Nevada Senate race in a dead heat

One of the tightest Senate races in the country has drawn even tighter in the final weeks of the midterm election season, with Republican Adam Laxalt now polling even with Democratic Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada — a race that is one of the GOP’s best shots at flipping a Democratic-held seat.

Laxalt has inched ahead of Cortez Masto by 2 percentage points, within the poll's margin of error, a gain from a month ago when he was down 3 percentage points, according to a poll conducted this week by the conservative Club for Growth and shared exclusively with POLITICO.

The bump for Laxalt represents a swing toward Republicans as concerns about the economy loom large in contrast with a Democratic summer boost in momentum over abortion rights. Independent voters appear to be breaking with the GOP as the Nov. 8 election nears.

Laxalt’s slight lead in public polls comes as Democrats have called in top surrogates to appear in Nevada in the next two weeks, including former President Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump held a rally to support Laxalt.

Club for Growth’s super PAC, which is spending nearly $13 million in Nevada’s Senate race, found Laxalt moving from 39 percent support in mid-September to 42 percent earlier this month, and now to 45 percent. Support for Cortez Masto appears to have remained steady at 43 percent, according to the polling memo. The survey, conducted Oct. 16-18 by WPA Intelligence, has a margin of error of 4.4 percent.

A CBS poll released Thursday also found Laxalt up by 1 percentage point. While Republicans enjoyed a narrow lead last fall moving into the spring, Cortez Masto emerged as the frontrunner through the summer as Democrats attacked the GOP on abortion.

The race has remained tight since Labor Day, and Republicans are targeting the state’s large share of working-class and Latino voters with messaging on inflation and crime. Nevada and Georgia are currently Republicans’ two best pickup opportunities in the party’s fight to retake control of the narrowly divided Senate, an endeavor that involves protecting seats in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio while ousting at least one Democratic incumbent.

The Nevada race has generated a flurry of news in recent days, underscoring the high stakes. Last week, more than a dozen of Laxalt’s relatives endorsed Cortez Masto, something the Republican dismissed, referring to those family members as “Democrats.” A similar number of Laxalt’s relatives also decried his decision to run for governor in 2018, a race he lost. Laxalt, the grandson of former Nevada governor and U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt, served as the state’s attorney general from 2015 to 2019.

Registered voters are beginning to receive mail ballots, and early voting begins Saturday. Television ad spending in the race has been roughly even between parties over the last month. Republican groups have run ads critical of Cortez Masto’s time as attorney general and also have tried to frame her as responsible for soaring inflation due to approving large federal spending bills and supporting President Joe Biden’s agenda.

“Democrats across the country are vulnerable on crime and the economy, and our polling shows that Sen. Cortez Masto’s record is particularly problematic for Nevada voters on both issues,” said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, in a statement to POLITICO.

Cortez Masto and Laxalt have each touted support from separate law enforcement associations. A new ad Club for Growth is releasing Friday spotlights felony inmates who received pandemic stimulus checks from the federal government, including men convicted of murder, sex trafficking and child pornography. The ad will also run in Spanish, part of the Club’s $2.5 million to target Hispanic voters. The ad describes Cortez Masto as the “deciding vote” to approve the checks; however, pandemic relief payments approved under Trump also allowed inmates to receive checks.

Democrats, meanwhile, have sought to tie Laxalt to Trump’s denial of the 2020 election, as well as his opposition to abortion. “He put his commitment to Donald Trump ahead of his commitment to law and order,” a police officer says of Laxalt in a new Cortez Masto ad, highlighting Laxalt’s support of efforts to overturn the results of the election. Laxalt helped lead unsuccessful legal challenges to the election results.

The GOP’s calculation is that voters’ concerns about the cost of goods, crime and their dissatisfaction with Biden will outweigh independents’ disapproval of Trump, who lost the state by just 2.7 percentage points.