In 2014, Nevada Democrats endured a catastrophic shellacking.
They saw all six constitutional offices go red. They witnessed Republicans flip both houses of the state Legislature. They lost a Democratic congressional seat in a gigantic upset.
With a popular governor, Brian Sandoval, entering his second term and Republicans with a Carson City trifecta, a GOP renaissance was at hand. The Democrats were virtually irrelevant.
Twelve years later, 2026 is a mirror image of 2014, a Democratic wipeout as part of a national bluebath that is arguably even more devastating for Nevada Republicans. Democrats now hold all the statewide offices, including both U.S. senators, and all House seats (thanks to one of the greatest upsets in Nevada history in the 2nd Congressional District) in addition to an Assembly supermajority and a state Senate majority one shy of two-thirds.
Just two years after the GOP turned the state red for Donald Trump and many Republicans (and Democrats!) thought Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) was a virtual lock for re-election, their dreams have crumbled in a very Nevada kind of way.
Look on these works, ye Republicans, and despair.
Nevada Republicans in Tuesday's aftermath are seeing red because they can see no red, having had their bench erased and even their most promising candidates trumped by the president's cellar-dwelling numbers. Amid the gloating and hand-wringing, though, one central question remains: What does this mean for the state?
First, let's quantify just how smashing a win this was for the Democrats in Nevada beyond the number of seats they hold. Every statewide candidate, except for Gov.-elect Aaron Ford, won by double digits and by more than 100,000 votes. The three Democratic congressional incumbents, in friendly but not overwhelmingly friendly districts, garnered about 60 percent of the vote. In the Legislature, Republicans in the Assembly can caucus in a closet (to be fair, a walk-in closet) and the Republicans in the state Senate will only be marginally relevant.
The legendary Reid Machine, which has been seen as fading into obsolescence by its critics after Lombardo '22 and Trump '24, roared back, capitalizing on the tsunami that swept across the country. The senator's disciples re-energized a Latino vote that had become redder two years ago, spent more than twice as much as the Republicans in every race except the governor's contest and drove up margins in key races to spectacular levels.
You can say anyone could have done this because of the force of the wave. But to create those kinds of margins in congressional races, thus deterring future foes, and ensuring that Republicans are in political oblivion, took commitment and relentlessness.
Even the Dems operating the levers of the machine did not see the enormity of what happened this week. Indeed, nobody saw this coming.
I foretold of a coming wave after a few days of early voting, but not close to this deep. Both gubernatorial campaigns had it as a dead heat going into Tuesday, but neither side knew the reservoirs of Democratic anger or GOP angst.
Let's also be clear about what this election was not about. It was not about Democrats having stellar candidates, although some were. It was not about Democrats having better ideas, if you could even find them in most races. And it was not about the Republicans running terrible campaigns, although there were a few of those, too.
Even though the president is acting like O.J. looking for the real killers of Nicole and Ron, President Donald Trump is the reason for the bluebath here and across America. You can talk about high gas and grocery prices, the war in Iran, the self-enrichment by the Trump family. But all of those are about Donald J. Trump and his historically awful approval ratings.
It is one of the great just deserts of this cycle that Republicans who genuflected to and enabled Trump out of fear for their own political lives have lost their careers because the man they kowtowed to has destroyed them and their party's brand. It may have been inevitable because of Trump's narcissism and greed, but that does not make it any less humiliating for his vassals.
Lombardo was no MAGA member, despite Democratic attacks, and even if he had repudiated Trump, he probably would have suffered the same fate with a different electoral mix. Whether you see him as a steady hand who didn't deserve this or a too-Trump-friendly governor who should have resisted more, his loss had nothing to do with his record in the capital.
Ford and the Democrats have no mandate for anything — for repealing "right-to-work," as Ford promised, or passing rent control, as some lawmakers desire. What they have is an opportunity to lead in a way no one expects, or to do so in a fashion that could lead the state to ruin and a 2028 debacle.
Ford ran significantly behind other statewide Democrats not just because he had the most formidable foe, who outspent him and caricatured him as a soft-on-crime sloth who preferred world travel over hard work. He simply did not energize the Democratic base as others might have, and his campaign, until the Democratic Governors Association interceded, was clearly inferior to Lombardo's.
But here's what I have observed about Ford since he came to the Legislature in 2012 and has won five straight contests after an initial state Senate loss in 2010. There is a certain indomitability about him, a willingness to absorb political body blows and keep his eye on the prize. I think this comes from a hard, even troubled, life when he was younger, one that infused him with the drive to become the first Black governor in a state once known as the Mississippi of the West.
I am not sure what kind of governor he will be, mostly because his campaign was rich with platitudes and light on substance. This does not separate him from many others, but it makes his agenda somewhat opaque. Ford's ambition has never been a secret, but that can be a positive attribute if channeled correctly.
The situation he will confront when he is sworn in next year is a state in relatively robust economic shape despite his attempt to portray Nevada as some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland during the campaign. But he will confront a Legislature teeming with Democrats, some of them quite far left and ravenous for real change. Ford has never struck me as a real-change kind of guy, but we are about to find out.
I am sure the business community, or at least much of it, is petrified that we are about to become a hotbed of rampant socialism and higher taxes, that the Democrats in the capital will overreach, overspend and overcorrect. The seminal question for the incipient Ford administration is whether the new governor is a man who can say no. And, similarly, can two new legislative leaders, Speaker-to-be Elaine Marzola (D-Las Vegas) and state Senate Majority Leader Edgar Flores (D-Las Vegas), stop bad ideas from percolating so far that they reach the governor's desk and force him to sign or veto bills inimical to the state's fiscal health?
Sure, bad bills are in the eye of the partisan. But while restraint may be hard to come by next session, it may be essential for the state's health and political prosperity, too.
The future looks bright for Democrats and bleak for Republicans. The Reid Machine's ability to capitalize on this wave has produced a state dynamic that is very favorable to the party, especially as the presidential campaign has already begun. Having a governor who controls the levers of political power is a real advantage for Democrats hoping to turn Nevada blue again in 2028.
But.
Just two years after their massive victories in 2014, Nevada Republicans suffered their own crushing election, losing the presidential and U.S. Senate races here, ceding that flipped congressional seat back to the Democrats and seeing the Legislature switch back. Political power, be it held by mighty pharaohs or parties, is as transitory as Blanche DuBois' physical beauty.
Depending on how Ford and legislative Democrats conduct themselves in 2027, they should fear that they, like the president who would be king of kings and handed them their victories with his hubris, will be gazing upon a colossal wreck, boundless and bare.
