In 2012, Dean Heller played the presidential race exactly right.

Internal campaign polling showed Heller, a Republican running for his first full Senate term, up 7 percentage points over Democratic opponent Rep. Shelley Berkley heading into the fall, with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney locked in a dead heat with President Barack Obama.

But everything changed after Mother Jones published the now-infamous video of Romney telling donors that 47 percent of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because of their dependence on the government and victim mentality.

Heller quickly distanced himself from Romney’s comments — saying he had a “very different view of the world” — but the damage was done. The campaign’s next internal poll showed Romney had fallen 7 percentage points, threatening to drag Heller down as well.

So, he avoided Romney on the trail and focused instead on split-ticket voters in Washoe County. It paid off — Heller won by just over a point, also benefiting from a congressional ethics inquiry into his Democratic opponent, while Obama won by nearly 7 — making Nevada the only Obama state in 2012 to elect a Republican senator.

“You see somebody like Shelley Berkley, who kept her distance from Barack Obama, and then all of a sudden, oh my gosh, Barack Obama's up, we have to bear hug him,” Heller’s then-political director Jeremy Hughes recalled in a recent interview. “Whereas Heller … ran his own race.” 

But six years later in 2018, it was the opposite. Heller — who once said he opposed Donald Trump “99 percent” and returned his campaign donations to charity — had to quickly pivot and embrace Trump, campaigning with the president and running on a message focused on Trump’s tax cuts and judicial appointments. Just weeks before Election Day, Heller told Trump, “everything you touch turns to gold,” at a rally in Elko, Nevada.

But in a strong year for Democrats, Heller couldn’t hang on. Then-Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) beat him by 5 percentage points, riding a blue wave of anti-Trump backlash. 

Now running for her own re-election, Rosen finds herself in a similar position — deciding how to treat an unpopular sitting president whose path to electoral victory likely includes her state. And the Republican nominee will have to contend with the dilemma that Nevada Senate candidates have been dealing with since 2016 — how close do you align with Trump, a presidential candidate beloved by the GOP base but repeatedly rejected by the independent voters who power general election wins?

Both likely nominees remain unpopular in Nevada, according to recent polls, but with months to play out on the campaign trail, Biden and Trump appear headed for a rematch in 2024 — and the approach of Senate contenders on either side of the aisle is already taking shape.

So far, the common choice among the GOP field is simple: embrace Trump. Even primary front-runner retired U.S. Army Capt. Sam Brown endorsed Trump last week after avoiding questions on the presidential race over the early period of his campaign and amid myriad attacks from primary rivals who said he didn’t sufficiently support the former president.

On the Democratic side, Rosen is seeking re-election with a message focused on her bipartisan bonafides. Still, she’s been unafraid to appear with Biden at events — including a high-speed rail funding announcement — and share the stage at a Culinary Workers Union rally with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Democrats familiar with her campaign said Rosen, unlike incumbent Democratic senators in redder Montana and Ohio, is running in a purple state — and where it makes sense to campaign with Biden, she will.

The history of the president-Senate candidate relationship in the Silver State is checkered with good, bad and ugly — from the hot and cold relationship between Trump and Heller to the close bond between Obama and longtime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). What lessons can each side take from the history of those relationships?

When it all clicks

The Nevada electoral outlook hasn’t changed much since 2016 —  a battleground on the presidential and Senate maps and a bellwether for the national political climate.

In 2016, each of the eventual presidential nominees won in Nevada. In late February, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton narrowly won the Democratic caucus, and days later Trump’s landslide caucus victory in Nevada cemented his front-runner status.

In the same cycle, Nevada’s Senate race was defined by Reid’s retirement announcement in March 2015. That set up an open, and costly, Senate race ultimately pitting former Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, against then-Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) — a pair of candidates who took drastically different approaches to their relationship with the person at the top of the ticket.

Cortez Masto — quickly backed by Reid as his successor — endorsed Clinton a week before the Nevada caucus and stuck by her amid controversy over her private email server.

The two made a pair of appearances alongside each other, and throughout her campaign, she benefited from high-profile visits from surrogates that ranged from Obama-led rallies and ads to events featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and then-Vice President Biden.

A source close to Cortez Masto’s 2016 campaign, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about Democratic campaign strategy, said there was a focus on consolidating Democratic support from the top of the ticket on down the ballot — a key takeaway for Democrats after the 2012 election, which saw Berkley lose the Senate race by more than a point even as Obama won the state by nearly 7 percentage points.

On the Republican side, Heck, like most swing state Senate candidates, kept Trump at arm's length, endorsing but not explicitly running or appearing with Trump. But the most critical moment between Heck and Trump came just a month before the election, when, after the release of the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape that featured Trump speaking in vulgar and sexist terms about women, Heck publicly withdrew his support for Trump — a move met with boos and heckles from supporters at a rally in Southern Nevada.

Heck continued to muddy the waters in the following weeks, telling supporters in a closed-door fundraiser that he wanted to support Trump and calling him “qualified” to be president. Heck ultimately received 17,000 fewer votes than Trump when both of them lost in Nevada in 2016.

Meanwhile, Clinton and Cortez Masto secured victories in the Silver State with nearly identical margins — Clinton over Trump by 2.4 percentage points and Cortez Masto over Heck by 2.4 percentage points.

Past Democratic alliances have proven to be similarly fruitful. Despite some fraught moments in their history, Obama and Reid were often united on the campaign trail, including in Reid’s final electoral victory, when he overcame low approval ratings to defeat tea party favorite Sharron Angle in 2010. 

In contrast to the current face of each party, Obama was often a boon for Nevada Democrats. In 2008 and 2012, he recorded the two largest presidential margins of victory in the state over the past 30 years. Since leaving office in 2016, Obama has often served as one of the most popular surrogates to boost down-ballot Democrats running in Nevada, including a Las Vegas rally with Cortez Masto and other Democrats days before the 2022 election. 

Some key elements of Cortez Masto’s 2016 victory remain in place heading into 2024, including the vaunted “Reid machine” that has also helped power Democratic Senate victories in 2018 and 2022. 

David Damore, a political science professor at UNLV, said in an interview that the ground game will become particularly important as ads and additional outside spending flood the airwaves with attacks tying Senate candidates to the presidential ones.

“At some point, I think it just becomes so saturated,” he said. “And that's where I think the door-to-door, the canvassing … really makes a difference.”

An unwelcome reception backfires

Looking at the past decade of electoral outcomes in Nevada, the Silver State may appear more blue than purple. Even amid a spate of razor-thin victories, the last time a Republican candidate won a U.S. Senate race in Nevada was 2012. George W. Bush was the last Republican presidential candidate to win the state, doing so in 2004.

Though many of the recent high-profile losses by GOP candidates in Nevada have come at a time when the party has been defined by Trump, candidates who rejected Trump have suffered with the GOP base.

In 2016, a strong year for Republicans nationwide, the only two Senate toss-ups they lost were Nevada and New Hampshire — both states where the Republican candidates vocally opposed Trump. Similar to his criticism of Heller following the 2018 election, Trump mocked Heck for unendorsing him prior to the 2016 election, telling the New York Times “he went down like a lead balloon.”

Heck’s attitude toward Trump may prove to be a valuable lesson for Brown, who enters 2024 in a position with key similarities to Heck’s position entering 2016. Though Brown lacks Heck’s standing as a congressman, he too sits as a front-runner backed by the national party establishment facing challenges from more conservative opponents.

Hughes said the 2016 election may prove the most analogous to 2024, in that both presidential candidates are unpopular and the Senate candidates must decide how much to involve themselves with their party leaders. Hughes said the best thing the candidates can do is avoid nationalizing their race. They should show up to their party leaders’ high-profile events in the state to avoid the appearance of snubbing them, but for the most part, Rosen and Brown would do best to stay focused on Nevada.

“You campaign with them when you can, but you're running your own race,” he said.

Both the Rosen and Brown campaigns are already painting their prospective opponents as enablers of their unpopular leaders, a “rubber stamp” in the case of Rosen and an anti-abortion election denier for Brown.

Still, Damore pointed to one recent example of a Nevada candidate finding success while navigating questions about how close to stick to Trump: Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who won a tight race in 2022 by appealing to independents, even while making several appearances at rallies alongside Trump and offering conflicting views on his presidency.

A senator’s distancing goes right

Alongside Heller’s 2012 success, Cortez Masto’s re-election in the 2022 midterms may provide the best example for Rosen to follow.

While Trump made multiple visits to the Silver State in 2022 to boost Republican candidate and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt, Biden kept a comparatively lower profile on the trail, avoiding Nevada. That space — along with a record amount of cash — allowed Cortez Masto to define her own image in the campaign, overcoming Republican efforts to tie her to Biden, while recording endorsements from some Republicans and making visits to deep red parts of rural Nevada. 

In the end, she won in the tightest Senate race in the country while earning more votes in every county than Democrat Steve Sisolak did in the governor’s race. Trump-backed candidates across the country also notably performed poorly in 2022.

“The playbook is there [for Rosen],” Damore said.

But he added that winning the same type of support may be more difficult for Rosen “because she's unknown.” Since her last time appearing on a ballot in November 2018, the number of registered voters in the state has grown from fewer than 1.6 million to more than 1.9 million, with many automatically registered at the DMV. 

That growth has included significant churn, too, with many voters leaving the state and new residents joining the rolls. The New York Times reported in 2022 that “almost half the voters on Nevada’s rolls have registered” since 2016, according to an analysis from Democratic data firm TargetSmart.

“How many people really even know who she is?” Damore asked.

A February 2023 Nevada Independent / OH Predictive Insights poll found that 22 percent of registered voters surveyed had no opinion of or had never heard of Rosen — nearly double the amount with the same lack of opinion of Cortez Masto — though as the incumbent, she still holds a distinct name recognition advantage over any of her challengers.

But being better known does not always translate to success. In his 2012 campaign, Heller had only held his Senate seat for a few months as he entered his election fight against Berkley.

A former secretary of state and a Northern Nevada congressman since 2007, Heller was appointed to the Senate seat in May 2011. Berkley, meanwhile, had established a base in populous Clark County as the congresswoman representing central Las Vegas since 1999. 

Heller ultimately eked out a victory of fewer than 12,000 votes — a win that his political advisers said came from targeting independent voters, who now make up the largest share of the Nevada electorate, and a relentless ground game.

Both Rosen and her eventual Republican challenger will have to contend with their unpopular party leaders coming to Nevada.

On the Republican side, Brown has only recently embraced Trump, but in a party dominated by the former president, his challengers are hoping their “Never Trump” attacks will stick against Brown, even as he has shown clear support for the former president.

Damore described Trump as a “double-edged sword,” noting that when he’s on the ballot, he brings out his highly motivated base of GOP followers. But a candidate’s decision to tie themselves more closely to Trump to win in a Republican primary may ultimately hurt them in the general election — where they’ll need to rely on moderate independents to win.

For Rosen, Democratic strategists, who were granted anonymity to speak freely about campaign strategy, said whether or not she appears with Biden, voters know they’re both Democrats, but that Rosen should tout notable breaks with the president or the majority of her party to establish her record as a moderate. Critically, she has the resources to do so — a war chest of over $10 million going into 2024 and the backing of well-funded interest groups who will spend in the state.

Still, on either side, the candidates may face a risk of not winning the same level of support as their counterpart on the top of the ticket. In three of the past five Nevada Senate elections, voters have elected a member of the opposite party in the state’s other major race, whether for governor or president.

“We do have a fairly strong history of split outcomes in this state, so … there's some notion of voters differentiating [their choices],” Damore said.