Las Vegas Incumbent Democrat Scrambles for Seat as Blue District Goes Purple

As Floridians and New Yorkers voted in primaries on Aug. 23, House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) were in Las Vegas to boost their party’s odds of winning the chamber’s majority in the midterm elections.

The House leaders were in town to double down on the bets party voters made in Nevada’s June 14 primaries when Republicans nominated three challengers to take on Democrat incumbents in what analysts uniformly rate as three “tossup” southern Nevada congressional races.

Among the GOP candidates McCarthy was stumping for was Mark Robertson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who is campaigning to unseat six-term Democratic incumbent Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nevada) in Nevada’s Congressional District 1 (CD 1).

The three Republican challengers may benefit from an inadvertent assist from Nevada’s Democratic-controlled legislature’s redistricting. 

Republican candidate for Nevada Congressional District 1 Mark Robertson speaks on July 28 in Las Vegas speaks with a fellow veteran, a constituency he is appealing to unseat incumbent Democrat Dina Titus (D-Nevada) in their Nov. 8 election. (Courtesy of Robertson for Congress)

In an effort to bolster Democratic numbers, lawmakers shifted some CD 1 Democrat-dominant precincts into CD 3 and CD 4, clumping what had been a deep blue inner-Las Vegas district Titus routinely won by double-digits in with rapidly reddening suburbs to elevate Republican chances of winning the district for only the second time in 40 years.

GOP challenger April Becker is up against two-term incumbent Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nevada) in CD 3. Republican challenger Sam Peters is running against two-term Rep. Steve Hosford (D-Nevada) in CD 4.

With CD 1’s new boundaries stretching east and south of Las Vegas and its reconfigured demographics doubling the district’s number of registered Republicans to nearly 110,000, what had been a 2-to-1 Democratic voter bulge has been scaled back

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