Nevada Senate Midterm Results: Rosen Deals Blow To Heller

LAS VEGAS, NV — Democrats didn't win control of the Senate in Tuesday's midterm election, but Nevada voters defeated incumbent Sen. Dean Heller, electing Democrat Jacky Rosen, a first-term Democrat to replace him.

Heller was the only Republican incumbent senator running in a state Democrat Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 presidential election, though the Silver State’s Democratic leanings are waning.

Nevada voters reported long waits to mark their ballots at several precincts in Las Vegas. Among them was Vivian Dunbar, who took the day off so she wouldn't miss a chance to vote in the midterm election. It was early morning Wednesday before the unofficial voter tally was announced. The secretary of state said no results would be announced in Nevada until the last person in line had voted. Nearly two hours after polls closed, people were still waiting to vote.

See Also: 2018 Midterm Election A Referendum On 'Trump's GOP'

Dunbar told the Las Vegas Sun that she voted for Democrats across the board, but thinks both parties need to set politics aside and work together.

“We all have to be one people, we shouldn’t be divided,” Dunbar told the newspaper. “We’re one nation and we should be one people.”

Heller got Alyssa Herman's vote. She hasn't declared a party, but told The Sun her views more closely align with Republicans' than with Democrats.' But the 22-year-old nanny and university students echoed Dunbar's sentiments, and said Republicans and Democrats need to work in a bipartisan fashion.

The Senate campaign is one of the most expensive of the high-stakes midterm election, with the two spending a combined $75 million in the state of about 4 million residents. Rosen, 61, is a former synagogue president backed in the election by retired Nevada senator Harry Reid. Heller, 58, was appointed to the seat in 2011 and won it outright in 2012.

Dissatisfaction with President Trump isn’t a driving force in Nevada’s midterm election, as likely voters are about evenly split on the president’s job performance. Heller, who is one of the most vulnerable sitting senators in the midterm election, aligns himself closely with Trump, and Rosen says he’s a “rubber stamp” for a president’s tax cut.

Heller is all in with Trump after the president threatened to support a primary opponent in 2017. At the Nevada Senate candidates’ only debate last month, Heller said he had been “99 percent” against Trump, but now is one of his most ardent supporters, CBS News reported.

Rosen has made Republican efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act a central issue in the campaign and calls for a bipartisan effort to fix problems with President Obama’s signature healthcare legislation. Heller initially voted against his party’s move to repeal Obamacare, but ultimately voted with Republicans, though that effort failed.

Both candidates told the Las Vegas Sun patients with pre-existing conditions should be protected. Rosen introduced a resolution in the House defending the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act against a lawsuit by 20 Republican governors to overturn those protections in federal court. Heller also introduced legislation that would guarantee coverage for pre-existing conditions, but some experts, including the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt, say it’s full of loopholes.

As Levitt, the foundation’s vice president for health care reform, explained it to Bloomberg, insurers couldn’t deny coverage or increase premiums based on health, but could increase the cost of insurance based on age, gender, occupation and leisure activities. Insurers could also exclude services associated with a pre-existing condition, making protections “a bit of a mirage.”

Immigration is a big issue in Nevada, where 29 percent of residents are Latino. Trump has ramped up his anti-immigration rhetoric in the weeks ahead of the midterm — calling a caravan of migrants seeking asylum a threat to the United States and claiming without evidence the group includes members of the murderous MS-13 gang and ISIS sympathizers. And he raised the stakes when he released an ad days before the midterm election that was immediately compared to the 1988 Willie Horton ad that helped turned Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis’ lead into a landslide victory for President George H.W. Bush.

Rosen told the Las Vegas Sun she supports comprehensive immigration reform that includes a legal path to citizenship, including for so-called Dreamers who came to the United States as children. But she thinks building a border wall, one of Trump’s promises in the 2016 campaign, is a waste of taxpayer money.

Heller says he has always supported the border wall. On the issue of Dreamers, he sponsored legislation that would provide a “provisional protected presence” for qualified Dreamers. During the debate, he also accused Rosen of abandoning her job in Washington in June to film a campaign ad at a U.S. border detention facility where children had been separated from their parents.

“I went down there to check on children,” she said. “I was doing my job.”

Rosen also wants to fully ban bump stocks, which attach to semiautomatic rifles and speed up the firing rate. The device was used by the Mandalay Bay gunman, who killed 58 people and injured hundreds in 2017. She also favors prohibiting the sale of high capacity magazines, expanding background checks and closing the gun show loophole.

In a March 23 statement, Heller applauded the Department of Justice proposed rule to ban bump stocks and large-capacity magazines, but no other Senate Republican signed on to it.

For more on the candidates’ positions on various issues before Congress and Nevada, go to the Las Vegas Sun.

Lead photo: Nevada Democrat U.S. Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate Jacky Rosen speaks after winning her Senate race against U.S. Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) at the Nevada Democratic Party's election results watch party at Caesars Palace on November 7, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Americans voted on their choices of candidates in the midterm election, which is seen by many as a referendum on President Donald Trump. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)