decide whether to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution.
Rosen raised more than $31 million, and her opponent raised around $9.5 million, according to Open Secrets’s latest data as of June 30. Rosen outraised her 2018 opponent, then-incumbent Republican Sen. Dean Heller, in her first Senate election and ended up winning the race.
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In the weeks leading up to the 2024 election, The Hill/ Decision Desk HQ’s Election Center projected Rosen had an 80% chance of winning reelection in Nevada. The New York Times reported that Cook Political Report’s political editor Jessica Tyalor attributed Rosen’s lead to her messaging about abortion and reproductive rights. However, since the state has a fluctuating electorate that causes problems with polling, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the race could go either way.
A total of 34 Senate seats are up in 2024 with 23 being held by Democrats and independents. Republicans can retake control of the upper chamber of Congress by taking two seats from Democrats or by winning the 2024 presidential election and winning just one other seat. As a result, the outcome of this race will affect the balance of power within the Senate in 2025.