'Oh shit, we won': Inside the perfect storm that flipped Nevada's only GOP House seat

The final two ads of the campaign that would make Teresa Benitez-Thompson the first Democrat ever to win Northern Nevada's 2nd Congressional District were filmed within 72 hours of writing them.

In one, the 48-year-old former lawmaker and social worker serves burgers and fries, highlighting how she once worked as a waitress to make ends meet and would serve her constituents in office. In the other, she eviscerated her opponent on camera in a poker room. Both ads were packed with extras, who chatted and dealt cards in the background.

Who were all these extras? They were campaign volunteers, roughly five dozen of whom said they would show up in the middle of the workday each time to help the campaign.

On Tuesday, Benitez-Thompson, or TBT, inspired voters to do the same.

She beat small-business owner David Flippo (R) in a district that retiring Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) won by 19 points in 2024 and that a Democrat has never represented. Her historic victory was part of a nationwide rebuke of President Donald Trump (R), but according to interviews with more than a dozen sources on both sides of the race, it was much more than a case of right time, right place.

When Amodei announced his surprise retirement in February, Democrats began saying this could be the year the district finally went blue. But it seemed like a pipe dream. Even Benitez-Thompson called herself a longshot.

But she also believed she could win.

"I took the weekend to look at numbers," she told a small group of supporters in April. "And I saw, there's a path. There's a path, with an open seat, to flip this district blue. It might not be a landslide, it might be 30 votes or 300 votes, but there's a way for a Democrat to get there."

Making history required more than a favorable national environment. A scandal-ridden Republican candidate, seven-figure outside investments and a smart campaign strategy that took advantage of changing district dynamics all contributed.

Asked by The Nevada Independent which factors made the difference, Benitez-Thompson said "all of the above."

"We did such hard work in this campaign and I don't want that to be lost on anyone," she said.

"I did not sit around waiting for a blue wave to take me over and push me across the line."

What happened in the 2nd Congressional District, then, wasn't just a wave — it was a perfect storm.

"The perfect Democratic candidate"

Vote totals on Sunday showed Benitez-Thompson had won the seat by nearly 6 percentage points. The Democrats' previous high-water mark in the district this century was a more-than-five-point loss in 2006, when former state party chair Jill Derby (D) fell short against eventual Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV).

This week, Derby was thrilled.

"From the beginning, I thought, 'She's the perfect candidate to go to Congress from this district,'" said Derby, whose son was on the high school debate circuit with Benitez-Thompson. "She understands people. She understands their needs. Congress is where you can do something about it. And then she's just a lovely human being."

When rumors about Benitez-Thompson's interest in the seat began circulating earlier this year, nearly every other prominent Northern Nevada Democrat stepped aside and began gushing about her.

Read More: Lawmaker. Social worker. Pageant queen. Is Congress next for Teresa Benitez-Thompson?

Even the opposition agreed she had a stellar resume.

"She's the perfect Democratic candidate for this seat, right?" said Flippo's general consultant Rory McShane in a Wednesday interview. "She's Latina. She's a legislator. She's incredibly well-spoken. She doesn't come off like a radical. She's a former beauty queen. I mean, her husband's the local weatherman. You literally could not pick a better Democratic candidate for this seat. I remember watching some research film of her where she was talking about the bathroom bill, right? And she made the argument in such a way that, as a hardcore rabid conservative Republican, I wanted to rethink my position."

Every Democrat who spoke to The Nevada Independent for this story emphasized that Benitez-Thompson was more than just a lucky recipient of a good political environment. Her leading Democratic primary opponent, wealthy investor Greg Kidd, said "she really just represented the best of what Nevada and the 2nd District is about."

"This race really exemplifies how much candidate quality matters," said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) spokesperson Lindsay Reilly. "Yes, this environment was a good environment for Democrats, but I think Northern Nevadans just saw Flippo as the fraud that he is and they saw Teresa Benitez-Thompson as a leader who cares deeply about Northern Nevada, and they made their choice."

It helped that she could speak directly to affordability. 

"She knows how to talk to people," longtime political strategist Billy Vassiliadis told The Indy. "Especially in a time when voters are feeling unheard, unseen and unattended to, you put a TBT in front of those voters, and now they're being heard."

On the campaign trail, she shared how she and her husband have had to make tough financial decisions, like pulling back on retirement investments. Her personal financial disclosure lists five figures of credit card debt.

Many politicians talk about "families like yours." Benitez-Thompson says "families like mine."

"When I go to fill up my gas tank, I don't want to feel like I'm checking my balance every time," she told reporters Wednesday. "You need people who've got real skin in the game going back there and making policy."

An unprecedented campaign

This spring, Benitez-Thompson won the Democratic primary without running a single TV ad. Her campaign manager Riley Sutton said that was on purpose. 

Before June, her team could either fund an ad buy or a field campaign. They opted for the latter because they knew they needed a robust, people-powered operation to carry into the general election. 

Over the course of the campaign, Benitez-Thompson's team sent 15,000 hand-addressed letters. In the final two days, it sent a couple hundred thousand peer-to-peer texts. 

She held 180 public events across the district, including small house parties. Voters would remember her as the hometown candidate because they had met her in their hometowns, from Spanish Springs to Caughlin Ranch.

Her efforts paid off in Washoe County, the district's most populous region and a notorious bellwether. She won there by roughly 20 points. 

She repeatedly visited Carson City and ultimately won it, something no Democrat running for federal office had done since President Barack Obama in 2008. 

"Its registration numbers belie the fact that it is a heavily state worker town," Sutton said of the capital. "So it's people that know that their bread and butter comes from state and federal work."

During the primary, she regularly joined much less well-known candidates for rural tours of the state, answering questions alongside them across the far reaches of the district. Sixty guests showed up to a house party in Wellington, thrilled that a politician was there. She went to Wells, West Wendover, Gardnerville and Fernley.

In every rural county, she improved upon the percentages of past Democratic candidates by double digits.

"Teresa showed up and spoke to voters in every corner of her district," Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) wrote in a statement to The Indy.

She was also boosted by unprecedented outside support. 

A Nevada Independent analysis found that this race attracted more outside spending than any in the district's history, including a $2 million spend targeting Flippo from a clean energy group called Invest in Tomorrow Coalition (ITC). The plan, ITC spokesperson Matt Munsil said, was to work against House Freedom Caucus candidates who "made it their purpose in life to kill clean energy for purely political reasons." 

ITC believed Flippo would be an underperformer and that money could go a long way in the relatively affordable Reno media market.

"There are a ton of groups with a ton of money whose entire job is to get Democrats to Seat Number 219 or 220," Munsil said, referring to numbers just above what's needed for a majority in the House. "We don't have that money, and that's not our prerogative. So we were looking for sort of unique edge cases where our $15, $20 million could make a meaningful impact in races that were sort of flying under other folks' radar."

National Democrats sensed the environment growing bluer. Polling popped up showing Benitez-Thompson within striking distance. EMILY's List came on board. In August, the DCCC named the district "in play." In October, it added her to its Red to Blue list, reserved for the most competitive districts in the country — supercharging her fundraising. 

Independent race raters repeatedly shifted the contest in her direction. 

"Everybody got a sense that TBT was moving pretty strongly in the fall, upwards," Vassiliadis said.

In the final days of the race, shadowy PACs popped up to try to direct Republican voters to third-party candidate Lynn Chapman (IAP), who ultimately performed about as well as she did when she ran in 2024. Similarly mysterious groups attempting to mobilize Republicans were too late.

The DCCC targeted younger voters at UNR, where there were long lines on Election Day. The committee made its biggest investment at the end of the race.

"We helped the Benitez-Thompson campaign blanket the market with TV ads in late October," Reilly said. "At that point, we knew how damaging Flippo's vulnerabilities were and that there were still a lot of undecided voters, so we took a shot. And then when results came in at 3 a.m., it was like, 'Oh shit, we won.'"

"The deflection Olympics"

Derby, the Democrat who lost in 2006, thinks she was missing something Benitez-Thompson got: the right opponent.

"I so wanted to win it myself," Derby said. "Maybe if I'd had as bad a candidate as she did, I might have been able to."

Amodei had planned to stay out of the primary and support the eventual GOP nominee. The race turned out very differently. Amodei eventually backed former state Sen. James Settelmeyer (R), became one of Flippo's harshest critics and voted third party.

"The reason TBT won, I'm just winging it here — she was better qualified to represent CD2, I think, in people's minds, than Dave Flippo," Amodei told The Nevada Independent on Wednesday. "I'm not celebrating."

Someone recently asked him why he didn't endorse Benitez-Thompson. He said they should have thanked him for going as far as he did.

"There's not a snowball's chance in hell, if the shoe was on the other foot — Teresa Benitez-Thompson wouldn't and shouldn't have endorsed me, so let's cut the fantasy stuff," he said.

In the spring, when Flippo and Settelmeyer vied for the Republican nomination, Sutton knew who he wanted to come out on top — Flippo, who had swapped races last minute from a Southern Nevada seat and only recently moved to Reno.

Even Republicans saw the signs.

"In April, it was clear to us that if Mr. Flippo won the nomination, there would be problems in Washoe County in this environment," said Greg Bailor, a Republican political strategist who helped run Settelmeyer's campaign.

But thanks to Trump's endorsement and a ruthless primary campaign that kneecapped Settelmeyer from the right, Flippo became the Republican nominee. As spring turned into summer, other controversies mounted. 

"We started actually doing real research into Flippo over the summer," Reilly from the DCCC said. "We found some eyebrow-raising issues, and those ended up making a real difference in this campaign. No one wanted another George Santos in Congress."

First was his failure to file a personal financial disclosure that was legally due in May, which he still has not filed. 

Next was a report that he exaggerated his military record — one that Democrats believe was key to sinking his bid.

"There had already been stories written about Flippo's campaign finance issues at that point, but that stuff can be so in the weeds that it just doesn't translate, it's not tangible in the same way that lying about your military service is," Reilly said. "I have a lot of respect for his military service, but if you are lying to voters about it, that is a red line."

More revelations about his dismissal from previous jobs, his personal and campaign finances, and his military record continued to trickle out. Democrats capitalized on the news.

"It was a horribly run campaign with a terrible candidate who was a liar and completely incompetent, someone who didn't know why he was running, and there wasn't a single day that didn't go by without a scandal," a GOP strategist who worked in competitive races across the country, including in Nevada, told The Nevada Independent.

The strategist added that Flippo's refusal to file a disclosure was "a red flag" and that he seemed like a self-funder when "he really wasn't."

His campaign wrote the headlines off as liberal attacks. 

"You know that stuff is patently unbelievable," Amodei said. "Talk about the deflection Olympics."

Benitez-Thompson was prepared to debate Flippo, but he declined to share a stage with her.

"It's almost like, 'Hey, it's a Republican district, and I'm the Republican nominee. Period. End of pep rally,'" Amodei added.

Amodei explained that Trump created a situation in which House leadership had to line up behind his endorsed candidates such as Flippo, even when they were unknown or had baggage.

"I'm speaking factually, not emotionally: Donald Trump didn't know David Flippo," Amodei added, blaming the president's endorsement on Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), another McShane client. "They're in there humping away to get another guy in the Freedom Caucus, which is fine. … But that's what I was told was the deal at the White House." 

Other Republicans say the president didn't know who Amodei was, though Trump has also endorsed him in the past. 

"I just remember people talking about Mark Amodei, and him saying, 'Well, wait a minute, who's Mark Amodei?'" Secretary of State candidate Jim Marchant (R) recalled to The Nevada Independent about an August rally in Las Vegas. "It takes a lot of interactions before he really knows who you are. … That was the case with Mark Amodei. He doesn't really know who he is, but he kind of does now, because I kind of told him."

Amodei wasn't the only one whose concerns about Flippo outweighed traditional party preference. The Retail Association of Nevada (RAN) had never before backed a Democrat in the 2nd Congressional District. But this year, it endorsed Benitez-Thompson over Flippo.

"He didn't really seem to have a grasp of the issues," RAN President Brian Wachter said. "He came laden with a lot of questions. He had some transparency issues. … We've been very strong on some of the federal policies that we feel have been driving the affordability crisis, and he repeatedly doubled down on those same policies."

And if Settelmeyer had won the primary or if Amodei had run again?

"We certainly would have had questions for him going into it," Wachter said. "I think it's likely, however, that should the congressmen have wanted to return to Congress, we would have supported that decision."

"Hanging out at the morgue"

The blue tsunami that tore through the country on Tuesday is the easiest part of the story to understand. Voters angry about an unpopular war, an unpopular president and $6-a-gallon gas rejected the status quo.

One Democratic strategist said even Democrats underestimated voters' frustration and how much they want change. 

A memo Bailor shared with The Nevada Independent provides some early insights into the scope of the blue wave. It detailed an exit poll of 866 early voters in the district, conducted by the polling and data analysis arm of his firm for a private client, who authorized its release for this story. The poll showed Benitez-Thompson with a 20 point lead over Flippo before Election Day, 56.8 percent to 36.8 percent. 

Only three quarters of the Republicans polled supported Flippo and about 1 in 7 said they had backed Benitez-Thompson. She also led among nonpartisans outside of Washoe, 60.3 percent to 31.5 percent. 

Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) ended up getting a few thousand more votes than Benitez-Thompson in the district, suggesting ticket-splitting was a factor. Almost 19,000 voters left the race blank as of Thursday's count.

Bailor said efforts to juice Republican turnout may have backfired.

"The perceived response was, 'Let's get more Republican voters to come out and support David Flippo,'" Bailor said. "Every time they made those attempts, they had to be losing nonpartisans. … You weren't going to earn more votes by leaning into the president."

Could a different GOP nominee have survived the blue wave? 

McShane noted it was "the worst election in the country" for Republicans in decades, saying, "There's an attempt from people in our party, people who were supporters of our primary opponent, and obviously Democrats … to try to make this out to be some exception, but it's not."

UNR political science professor Jeremy Gelman agreed it was a historic shellacking.

"This is sort of a midterm election that is on par with what happened in the 1970s after Watergate," Gelman said. "We have wave elections. This was a much bigger wave election than recent wave elections."

Compared to Trump's 2024 margin of victory, all four of Nevada's congressional districts shifted toward Democrats by a similar amount, roughly 20 points. Compared to the House candidates' 2024 margins, the shift in the 2nd Congressional District was a little bigger. 

Another way to measure the candidate effects is to look at how many votes Democrats and Republicans got in the counties that make up the 2nd Congressional District. 

Benitez-Thompson outperformed all the statewide Democrats, including Gov.-elect Aaron Ford (D), in the counties that made up the district. 

Meanwhile, Flippo underperformed every statewide candidate on the ballot. But the Republican nominees for lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general all got fewer votes than Benitez-Thompson in those counties as well.

"There's no sense hanging out at the morgue," Amodei said. "But there's plenty of conditioning drills that need to be done to get ready for the next run because, right now, there's nobody even trotting in the elephant camp."

Outside of the elephant camp, everyone's waltzing.

"I got to give credit, also, to Mark Amodei," said Kidd. "He played a really positive role, too, and even Lynn. Everybody kind of did their part, but this was the perfect alignment of planets, and now we have this amazing outcome."

The future of CD2

As for Benitez-Thompson, she's been busy. Her voicemail is full. New member orientation starts Sunday. She has to hire staff. 

"What's most important to me is to have exceptional constituent services and communication," Benitez-Thompson told The Nevada Independent in a Thursday interview.

There will be plenty more to do come January. Though she didn't want to speculate on specific next steps, she wants to help move the Iran war toward a resolution. She thinks ending the war is the first step in lowering gas prices. 

"It's going to take time to set that right," she said.

Everything is "on the table" when it comes to addressing tariffs. Asked if she would be open to impeaching Trump, she replied, "I think the American public has been very clear that this election was about making sure that we're putting Nevada families [at the] center of the conversation."

Pete Hegseth is a different story.

"That one's interesting because Speaker [Mike] Johnson [(R-LA)] sent Congress home because he was worried about the amount of Republicans who would support the impeachment resolution that [House] member [Thomas] Massie [(R-KY)] brought," she said. "There's a different dynamic there because that doesn't seem to be as much a partisan issue."

Benitez-Thompson is in the process of reaching out to Amodei so she can ask him questions and "thank him for his candor."

"It is hard to go out on a limb and to be vocal against your own party and your own party's nominee," Benitez-Thompson said. "But he really led as a Nevadan first on that, so I personally want to thank him."

Asked Wednesday if he'd help Benitez-Thompson with the transition, Amodei said his Democratic colleagues would eagerly assist: "She's not going to be a babe wandering around in the woods."

Behind the scenes, ambitious Republicans are already salivating over 2028. The perfect storm that helped her make history means holding the seat will be difficult.

The Democratic trifecta in Carson City could theoretically redraw district boundaries mid-cycle to shore up Benitez-Thompson. But Amodei says the congresswoman-elect will have a path to re-election regardless.

"If they're smart, because they say the first re-elect in this business is the toughest one in Congress, [likely House Speaker] Hakeem Jeffries will give her some passes, now that he's got the votes to play with," Amodei said. "Her folks should be taking care of her to give her some wins to bring back. That's Politics 101. The other thing is, 'Okay, so who's your opponent going to be?'"

The congressman doesn't know which Republicans might be able to unify the party in Northern Nevada come 2028. They haven't started calling him yet.

"But I'm looking forward to going to the Carson City Republican Central Committee Christmas party," he said. "They invited me, and by God, I'm going. Don't tell anybody. Don't tell Bruce Parks."

McShane said two fairly prominent Nevada Republicans reached out to him before the end of election night to discuss the seat, but that it was too early for him to have those conversations. 

Settelmeyer also told The Nevada Independent it was "too soon" to say whether he'd consider running again. 

But he did have one comment: "People still matter." 

Tabitha Mueller and Piper Heath contributed to this report.