President-elect Donald Trump has won the battleground state of Nevada early Wednesday morning, Newsmax has projected, while GOP Senate candidate Sam Brown held a 0.1% lead in a race that is too close to call.
Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.& — a former computer programmer and synagogue president — is trailing Brown, a retired Army captain whose face is still scarred from injuries he suffered in Afghanistan, by less than 800 votes with an estimate 89% of the vote reporting.
Nevada was among the battleground states that drew outsized attention from the presidential candidates. But the Senate race drew little notice, though Rosen was the favorite.
The first-term Rosen has outspent Brown by more than 3-1 in the contest.
Brown, who was awarded the Purple Heart, has campaigned on his biography and the state's cost-of-living crisis, particularly acute in working-class Nevada.
Since Nevada became a state in 1864, only five of its incumbent senators have lost bids for reelection. Most have behaved like Rosen, positioning themselves as nonpartisan leaders who deliver for the state.
Rosen won in 2018 when the prior senator who had occupied that role, Republican Sen. Dean Heller, veered sharply to the right in response to attacks from Donald Trump for not supporting the then-president adequately. The state's other senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, narrowly won reelection in 2022 with a similarly centrist, low-profile campaign against a Trump-backed candidate.
Nevada voters were divided over how they view Rosen and Brown, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 3,600 voters in the state.
Half of voters viewed Brown in an unfavorable light, but nearly the same number of voters viewed him positively. Rosen scored about the same with voters. Nearly half held a favorable view of the senator, and about the same number viewed her unfavorably.
Trump endorsed Brown in the state's primary, but his political career predates Trump. Brown tried to run for a statehouse seat in Texas in 2014 before moving to Nevada in 2018 and unsuccessfully competing in the 2022 Republican primary to challenge Cortez Masto.
Brown in 2008 was grievously wounded by an improvised explosive device during a Taliban ambush of his unit in southern Afghanistan. He left the Army in 2011 after 30 surgeries and years of recovery, founding a business to help veterans get medical care. Brown's face remains seriously scarred and has become central to his campaign ads.
"As a U.S. senator I will proudly stand alongside Donald Trump to make America affordable, safe and strong again," Brown said at the Republican National Convention this summer.
Brown describes himself as "pro-life" and contends he never filled out a 2022 questionnaire that states he opposes exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the mother. Brown and his wife Amy sat down for a joint interview with NBC News earlier this year describing an abortion she had before the two met.
The Nevada race was among a handful of close contests that will determine how large a Republican majority President-elect Trump will work with in the Senate. The GOP already clinched the Senate majority in the 2024 general election, retaking it from Democrats who held it for four years.