Editor’s note: We are pleased to again publish this advance excerpt from this year’s Almanac of American Politics, the Bible of the American political landscape. You can see the last edition here.
For more than five decades, the Almanac of American Politics has set the standard for political reference books. In September, the Almanac will be publishing its 2026 edition, with more than 2,000 pages offering fully updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more.
Below are excerpts from the new chapters in the 2026 Almanac on the state of Nevada and Gov. Joe Lombardo, written by Louis Jacobson. Jacobson — a senior correspondent for PolitiFact, a senior columnist for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and a contributor of political coverage for U.S. News & World Report — has written for eight editions of the Almanac since 2000. For the 2026 edition, he served as chief author.
Readers can receive a 15 percent discount if they purchase the new Almanac at its website and use the code NevInd2026 at checkout.
State overview
Nevada’s political scene fuses two important, and at times divergent, demographic groups: minorities and blue-collar whites. The state is 30 percent Hispanic (the fifth highest of any state), 11 percent Black and 9.7 percent Asian (the fifth highest) — groups that have historically voted Democratic, but who shifted rightward in 2024. Nevada has more Filipinos than any state except California and Hawaii. Nevada’s white population, meanwhile, accounts for 45 percent of the total — the fifth smallest of any state — and many of these people, especially in the rural “cow counties,” have prickly views about the federal government, which owns about 80 percent of the state’s land. Mix in economic upheaval — first during the Great Recession and later during the coronavirus pandemic, both of which flattened the state’s crucial tourism industry — and you have the recipe for volatile politics.
Nevada has been a land of boom and bust from its very beginnings as a territory. The evidence of the latest boom is apparent as your plane descends at Las Vegas’ Harry Reid International Airport (renamed in 2021 for the former Senate majority leader). You see a pyramid rising from the desert along the famed Las Vegas Strip; just across the street from a sphinxlike lion are scaled-down New York City-style skyscrapers. Nearby are a nearly half-scale Eiffel Tower, Venetian gondolas and a flaming pirate ship. But the signs of bust include giant hotels and condominiums with no lights on at night, retail space for rent and a seamy side of town expertly mined by CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the flagship of the long-running television crime procedural. All this is set in one of North America’s most forbidding landscapes, a bowl-shaped desert valley rimmed by barren peaks.
The natural parts would have looked familiar to the prospectors who first came to mine silver and gold in Virginia City, on a mountain more than 6,000 feet above sea level, or to Mark Twain and Bret Harte, who documented the heyday of the Comstock Lode, which beginning in 1859 produced $500 million worth of silver within two decades. President Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans made Nevada a state in 1864, even though it missed the population requirement by 20,000 people, to win three more electoral votes. But the silver boom went bust, and by 1900, Nevada had 42,000 residents, down 68 percent from its 1880 peak. For a time, it seemed questionable whether Nevada would be a viable state. In the early 1930s, when there were 91,000 Nevadans, the state government was about to go bankrupt. So, Nevada rolled the dice — it reduced its residency requirement for divorce to six weeks and it legalized gambling. The state offered casinos, pawnshops, divorce mills, quick-wedding chapels and legal brothels. (Nevadans remain below the national average in church attendance.) It was good business: Nevada’s 6.75 percent gross gambling receipts tax generates enough revenue to make income, corporate or inheritance taxes unnecessary.
From mining boom to gambling boom, Nevada has been a revolving door — a second-chance state, a place for outcasts to succeed and misfits to rebound, for immigrants to seek the American dream and for retirees to soak in the sun. About a quarter of the state’s residents were born in Nevada, by far the nation’s lowest rate, and that percentage has held steady for a half-century. Today, more of the state’s adult residents were born in California than in Nevada. Nevada has been an avenue of success for ethnic groups that faced roadblocks elsewhere. The Comstock Lode’s four owners — MacKay, Fair, Flood and O’Brien — were Irishmen. A Jewish gangster, Bugsy Siegel, built the Las Vegas Strip’s first big hotel, the Flamingo, in 1946. Mobsters owned most of Las Vegas’ big casinos until industrialist Howard Hughes — a different kind of outcast — bought them up in the late 1960s. The job market has consistently attracted minorities. But Nevada’s median income trails the national average, and about a quarter of residents had a college degree in 2023, tied for fifth from the bottom nationally.
Gaming (the state’s preferred term for gambling) has generated enormous growth. Las Vegas was a dot on the map when gambling became legal, a one-traffic-light crossroads with 8,532 people in all of Clark County. Now, Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, has more than 2.3 million, and Nevada has nearly 3.3 million. Las Vegas’ 23,000 hotel rooms in 1973 have mushroomed into about 150,000. Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb, is now the state’s third-largest city with 337,000 residents, having grown by about 31 percent since 2010. Metropolitan Reno, known as “the biggest little city in the world,” has about 564,000 people. Nevada was America’s fastest-growing state in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and was ranked fifth from 2010 to 2020. For a long historical moment, gaming was a good economic bet. But in 2007, that revenue declined even before the national economy fell into recession. Nevada suddenly went bust, with the gaming revenue downturn cascading into a housing and construction crash. Nevada had the nation’s steepest fall in homeownership rates from 2004 to 2012, and foreclosure rates peaked at nearly 10 percent of households.
As the nation began recovering, so did Nevada. Housing prices rebounded, as migrants from other states flocked to a place with a much lower cost of living. Clark County’s population has grown by almost 20 percent since 2010, operating with a revised business model. With some form of gambling available in 48 states and with neighboring California dotted with tribal casinos, Las Vegas promoted itself, at least in some contexts, as a family destination with luxury shopping and world-class restaurants. Although gaming accounted for 57 percent of Nevada casino revenue in 1996, it fell to 43 percent in the prepandemic year of 2019, and on the Strip specifically, the share declined to 34 percent. The pandemic hobbled Nevada’s economy; statewide unemployment peaked at 28.5 percent in April 2020 (the highest monthly rate for any state since records have been kept) and 31.1 percent in Las Vegas. It has hovered around 5 percent since, typically a point or two higher than the national average. The expansion of sports betting nationally, enabled by the Supreme Court in 2018, poses a threat, as does overseas competition; in China, Macao’s gaming revenue exceeds casino revenue in Las Vegas. Las Vegas has become a major player in the convention business — the giant Consumer Electronics Show and Specialty Equipment Market Association expos are held there annually — and since 2017, it has added three major league sports teams: one born from league expansion, the National Hockey League’s Golden Knights, and two from franchise moves from California, the National Football League’s Raiders, and, starting in 2028, Major League Baseball’s Athletics.
Nevada has sought to diversify its economic base. Las Vegas is now a hub for such businesses as Amazon, shoe retailer Zappos, and data company Switch Inc., along with a developing medical sector that’s piggybacking on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ medical school, opened in 2017 and named for the late casino magnate and business leader Kirk Kerkorian. In Henderson, Google has built a $600 million data center, while Haas Automation, which makes computerized machining tools, is building a 2.4-million-square-foot plant. Nevada ranks second to California in geothermal electricity generation and eighth in solar electricity generation, with major new projects underway across the state. Nevada has lots of space left: A Nature Conservancy report identified nearly 400,000 nonvirgin acres in the state that are suitable for renewable energy development and near transmission lines or substations. Nevada also mines lithium, a key component in batteries for smartphones and electric cars; the state has the only two major U.S. lithium mines to win approval over the past decade. Meanwhile, climate worries are growing. Temperatures in Las Vegas and Reno have risen the fastest of any U.S. cities since 1970, the research group Climate Central found; in July 2024, Las Vegas hit a record 120 degrees. The number of heat-related complaints reported to the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration more than tripled in 2024 compared with the average from 2016 to 2021, and heat-related deaths have risen, too.
Reno’s Washoe County has ridden its low living costs and its pleasant combination of sun and ski slopes to an 18 percent population increase since 2010. Tesla and Panasonic accepted $1.3 billion in incentives to build the world’s biggest electric-vehicle battery factory, at the 166-square-mile Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. Tesla subsequently announced plans for a $3.6-billion plant to produce semitrucks. Such investments have attracted engineers and other workers with undergraduate and advanced degrees; in Washoe, 32.5 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 26.4 percent in Clark County. But Washoe’s growth has strained local services and elevated housing prices. Washoe’s median home value is almost $500,000, well above the $400,000 for Clark. Child care is another worry; Nevada is the nation’s costliest state for child care, the personal finance site LendingTree found in 2024. Nevada could also be hit by President Donald Trump’s mass deportations; it is estimated to have the highest share of unauthorized immigrants of any state workforce, at 9 percent. Nevada has attracted immigrants for its service and construction jobs, though these jobs are also vulnerable during economic contractions.
For all its distinctiveness, Nevada has often mirrored the nation politically. As a silver-producing state, it voted three times for William Jennings Bryan’s free-silver populism, but since his final candidacy in 1908, Nevada has voted only twice for the loser of a presidential election — Gerald Ford in 1976 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. For years, Nevada sent politically shrewd Democrats to Washington, notably Reid, and kept them there to protect the interests of a state with so much federally owned land and key federal installations. Helping Reid and other senior Democrats in power was the Culinary Workers Union, which provides health care and citizenship classes for its members, who are almost entirely Hispanic and Asian, and has long been a crackerjack political organization. When the federal government planned to build a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from Las Vegas, Reid fought it mightily and successfully. On the other side, Las Vegas-based casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021, was a Republican megadonor and owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the state’s largest newspaper; his widow, Miriam, carries on his mission.
Since 2000, Nevada has been closely divided between the parties. In 2024, Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to win the state since 2004. Exit polls found that Trump won 46 percent of the state’s Hispanic voters, two points behind Kamala Harris but an 11-point improvement compared with 2020. Democrats did better downballot, however, with Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) winning re-election; Rosen’s GOP challenger, Sam Brown, underperformed Trump by more than 74,000 votes and 4.4 percentage points. Also, three Democratic House members won new terms, the party maintained its majorities in the state Senate and Assembly (though not with the supermajorities they had hoped for) and an abortion rights ballot measure passed for the first of two required votes, with 64 percent.
Governor Joe Lombardo
Republican Joe Lombardo, a career law enforcement officer, won Nevada’s governorship in 2022, becoming the only Republican to flip a Democratic gubernatorial seat that year. He used his veto pen to block a range of bills passed by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, setting a single-session record for the state, but he approved others, including on social issues.
Lombardo was born in Misawa, Japan, the son of a U.S. Air Force veteran. He moved to Las Vegas, where he graduated from high school and earned bachelor’s and a master’s degrees from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He served in the U.S. Army, then rose through the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s ranks for a quarter-century before winning election in 2014 to the nonpartisan post of sheriff of Clark County (Las Vegas). He was re-elected in 2018. Lombardo came to national prominence after the nation’s deadliest mass shooting, in which a gunman on the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino’s 32nd floor fired into a music festival crowd below, killing 60 people and wounding more than 400 others. The New York Times described Lombardo from his press conferences as a “plain-spoken man whose persona contrasts sharply with his city of flashing billboards and jangling slot machines.”
Lombardo entered the 2022 Republican primary to challenge Gov. Steve Sisolak, who had served on the Clark County Commission and Nevada Board of Regents before his governorship. Sisolak, a Democrat, was considered one of the nation’s most vulnerable governors because of a delayed backlash against his public health restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, which was a big blow to tourism-dependent Nevada. In 2018, Sisolak became the first Democrat to win the Nevada governorship in two decades; with expanded Democratic legislative majorities, Sisolak was able to enact a broadly progressive agenda, signing bills on renewable energy, abortion, labor unions, the minimum wage, and gun restrictions. More than a dozen other Republicans sought the GOP nomination, including attorney and former boxer Joey Gilbert, who received the state party endorsement; former Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV); North Las Vegas mayor and former Democrat John Lee; and venture capitalist Guy Nohra. But Lombardo became the early and durable frontrunner, thanks to an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, a big war chest and a familiarity among voters in populous metro Las Vegas. Lombardo took 38 percent, outpacing second-place finisher Gilbert with 28 percent.
In the general election, Lombardo leaned into criticism of Sisolak’s pandemic policies while touting conservative policies on education, including expanded school choice and arming trained teachers in the classroom. But on other issues, Lombardo kept his distance from his party’s right wing. He backtracked on abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Lombardo had initially expressed support for a referendum to ban abortion after the 13th week of pregnancy, but later he said Nevada residents had already spoken decades earlier when they passed a ballot measure that enshrined abortion rights. Lombardo also broke with some Republicans by saying Joe Biden was the nation’s legitimately elected president. When asked in the campaign’s only debate whether he thought Trump was a “great president,” Lombardo responded, “I wouldn’t use that adjective.” This almost cost him Trump’s endorsement; Trump floated the idea of unendorsing Lombardo for his apostasy, but Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel intervened and the Lombardo campaign proceeded to release a statement calling Trump a “great” president.
However, it was ultimately Lombardo’s distance from Trump that made his victory possible. In a race that was close enough that it took three days to call, Lombardo defeated Sisolak, 48.8 percent to 47.3 percent, a difference of about 15,000 votes. (Nevada’s eccentric ballot option, “None of these candidates,” won just shy of 15,000 votes.) Sisolak took Clark County, as all winning Democrats must, but he trailed the Clark County performance of Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic senator who won another term, by a crucial 2.1 percentage points. Sisolak also won Washoe County (Reno) but trailed Masto’s showing there by three percentage points.
In the state’s 2023 biennial legislative session, Lombardo worked with Democrats to enact a $2 billion increase in K-12 spending and approved $380 million of public money for Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics’ move to Las Vegas. But he vetoed Democratic-backed bills that would have funded universal free lunches for K-12 students; tightened restrictions on gun purchases; provided health care for pregnant immigrant women in the U.S. illegally; bolstered tenant protections; and criminalized the signing of “fake elector” certificates. However, Lombardo sometimes deferred to Democrats on social issues. He approved protections from out-of-state prosecutions related to abortion, and he signed two bills strengthening protections for transgender people (though he vetoed another that would have protected providers of gender-affirming care). Lombardo also vetoed an assisted suicide bill.
Before the 2025 legislative session, Lombardo listed several priorities, including increased funding for affordable housing, stiffer criminal penalties for repeat offenders, and a crackdown on consistently underperforming public schools. He also said he wanted to accelerate ballot counting, through a bipartisan bill if possible or, failing that, by directly asking voters in a ballot measure.
Among GOP governors, Lombardo is the top incumbent being targeted by Democrats. Attorney General Aaron Ford has already declared his candidacy.
