The Democratic National Committee hopes to reverse recent trends by making a historic investment in registering new Democratic voters nationwide — and the party is kicking off the effort with a seven-figure investment in Nevada. 

The push comes a year after Republicans took the voter registration lead in the Silver State, which Democrats had previously held since 2007. 

Nonpartisans have also surged; the most recent statistics indicate that a few thousand more Nevada voters are registered Republicans than registered Democrats, but that nearly 200,000 more are nonpartisan. Gallup data published Monday showed a record high 45 percent of American adults identified as independents in 2025. 

The DNC’s program, dubbed “When We Count,” is expected to be the committee’s largest-ever national voter registration campaign and marks the first time in more than ten years that it has invested in on-the-ground partisan voter registration. DNC Chair Ken Martin stressed the strategic importance of such efforts, saying they will be a top priority.

“A year ago, during my campaign for DNC chair, I vowed that our national party would get back into the business of partisan voter registration,” Martin said on a Tuesday press call. “For too long, Democrats have ceded ground to Republicans on registered voters.”

The DNC will be especially focused on voters of color that it says have been overlooked by traditional registration efforts. The party believes it could help register nearly half of the state’s 160,000 unregistered Latino voters, as well as many members of the fast-growing Asian American and Pacific Islander electorate.

Both groups helped flip the state to President Donald Trump in 2024, a departure from historical patterns in which nonwhite voters have strongly backed Democrats and had kept Nevada blue for the last two decades of presidential elections. 

“I’m a big advocate of this and I’ve been pushing for this for years,” said Chuck Rocha, the founder of Solidarity Strategies who engineered Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Latino outreach strategy in the 2020 Nevada caucus. “We have spent so much money on nonpartisan voter registration without telling people why they should be a part of the Democratic Party.”

A part-time, paid fellowship for young Democrats will be the centerpiece of When We Count. The committee this spring will bring on its first cohorts, totalling more than one hundred fellows across key congressional districts in Nevada and neighboring Arizona. The fellows will receive weekly training to learn how to register their peers and other new voters.

The committee is also planning four National Voter Registration Weeks of Action ahead of the midterms. These weeks will aim to energize fellows, state parties campaigns, college and high school Democrats and volunteers with trainings, surrogates and intra-state competitions. 

“With the DNC’s historic investments, the Nevada State Democratic Party is full steam ahead to win up and down the ballot in November 2026 and kick Joe Lombardo — the most vulnerable GOP governor up for reelection — out of office,” Nevada Democratic Party Chair Daniele Monroe-Moreno wrote in a statement to The Nevada Independent.

Nevada was one of the states where the committee’s GOP counterpart, the Republican National Committee, opened community centers to court voters of color ahead of the 2022 midterms. The offices hosted voter registration sessions and other events. But by early 2024, those centers had quietly closed. The RNC focused on culling the voter rolls, suggesting in a lawsuit that Nevada voter registration rates were “impossibly high.” 

Nonetheless, Democrats have lost more than 60,000 Nevada voters since reaching their high-water mark of almost 655,000 in 2021, while Republicans have gained 20,000 over the same time period. 

UNLV political science professor David Damore largely credited outside groups for Republicans’ comparatively better numbers after the state expanded voting access. 

“I think there was an expectation that the liberalizing of the voting laws here would be great for Democrats,” Damore said. “It didn’t turn out that way. Same day voter registration, all that stuff sort of leans Republican, suggesting that they’ve done a better job of finding those marginal voters.”

Damore called the DNC’s new initiative “a first step” for a party that mostly rode the anti-Trump wave after 2016, when Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) did not seek re-election. He added that When We Count could help Democrats signal early enthusiasm to donors and better target voters for future turnout efforts in a way they haven’t for years.

“It’s about time,” Damore said. “It kind of got away from the Reid Machine model of registering as many voters as possible and then following up with the door-knocking.”