Why Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen Could Be Democrats’ Quiet 2024 Success Story

LAS VEGAS — In a year when an unfavorable map and Republican Donald Trump’s presence atop the ticket are endangering Democrats’ control of the Senate, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen’s consistent polling lead over her Republican challenger Sam Brown has been a bright spot.

Rosen’s edge, which has at times stretched into the high single and low double digits, has tightened in some recent surveys, but she is the sole vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbent that Cook Political Report is still rating “lean Democratic.”

The demographic makeup of Nevada, which has a lower share of college graduates than the country overall, makes Rosen’s staying power a head-scratcher, at least initially. Voters without a college degree, including those in Nevada’s large and growing Black, Latino and Asian communities, have generally been drifting away from the Democratic Party.

So, in a working-class swing state where Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump are essentially tied, what is Rosen’s secret?

To hear Rosen tell it, her relentless attention to Nevada’s interests and practical approach to legislating, even — or perhaps, especially — when it has meant breaking with President Joe Biden’s administration, have given her a clear edge.

“I’ve really been focused on Nevada. I’m a pragmatic problem-solver,” Rosen said in a late September interview at the Culinary Union Local 226’s headquarters in Las Vegas. “My motto [is] — everyone knows this — ‘Agree where you can and fight where you must.’ And so I don’t have to agree with everybody on every issue if we’re going to work on investing in our airports, our broadband, bringing the bright line train. I will talk about Nevada, our geography and geology.”

Rosen’s appeal as a warm, constituent-oriented Democrat is real. She also studiously avoids the kind of partisan grandstanding and controversial rhetoric that occasionally generates viral moments for her colleagues.

“There’s no reason to vote against her,” said Tick Segerblom, chair of the Clark County Commission.

Regardless, Rosen’s personal attributes are only half the story of her success against Brown to date.

Leveraging a massive fundraising advantage, her campaign began defining Brown as an anti-abortion zealot early in the race with a television advertising campaign beginning in April, according to a media-buying source. That ad blitz went largely unanswered over the course of the summer.

“How extreme is MAGA extremist Sam Brown? He said abortion should be banned without any exceptions for rape or incest,” the narrator intones in one typical Rosen TV spot that came out in May.

Brown, a former Army captain wounded in the Afghanistan War, had tried to neutralize the abortion issue in February when he and his wife Amy disclosed to NBC News that she had had an abortion prior to meeting him. In the interview, which aimed to convey empathy for women who seek out the procedure, Brown affirmed that while he and his wife are personally anti-abortion, he would oppose a national abortion ban and respect Nevada’s abortion protections.

But the Republican, who had run for Congress in Texas in 2014 and in the GOP Senate primary in 2022, has deep ties to the anti-abortion movement and made an array of anti-abortion statements Rosen took advantage of.

When Rosen started advertising, Brown was still running in a Republican primary where former Trump administration ambassador Jeff Gunter lent his campaign $2.7 million to fuel an ad blitz attacking Brown. Gunter did not end up coming close against Brown, who ran his own TV ads from May to early June.

But Gunter did come up with the moniker “Scam Brown,” which has since been coopted by Nevada Democrats. And Brown did not have the resources to go up on the air again until late August.

By that time, Rosen had already been using her TV firepower to undercut Brown’s NBC News interview and subsequent attempts to moderate his image on abortion.

“He’s trying to change his story to get elected, but for years, MAGA extremist Sam Brown has been pushing to ban abortion,” a Rosen ad warned in July.

Brown also gave Rosen additional material in early September when the Nevada Independent obtained audio of him revealing his opposition to an abortion rights amendment to Nevada’s constitution at a campaign event in August. The amendment, Question 6, would guarantee virtually unconditional abortion rights in the state constitution through the point of fetal viability, and then “when necessary to protect the health or life of the pregnant individual at any point during the pregnancy.”

In the recording, Brown said the amendment would “essentially [create] no limit on access to abortion” — a claim PolitiFact described as “false.”

Chris Roman, a Las Vegas independent who advises candidates from both parties but is supporting Brown, chalked up much of Rosen’s lead to her outspending him. As of mid-October, Rosen had indeed spent $43.2 million to Brown’s $17.4, though an avalanche of super PAC spending on Brown’s behalf from national Republican groups that has topped comparable Democratic spending has helped even the scales in the race’s final months.

Roman was optimistic, however, that Brown was still in contention thanks to an aggressive in-person campaign schedule across the state that he credited for helping drive down Rosen’s lead. “He’s showing up,” he said. “He’s out there every fucking day.”

Brown may also be benefiting from Trump’s rise in Nevada — itself a product of frustration that the state’s tourism and hospitality-heavy economy still hasn’t fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies that accompanied it.

A mid-October spot from Brown puts a photo of Rosen alongside Harris, characterizing them as “career politicians” who are “ruining Nevada” with inflation and “an invasion at the border.” The ad even features a clip of Trump at a rally in Nevada encouraging voters to vote for Brown, an “American hero,” over “Whacky Jacky.”

Buoyed by Trump’s improving poll numbers and registered Republicans’ edge over Democrats in Nevada’s early voting, the Senate Leadership Fund, Senate Republicans’ main super PAC, announced Thursday that they would be spending more than $6 million to boost Brown’s bid. It was the group’s first investment in the race and a key vote of confidence in Brown.

“Jacky Rosen has been a reliable vote for the Democrats’ extreme agenda and is a lackluster candidate,” SLF President Steven Law told NBC News. “President Trump is doing very well in Nevada and we think Sam Brown can too.”

But Rosen has been able to repel GOP claims that she is a partisan rubber stamp more effectively than some other Democrats. Rosen, whom Georgetown University’s Lugar Center ranked as the sixth most bipartisan lawmaker in 2023, can point to specific ways she has helped Nevadans — and when necessary, broken with Biden and other top Democrats.

Nowhere has this been truer than in Rosen’s defense of Nevada’s renewable energy and related mineral mining industry. She led an effort to pressure Biden not to levy tariffs on solar panel and cell imports from southeast Asia and blasted some of the Biden administration’s proposed regulations of the mineral mining industry, which has been exploding in northern Nevada thanks to green energy sources’ needs for lithium, in particular

“People in Nevada know that I’m willing to invest in them, expand opportunities, and not afraid to take anybody on, whether it’s the post office or the president for solar tariffs,” Rosen told HuffPost.

Finally, Rosen has found ways to inoculate herself from attacks on Democrats’ two greatest liabilities: inflation and immigration.

Unlike her fellow embattled incumbent in Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), Rosen has been vocal in her opposition to the Kroger-Albertsons supermarket merger, arguing it would drive up prices. In one of her TV ads, Rosen stands in a supermarket touting her vote for the Inflation Reduction Act provisions empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and capping insulin at $35 a month for seniors, as well as her work to “crack down on corporate speculators” driving up housing costs. “We can’t let special interests keep ripping us off,” she concludes.

On immigration, like other Democrats, Rosen supports a combination of stricter border enforcement, increased legal pathways to immigration, and an eventual path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already here. When she discusses border enforcement, though, she really gets into the nitty-gritty, growing passionate as she discusses how the demise of the bipartisan border security bill in May deprived the Border Patrol of more X-ray systems and other critical resources.

“We can stop more and more drugs and contraband human trafficking from coming through. So what do they need?” Rosen said. “They need more Wi-Fi. They need more broadband. They need more technology. They need space to build these” X-ray systems.

“This is how that bill was very nuts and bolts,” she added. “This is the practical kind of thing that [Republicans] voted against. I can’t stress that enough.”

Rosen was also an original cosponsor of the bipartisan END FENTANYL Act requiring the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to review and update its protocols for detecting fentanyl and other narcotics at border crossings. The bill became law in March.

Although Rosen grows passionate about certain topics, she has a practiced politician’s knack for refusing to answer questions that risk diluting her message or incurring political blowback.

Asked whether Harris should keep in place Biden’s June executive orders dramatically restricting the number of people who can claim asylum by crossing the border, Rosen said it would depend on “how the border crossings are going,” before bringing the focus back to federal resources for border enforcement authorities. “If we don’t invest in the tools and the training and the resources they have, executive action or not, they’re not able to do their job,” she said.

But political caution and personal charm are not mutually exclusive. Rosen, a former computer programmer married to a successful radiologist, is a multimillionaire. Yet she was at ease speaking to an audience of several hundred Culinary Union members on a Monday in late September, noting she had been a member of the union while working as a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s Palace to help fund her college education.

“I like how far she’s come and the fact still remembers where she came from,” said Sydney O’Sullivan, a Culinary Union member who works at the MGM Grand Hotel and had come to participate in the union’s training program for political volunteers following Rosen’s remarks.