Republican voters who left the Democrat stronghold of California for neighbouring Nevada could help win the swing state for Donald Trump, supporters and a senator have claimed.
Some 150,000 Californians have moved across the border since 2020, and now make up 20 per cent of the state’s population.
It is not clear how many of these are Republicans, but the gap between registered Democrats and GOP members has been narrowing – from 111,000 in 2020 to 71,000 in 2023.
There is a rising demographic of Californian ex-pats in Nevada who dislike their home state’s politics, with many actively against Kamala Harris and the measures she brought in as attorney general, according to Republicans.
Nevada state senator Jeff Stone, a former California state legislator who now runs the website Help Me Flee CA, told Politico that he thinks Californian ex-pats ‘could certainly be a significant help’ to Trump.
While many Nevadans begrudge what they see as liberal Californians moving to their state shifting its politics to the left, the rising number of Republican voters may suggest a different reality in many cases.
Republican consultant Chuck Muth said: ‘There are Californians who fled California and moved to Nevada because they wanted to get away from [Harris’] types of policies.’
Explaining why he upped sticks and moved to Reno, former California resident Jim DeMartini said: ‘California just got to be a communist state.’
The retiree, who previously ran a farm outside Modesto in California for 46 years, said he had been paying $200,000 a year in state income tax, and had moved across state lines in 2020.
‘[It was] Kamala Harris, it was Governor Newsom, it was a leftist, anti-business legislature who just felt they had to control everything. They even went so far as banning straws,’ he told Politico.
The Silver State has long been a swing state and the race there appears to be as close as can be. Like the other six battleground states, it looks set to be a nail-biter.
FiveThirtyEight.com on Thursday said Harris has a 51 percent chance of winning the state, while Trump has a 49 percent chance.
A CNN/SSRS poll released Tuesday showed Trump with 48 percent of the support of likely voters in Nevada and Harris with 47 percent.
Analysis suggests that more Republicans than Democrats have already submitted a ballot in the state.
The last time Nevada voted for a Republican in the presidential race was George W Bush in 2004.
However President Joe Biden only won the state by 33,596 votes in 2020.
Such a narrow margin means that the growing number of registered Republicans could give the Democrats cause for concern.
More people turned out in the last election than in 2016 when Clinton won the state by a similar margin over Trump or 27,000 votes.
Nevada has six electoral votes up for grabs and has elected both Democrats and Republicans statewide in recent years, making it one of the more likely swing states to potentially go red in 2024.
The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls has Trump up by nearly a point at .9 percent as of Oct. 31; Harris had been up by 1 point earlier in the month.
But an Emerson College poll out Nov. 1 had Harris leading by a point, 48-47. The poll’s margin of error is 3.6 percent.
It was estimated that around $24 million would be spent on the 2024 presidential race in Nevada in the final month of the race.
The state’s economy, which relies heavily on the service industries, was devastated by the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2022, voters ousted their Democratic governor and elected Republican Joe Lombardo by just 13,000 votes even as Democrats managed to hold the Senate seat. Republicans were helped in the state by independent voters.