2026Election Stories

The Democratic National Committee officially approved the new nominating calendar its Rules & Bylaws Committee had negotiated, elevating Nevada to the second spot in presidential elections.

The amount — more than $1.4 million more than Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) had at the outset of 2021, the year before her re-election campaign — gives the incumbent Democrat a substantial headstart over potential Republican challengers. 

Lombardo received significant contributions from donors previously supportive of Sisolak, including 27 maximum contributions totaling $270,000 from companies owned and operated by MGM Resorts International.

"I just wanted to, to the extent that we can, strengthen the rule against it, the penalty for it, make sure it never happens again, basically make it even more illegal than it was before," Daly, who represents a Sparks-area district, told The Nevada Independent.

With Iowa potentially on the way out, a DNC committee could elevate Nevada – or New Hampshire – to first-in-the-nation status

Though a ballot question proposing to implement open primaries and ranked-choice voting passed by a slim margin, another hurdle in the form of a second statewide vote in the 2024 election remains.

Ebert, a private sector benefits analyst, took the lead in the vote total over the weekend after following closely behind Weber several days after Election Day, as additional mail ballots were tabulated and processed.

In the days after media outlets called the race for secretary of state in his favor, Democrat Cisco Aguilar has often attributed his win to a single issue: Small-"d" democracy was on the ballot. 

Goynes-Brown's father, Theron Goynes, was North Las Vegas mayor pro tempore after serving as the first Black North Las Vegas councilman in the 1980s, but she is taking the name further.

Cortez Masto spoke with The Nevada Independent in a phone interview Monday to discuss the election, how she plans to work with Republicans back in Nevada and on Capitol Hill, and her legislative priorities for a second term. 

Despite wide Republican margins in Nevada's 15 rural counties, Laxalt — a former attorney general and one-time candidate for governor — was defeated amid numerically larger support for Cortez Masto from the state's two largest urban counties, Clark and Washoe.

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo is projected to defeat Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, but split-ticket voters gave projected victories to statewide candidates on both sides of the aisle.

But last year's redistricting process, which saw Democratic state legislators redraw district lines to pull thousands of Democratic voters from deep-blue District 1 into neighboring Districts 3 and 4, appears to have paid off for the incumbents.

As the results for the midterm election pour in, Democrats appear to be maintaining control of the Legislature, but they will likely fall short of hoped-for supermajorities in either house.

Mail ballots submitted to county election officials that have signatures that do not match those on file require "cures," a process by which county election workers verify the identity of the voter in question before having their ballot counted. 

Elsewhere in Southern Nevada, Pamela Goynes-Brown appears likely to become the first Black mayor of North Las Vegas, based on election results released just after midnight on Wednesday.

Across Northern Nevada, incumbent candidates running for Washoe County Commission and city councils in Reno and Sparks largely appear headed to re-election or are neck-and-neck with challengers.

In Clark County, the number of uncounted mail ballots, which include those dropped off in ballot boxes on Election Day, is likely in the tens of thousands, adding to the roughly 27,000 ballots Registrar Joe Gloria said the county was processing Wednesday.

Most of Nevada's top races remain too early to call with tens of thousands of ballots left to count, but initial results in the state's 2022 midterm elections slightly favor incumbent Democrats Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Gov. Steve Sisolak.

The latest updates on Election Day 2022 in Nevada from the staff of The Nevada Independent.