Want a clear sign of GOP doom under Trump? Look to this key swing state

Since Donald Trump came down his escalator in 2015 and successfully launched a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in the U.S., there have been 16 competitive races for Congress in Nevada.

Republicans have lost all of them.

Yes, Nevada Republican Rep. Mark Amodei was reelected every time over those years. But this is a look at competitive federal races. The Nevada second congressional district Amodei represents is so safely red Democrats didn’t even bother to run a candidate against him last year.

Nevada’s first congressional district, home of the fabulous Las Vegas Strip, was the mirror opposite of CD2 in 2016, 2018, and 2020, when Nevada Democratic Rep. Dina Titus easily defeated what amounted to token opposition.

But in 2022 and 2024, after Democratic legislators redistricted CD1 to buck up Democratic strength in CD3 and CD4, Titus’ district became competitive as well.

Upshot: In the last five campaign cycles from 2016 through 2024, there have been 16 competitive federal races, four for the U.S. Senate (in 2016, 2018, 2022, and 2024) and a dozen for U.S. House seats. Republicans lost all of them.

One of the most formidable of those losing Republican candidates was Joe Heck, a three-term member of the U.S. House who ran against a former Nevada attorney general, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, to succeed U.S. Sen. Harry Reid in 2016.

Heck had endorsed, if only perfunctorily, his party’s nominee for president that year, Trump. After the Access Hollywood tape, Heck, like many Republicans, recoiled in disgust, and he unendorsed Trump. It then appeared that Trump’s base was rejecting Heck because Heck had rejected Trump. Late in the campaign Heck started going wobbly on his un-endorsement of Trump, and wouldn’t say who he was voting for. In the end, Heck and Trump both lost Nevada.

The most striking of the many Trump-era Republican losses for federal office in Nevada came two years later in 2018. Early in Trump’s first term, when Trump was trying to repeal Obamacare, Nevada Republican U.S. Sen. Dean Heller balked, then dithered. That led to Trump publicly humiliating him. Heller began sucking up to Trump, and voted for a so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare after all. And that in turn led to the campaign of Democratic candidate Jacky Rosen running ads casting Heller as an inflatable tube man blowing whichever way the wind took him (one of the best political ads of 21st-century Nevada, by the way).

Over the years, the more Trump has consolidated his command and control of the Republican Party nationally and in Nevada, the weaker and less accomplished have been the Republican candidates for federal office in the state.

And in all the competitive races for federal office that Republicans have lost, Nevada Democrats have tied those Republicans to Trump early and often.

Because it works. Nevada Democrats have a pristine track record spanning the last five campaign cycles to show for it.

Past performance, future results

An NPR/Newshour/Marist poll released last week found Trump’s approval rating on the economy is 36 percent, the lowest that particular poll has ever found in either of his madcap occupations of the White House.

And that’s actually better, for Trump, than an AP/NORC poll earlier this month that found only 31 percent of respondents approve of his handling of the economy, similarly an all-time low for that poll.

Those two polls echo a slew of other polls lately that find majorities of voters having roughly the same opinion of Trump that South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham expressed on the Senate floor in the wee hours of Jan. 7, 2021: “Count me out. Enough is enough.”

Starting with the 2016 campaign cycle, Trump’s first, Democratic candidates for federal office have benefited greatly not only by the offensiveness of Trump’s general Trumpyness. They’ve also successfully run against him, er, Nevada Republican candidates, by focusing on issues where Trump has polled poorly, usually health care.

In 2026, they’ll have health-care again, as well as the infuriating cost of living. They’ll be counting on the electorate’s dissatisfaction with Trump to do much of their work for them, allowing them to navigate their way to victories running as the lesser of two evils.

This year, Nevada Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate have responded to the threat posed by Trump’s assaults on democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law mostly by hunkering down in mushy centrism and saying “bipartisan” a lot. That suggests the Democratic campaign playbook in 2026 will be much the same as it’s been for the last decade: try not to offend anyone (including of course donors), play it safe, and let their Republican opponents sink under the weight of Trump’s endorsements.

In other words, Nevada Democrats, and many of their fellow Democrats running for Congress nationwide, might win an election about the economy in 2026 while saying nothing particularly significant about the economy except that Trump blew it.

By letting the electorate’s dissatisfaction with Trump do their work for them, Democrats would yet again be absolving themselves of confronting a warped marketplace and K-shaped economy that, over decades and thanks in very large part to all that aforementioned bipartisanship, has grown more unapologetically harsh and unforgivingly predatory.

In thrall to centrism, Democrats seem to believe a normalcy of some sort will eventually be restored, so their most prudent course is cautious incrementalism — despite its failure in 2024 to energize portions of a hitherto reliable base, and a 2025 Democratic Party approval rating “lower than the Dead Sea.”

And in many of the Nevada Democratic victories in competitive federal races in recent years, their trademark emphasis on moderation and bipartisanship prevailed, but only by appallingly slim margins against patently weak and even buffoonish Republican candidates.

What might be Democratic wishful thinking notwithstanding, the forces that coughed up Trump and Trumpism aren’t going away any time soon. The more Democrats stiff-arm ambitious reforms, the more risk that voters will embrace the wild-eyed right, or just stop voting, and the more fragile the republic’s defense against authoritarian lawlessness.

Trump may sink Republican congressional candidates in Nevada yet again in 2026. But in addition to pointing at something obvious for voters to be against, Democrats have an opportunity, even an obligation, to articulate meaningful systemic change that voters can be for.

If past performance is any indication of future results, they’ll take a pass.

• Hugh Jackson is editor of the Nevada Current. Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.