what role Nevada played in the 2024 election.

And joining us with his take on that is Jon Ralston, CEO and editor of the Nevada Independent.

Jon.

You have long called Nevada.

The We Matter state is a hashtag that you have used on X a long time now.

However, you recently used the hashtag.

We didn't matter.

Why didn't we matter?

Race was over before Nevada's votes were counted.

The so-called blue wall amber that the Democrats, had fall in 2016 when Trump won, fell again, and this time pretty decisively.

And that is Michigan.

And and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Once Trump had those, Nevada's votes didn't matter.

Which is very sad, I guess for the matter.

Hashtag I have to maybe permanently retire it.

So I got so excited here.

I almost knocked over my glass.

So did Nevada matter any more or any less than the other swing states?

I think we were, we didn't matter because.

Because, as I said, the race was over before our votes were counted.

But we measured in the sense and I think we were reflection of what went on across the country, which was that, the Democrats did not come out and vote for Democrats.

That happened in the blue wall states.

That happened in other states that the Democrats needed to win, because Latinos did not come out.

And Latino Democrats do not come out and vote for Kamala Harris.

You had Latino men exit polls.

Amber, this is incredible.

2 to 1 in favor of Trump.

You've never seen anything like that.

Young voters went more for Trump than than people thought.

And Asian voters, which have been a reliable Democratic constituency both here and elsewhere, also barely went for Trump and some exit polls.

Now, they're not totally reliable.

But what you had is crossover voting going the other way than people thought.

A lot of people thought that Republican moderates would vote for Kamala Harris because of the issue of abortion and some other issues.

That appears not to have happened in great enough numbers.

Okay, so this is the first time in 20 years that a Republican has won the presidency in the state of Nevada.

How do you think Trump did this?

Or was it more of what Kamala Harris did not do?

Listen, she came into the race late right?

And Trump ran an absolutely brutal negative campaign against her, not just tying her to the Biden administration, which is manifestly unpopular, but also to some of her past positions.

And portraying her is a far left person, of course, calling her the buzzword communist.

And so I think that hurt her.

But he also, he benefited from people not responding to the campaign of, he's a threat to democracy.

He's unqualified for the president and more of the things that were right in front of them, I think, Amber.

And there's not enough data out to back this up, but there's some people care more about the economy.

They care more than it costs more to go get groceries.

And they played on fear.

Fear of illegal immigration.

And even though we're not a border state, you know, that's been a big issue here in other campaigns because we have a relatively large population of undocumented immigrants in the workforce here.

And I think that was more important to people than focusing on the character issue between Trump and Kamala Harris.

Why do you think that, unlike so many presidential elections before, in which you have picked correctly for the state of Nevada, you got it wrong this time.

I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.

Kamala Harris, what did you.

So I did get it wrong.

And I I've been very public about why I picked, Kamala Harris.

I thought even though the Republicans had very good turnout, in, in, in the early voting period, the so-called red machine, the Democratic machine, I thought they had banked enough votes to get their people out, and they she would just eke out a victory.

I went back and forth on this, at home thinking about who was I was going to pick.

But here's what I think happened, Amber.

And this is really something else.

I totally misread what would happen in Clark County, where we're sitting right now, where most of the votes are.

The red machine got those votes out.

But guess what?

They didn't vote for her.

They voted for Trump.

I mentioned some of these constituencies, the Culinary Union getting out.

A lot of Latino workers did the whole no taxes on tips, pander, pull some of the service workers, away.

But Donald Trump is going to end up.

Not all the votes are counted, but Donald Trump is going to lose Clark County by only 2 or 3 points.

Just for context, Joe Biden won by nine points.

Hillary Clinton won by more than ten.

And Barack Obama when he won the, state back in the old days, when I got things right, won by double digits and by almost double digits.

So something has changed here.

Remember Joe Lombardo, who was a Republican governor?

He changed the dynamic in Clark County in 2022 and ended up not losing by as much as as, for instance, Adam Laxalt did to Catherine Cortez Masto.

So some things going on in Clark County.

One other thing, Amber, the great number of nonpartisan voters that are in Nevada now, I think a lot of people, including myself, by the way, thought that they would lean towards Harris.

They did not.

And these were these were what, again, were the Democrats that were Democrats hiding as nonpartisan so that they could then turn out the exit?

Polling shows that Trump won non partizans in this state by about two points.

I don't know if that's right or not, but it sounds right.

As we speak.

It is Thursday evening, two days after the election.

And the Associated Press has yet to call Trump as the winner of Nevada has yet to call Rosen the winner of Nevada.

But the Nevada Independent has called that.

So once again, a split ticket in Nevada.

What's different this time around?

And then also, what do you think?

How does Nevada change this so that this state is not one of the last to have its election results?

Well, there's a lot of questions there.

The last one is a more difficult one.

So what happened?

The split ticket, you know, in 2022, you, right, was the same thing.

Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democrat wins.

And and and you had Joe Lombardo win for governor.

And this time Trump is going to win.

And Rosen listen, there's a huge drop off this time.

There's a difference.

Sam Brown, had some problems getting the base to love him.

So he really hugged Trump the last few weeks.

But but only Trump can do that.

Only Trump can do the whole MAGA thing and make it believable.

Sam Brown couldn't.

There's a huge drop off.

There's a huge vote in that race for none of the above, which is this unique, kind of crazy, only Nevada thing.

30,000 plus Nevadans voted none of the above.

Rather than voting for Sam Brown or Jackie Rosen, he is going to lose by fewer than 30,000 votes.

So those people I think a lot of those are people who voted for Trump but didn't want to vote for Sam Brown.

Real quickly.

Before you answer the question about how we solve this in Nevada, I want to mention that Nevada's U.S. House races, all of the incumbents won.

And then you also called the mayoral race in Las Vegas for Shelley Berkley, the former U.S. representative.

Okay.

Back to how do we get these election results enough so that outlets like the Associated Press feel comfortable enough to call them.

And it's not just the Nevada independent.

Right.

Exactly.

Not that that's a bad thing.

No, no, you've got a hold on this market, John.

So, you know, this is a difficult question because Republicans have complained that sending out mail ballots to everybody, then it's it's ripe for voter fraud, and it takes too long because you can count for up to four days afterwards.

And so we won't know the final, final results, not only not on Saturday, which is four, but then you can do curing of ballots.

In other words, if your signatures been rejected, you can go on to the next week.

So it plays into people who who are causing mischief by crying voter fraud.

Why?

Why are these ballots suddenly coming in?

And suddenly Jackie Rosen is ahead of Sam Brown?

There must be fraud.

I wish more people would speak out about it, but I wish more that everything could be done by election night.

And I think I think you could set different deadlines.

For one, mail ballots have to be in and that all the votes have to be counted on Election Day.

Give them the staff.

Of which they don't have enough staff, not just in Clark County, but in rural Nevada and in Washoe County.

And because now, whether we think it's good or not, too many people believe that something hinky is going on.

And so because you have that, you've got to put some guardrails up.

I think changing those deadlines, I think putting more rules on so-called ballot harvesting, which allows groups to go bring in hundreds or thousands of ballots on Election Day, so they almost have no chance, I think, to count them.

And again, people think could open the door to fraud.

I think you've got to change the rules.

Like, you know, if your family if you want to, if you want to bring your, your husband's, ballot, that's fine.

But you can't go and get walk down your street and start collecting ballots, people.

I think that creates a lack of faith in the system.

It shouldn't exist, but now it's there.

And so we have to do something about it.

Can we squeeze this in?

So one idea for this issue with the signature verification is perhaps voter ID, right.

That ballot question, question seven did pass.

It has to pass again next election.

Any other takeaways on the ballot questions.

Question three did not pass for open primaries and ranked choice voting.

What stands out to you?

Voter ID is hugely popular.

It was obviously, going to pass.

I don't think it's a black and white issue because I think Republicans want that because not because they're worried about fraud, but because they know that there are a lot of minority voters who do not have IDs and therefore won't be able to vote.

And those are Democratic voters.

And the same, you know, there's Partizan considerations on both sides.

The big surprise of the election, I think, here and this is really big, is how crushed question three, which was ranked choice voting and open primaries, which seemed like if there's all these non partizans, they're going to want to shake up the system.

And they spent $12 million or so trying to get that passed.

And the opponents spent about one fifth or one sixth of that.

But I just think people while they want a disrupter, if you will, like Donald Trump, they don't want to disrupt the system entirely, so they don't understand it.

Jon Ralston, you were going to get them all right.

Next election.

I am.

You sure?

Thank you for having us.

All right.

But you only missed one.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.