Jacky Rosen pulls ahead of Sam Brown in tight US Senate race
Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen pulled ahead with a sizable lead in the race against Republican challenger Sam Brown early Thursday as more ballots were tabulated.
The two candidates had been swapping leads as results began to be released Tuesday night, but the Democratic senator’s lead had jumped to a margin of 12,699 votes as of early Thursday, with 90 percent of votes counted, according to the Associated Press.
On Wednesday night, Brown had been ahead of Rosen by 2,188 votes, which had been up slightly from his lead of 1,757 votes earlier Wednesday evening .
The Brown campaign said in a statement Thursday afternoon that there are still tens of thousands of uncounted ballots in the race for U.S. Senate, separating the candidates by less than 1 percentage point.
“There are thousands of ballots which need to be cured,” the campaign said in the statement. “Sam Brown is committed to ensuring every legally cast, valid vote is counted.”
Rosen also stressed the need to ensure all the votes be counted to determine who won.
“We are not letting up now. Not now,” Rosen told supporters at the Aria after midnight. “We’re going to win this race.”
Rosen encouraged supporters to knock on doors and make calls to help voters cure their signatures. Clark County reported nearly 23,000 ballots needed curing as of Thursday afternoon.
“These votes deserve to be counted,” she said.
The closeness of the race is no surprise, with Nevada’s last Senate race in 2022 also a nail-biter. It wasn’t called until four days later, and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto won her re-election by less than 0.1 percentage points.
Polls consistently showed the Nevada junior senator leading her GOP opponent throughout the election cycle, though it was unclear what impact the presidential race would have on other races on the ballot.
Rosen, a Henderson resident, was first elected to the Senate in 2018 and previously served as a representative of Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District. She comes from a background in computer programming, and she sits on several senate committees, including armed services, homeland security and governmental affairs. She also serves as the co-founder and co-chair of the Senate Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism and the Abraham Accords caucus.
Brown, a Purple Heart veteran, has gripped Nevadans’ attention with his story of surviving an explosion while on duty in Afghanistan.
He previously ran for office in Texas and then ran for the Nevada’s other Senate seat in 2022 but didn’t make it past the primary.
The Reno resident, who moved to Nevada in 2018, worked at an Amazon fulfillment center and founded a business that provides emergency pharmaceutical drugs to veterans.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.
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