Nevada’s second youngest congressional district is also its swingiest.

Meet the 3rd Congressional District, a triangular swath of land enveloping Summerlin, Henderson and Boulder City and stretching all the way to Searchlight and Laughlin near the state’s southernmost tip. It’s a district that, since it hosted its first election in 2003, has voted for the winning presidential candidate, whether Republican or Democrat — once for George W. Bush, twice for Barack Obama and once for Donald Trump.

Last election cycle, Republicans and Democrats waged a fierce battle over the open seat after Republican Rep. Joe Heck decided not to seek re-election and pursued a U.S. Senate seat. And, though the district voted for Trump, it also elected Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen, a former synagogue leader, computer programmer and first-time candidate for office.

Now, following in the footsteps of Heck who occupied the seat before her, the freshman congresswoman is running for U.S. Senate in the hopes of ousting Republican Sen. Dean Heller, once again leaving the race in the 3rd District wide open.

Fifteen months remain until the 2018 election, but a handful of Republican candidates are already ramping up their campaigns: State Sen. Scott Hammond, ex-Assemblywoman Victoria Seaman, former chair of the Clark County Republican Party David McKeon and autism advocate Lynda Tache. Professional golfer Natalie Gulbis is also considering a bid in the district, according to a Republican consultant. (Multiple calls to Gulbis went unanswered and unreturned.)

On the Democratic side, the only name seriously being tossed around is Susie Lee, a philanthropist and former candidate for Nevada’s 4th Congressional District. Lee told The Nevada Independent that she has been considering a run for Congress in the 3rd District and that she and her family are “in reflection” about how best to give back to the state.

Although Nevada’s 1st District has almost always been represented by a Democrat and the 2nd District seat has always been held by a Republican, the 3rd District has flipped back and forth, though Republicans have held the seat for six out of the eight terms since the district was created by the 2000 census.

Republican Jon Porter was the first representative to hold the seat, serving three terms before losing his 2008 re-election bid to Democrat Dina Titus, who was buoyed by Obama’s 55-43 win in Nevada. Titus only served one term before she was defeated by Heck, who served three terms from 2011 to 2017.

The district has a relatively even share of Democratic and Republican voters, 153,829 to 143,437, with another 90,722 registered nonpartisans, as of July 2017.

Democrats, for their part, seem confident that they will be able to hold onto Rosen’s seat in 2018, relying on the hope that Trump’s ever-increasing disapproval ratings will weigh down Republican candidates. Democrats have been overperforming across the country in special elections held since Trump was elected in November.

“No matter who the Republicans nominate in this district, they'll be forced to defend a massively unpopular health care repeal effort to increase your costs, force millions to lose coverage, end Medicaid expansion and defund Planned Parenthood,” said state Democratic Party spokesman Stewart Boss. “The Republican primary battle brewing in this race is set to be nasty, messy, and expensive, and it will make it even harder for the GOP to try to flip this district.”

Lee, board chair of the education nonprofit Communities in Schools, was recruited to run for the 3rd District seat in 2016 but opted to run in the 4th District instead, which leans Democratic. The 3rd District is comparatively less diverse than the 4th — about 68 percent white compared to 61 percent white — and includes the more affluent suburbs in Henderson and Summerlin, while the 4th includes many neighborhoods that struggle with high poverty rates.

“I have been considering a run for Congress in CD3,” Lee said in an email. “As you know, I have dedicated my career to helping families have access to greater opportunities through education … My family and I are in reflection about how we can best continue to give back to our state which has given us so much. As soon as I make a decision, I will definitely let you know.”

A spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm of House Democrats, sounded an optimistic note.

“Democrats will soon have a strong candidate in this seat, who will build on Democrats’ strong past performances in Southern Nevada and win in 2018,” DCCC spokesman Drew Godinich said in a statement.

As a first time candidate, Rosen mostly faced attacks over the fact that she was recruited by longtime U.S. Sen. Harry Reid to run for the 3rd District seat, although Republicans also attacked her on various policy positions, including her stance on the Iran nuclear deal. Lee, who also had never run for office before last cycle, is likely to face similar attacks as she did in the Democratic primary in the 4th District, which she lost, that sought to paint her as out of touch with everyday Nevadans.

At the same time, the Republican side of the race is shaping up to be as feisty as the 2016 primary, in which businessman Danny Tarkanian and state Sen. Michael Roberson battled for the Republican nomination among a field of other plausible contenders including now-Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore and former Nevada Policy Research Institute Andy Matthews.

Despite a last-ditch effort from a dark-money group to help Roberson, Tarkanian won the primarily handily, 32 percent to Roberson’s 24, or a margin of 2,243 votes. Though Roberson has a long, mostly conservative record in the state Senate, Tarkanian’s name recognition — his father is Jerry Tarkanian, the legendary UNLV basketball coach — coupled with a distaste among some Republican voters for a $1.1 billion tax increase Roberson helped shepherd through the Legislature in 2015 ultimately sunk the Republican state senator’s ship.

Threads of that familiar conversation have already emerged in the 2018 race, with Seaman lambasting Hammond for voting for the tax increase in her inaugural interview as a candidate in the 3rd District, saying that Nevada doesn’t “need another person in D.C. who’s going to go up and raise taxes.” Hammond’s campaign manager Ross Hemminger dismissed Seaman as a “phony who’s voted repeatedly to raise taxes” and touted Hammond’s conservative bonafides, such as supporting tort reform, gun rights and weaker government unions.

Hammond, a charter school administrator who has served in the Legislature since 2010, announced his candidacy back in June after taking a brief break from the legislative session in March to travel to Washington D.C. and explore a bid for office. While there, he met with Republican Sen. Dean Heller and Republican Party officials to discuss why he would be a good fit for Congress.

“I’d like to see us change the culture and get something done, get something accomplished in D.C. and continue to work on that,” Hammond said in a June interview.

The Republican state senator is also the godfather of Education Savings Accounts in Nevada, authoring the 2015 bill to recreate the program and championing efforts to restart it during the 2017 session after it was stalled by the courts last year. Though bipartisan negotiations over the program ultimately broke down in the final days of the session, Hammond is still beloved by school choice groups, including one that has referred to him as “this incredible lightning strike, this incredible hero.”

Hammond, an adoptive father, has been outspoken on adoption and social service issues at the Legislature. He has also applauded decisions by the president, whom Hammond voted for in 2016, to appoint Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court and to cut down on government regulation, while saying he couldn’t comment on the president’s other political battles.

His campaign has recently brought on the firm run by Republican political consultant Chip Englander, who ran Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential campaign in 2016, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s 2014 campaign and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum’s 2016 campaign.

Seaman, a real estate agent turned business broker, has brought out the boxing gloves from the 2016 election, in which she used the tax increase argument to hammer then-Assemblyman Erv Nelson in the bitter Republican primary for State Senate District 6. Seaman won the primary but ultimately lost the general election to Democrat Nicole Cannizzaro.

The former assemblywoman, who announced her campaign in early August, has also made a point to highlight her support for Trump and his agenda, from immigration policy to repealing the Affordable Care Act, in the early days of her campaign. She said that the president hasn’t been given enough credit for lowering unemployment rates and stimulating economic growth.

“I think he’s done a fantastic job,” she said. “I think that he is being obstructed by not only Democrats but Republicans, but despite it all, from the media, Congress, despite that, we have more jobs, more growth, and the country is going in the right direction.”

She has also been the most vocal so far in the U.S. Senate race, giving a full-throated endorsement to Tarkanian, whom she noted that she has been friends with a long time. The three other candidates, Hammond, McKeon and Tache, all declined to comment on the Republican Senate primary so early in the race.

“I’ve supported him and he’s supported me. He’s a conservative like I am and, philosophically, we align together,” Seaman said. “So that’s the way I feel about that. We are good friends. I’ve always supported him. I always will support him.”

Seaman was in Washington D.C. this week meeting with various conservative and pro-business groups and said she had met with the National Republican Congressional Committee to discuss her candidacy. She has also contracted with former Ted Cruz presidential campaign manager Jeff Roe’s Axiom Strategies to work on her campaign.

Seaman declined to specify how much money her campaign planned to raise or how, only saying that her campaign has begun its fundraising efforts. She is in the process of wrapping up the last few items at work before she turns to the campaign full time.

The two other candidates in the race, McKeon and Tache, have never run for office before and framed themselves as political outsiders who could bring a new perspective to Washington D.C.

McKeon, who most recently owned a corporate events business called TLS Company, couched himself as a “man of the people” and pointed to his time as chair of the Clark County Republican Party to show the dedication and enthusiasm he believes he would bring to Congress. But McKeon isn’t entirely without D.C. connections — his father is longtime Southern California Congressman Buck McKeon.

He said that he decided to run in December of last year, long before Rosen announced that she wouldn’t seek re-election to the seat, after talking with his wife about how difficult campaigning would be and what it was like going through the experience with his father. McKeon said that his priorities in Congress will be ensuring that veterans get access to the services they need, ensuring that the nation’s laws are enforced and pushing for a balanced budget in Congress.

“This is about me serving the people,” McKeon said. “I want people to make that distinction for themselves by seeing how I served them in the past.”

On health care, McKeon said that the “promise” of the Affordable Care Act to reduce premiums and allow families to keep their doctors “was not fulfilled.” He said it’s “distressing” that people were promised health care but can’t afford to pay their deductibles and stressed the role of the free market in allowing the private sector an opportunity to provide competitive services.

He also said that the immigration system needs to “modernize” but that “just saying it’s broken, it doesn’t matter, let everyone in” isn’t the right solution either.

His campaign manager is Ed Williams, another former Clark County Republican Party chair who resigned during the county convention in 2016. McKeon said that he does not have any paid consultants and that his entire team is made up of individuals who live in the 3rd Congressional District.

McKeon said that he would have a “pretty good number” on his first fundraising report, where he said both the grassroots contributors and higher dollar checks will be properly represented if he’s doing his job right. He also said that he hasn’t gone out and courted endorsements but Republican Assemblyman Chris Edwards confirmed that McKeon has his “full throated endorsement.”

Tache, meanwhile, is a lifelong Republican, but the bulk of her work in recent years has centered around her Grant a Gift Autism Foundation, of which she is the founder, president and CEO. Her son, Grant, was born with autism, and she struggled for years getting her son access to the health care services he needed.

The organization began as a grassroots advocacy group focused on meeting new families and helping them navigate the world of autism and now has partnered with the new UNLV School of Medicine to open the UNLV Medicine Ackerman Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment Solutions, which provides patients with a team of physicians and other specialists to help support infants and young adults.

“As a person who has passion and likes to advocate for other’s needs, (Congress is) going to give me a greater platform to advocate for people in our state, families, men and women who have different issues,” Tache said. “I want to be a voice for some of those families in Washington D.C. I’ve been in the trenches. I’m not a career politician, I’m just a passionate citizen who knows when you set your mind to something you can do anything.”

Tache said that, as a single mother of a now 16-year-old son with special needs, health care is extremely important to her and that she believes that families should have options for their health care. She said that she supports a repeal of the Affordable Care Act and, had she been in the House when it was passed in 2009, she would have voted against it.

“As a Republican, I’m here to work with my party as a team player, but I have a voice at the table,” Tache said. “We need to talk about these things, make the best decisions possible to make America great again.”

She said that she may not agree with Trump’s style in certain situations, but that she does believe in the president’s agenda and applauded his decision to nominate Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Tache, who worked as a cocktail waitress while putting herself through school at UNLV before working for several years in the hotel industry, described herself as a “results-driven conservative.”

Jeff McGowan, the founder of Bedrock Data Solutions who has done data analysis for the National Republican Campaign Committee and Americans for Prosperity, is handling Tache’s campaign.

The National Republican Campaign Committee is letting the primary run its course but a spokesman described the growing list of Republican candidates as a “talented field.”

“This seat was a top Republican pickup opportunity even before Jacky Rosen abandoned it,” said NRCC Spokesman Jack Pandol in a statement. “Republicans are feeling confident about our chances to take back this seat with a talented field either filed or considering – meanwhile, Democrats still don’t even have a candidate.”

Federal candidates in Nevada have until March 16, 2018 to file for the primary election.