According to May 2026 voter registration statistics, Nevada Republicans now hold a 5,744-voter advantage over Democrats in active party registrations. The total active registered voter pool stands at just over 2 million.
That might sound insignificant, but it’s not. On Election Day 2024, Democrats still led by 7,176 voters when President Trump carried Nevada by over 46,000 votes (3.1%).
It’s part of a decade-long trend of GOP registration gains and Democratic losses. Go back to 2016, Democrats had an 88,818- voter registration lead.
By 2022, the Democrats’ registration edge had shrunk to 52,340-voters when Gov. Joe Lombardo defeated then-Gov. Steve Sisolak by over 15,000 votes (1.5%). Lombardo was the only challenger in the country to defeat an incumbent governor that year.
The trend is real and it’s moving in the right direction for Republicans. It took Nevada 10 years to flip the party registration.
With polling in mid-May of Nevada voters showing President Trump’s approval at 38% and his disapproval at 56%, Democrats hope to buck the registration trend.
While Republicans currently have a voter registration advantage over Democrats (574,522 to 568,778) the wild card remains the 786,136 voters registered as Non-partisan.
This growing group is largely the result of Nevada’s “Automatic Voter Registration”—AVR. It was passed by voters in 2018 and went into effect in 2020.
When you go to the DMV to obtain or renew your license or update your address, you automatically get registered to vote unless you specifically say no.
The default registration is Non-partisan. New registrations from the DMV exploded after 2020 when over 140,000 new voters were added to the rolls in the first year alone.
The old system asked citizens to choose to register. You participated because you wanted to. AVR flips that on its head. Many of these DMV registered Non-partisan voters have no real interest in voting.
Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt raised another concern—that back-end checks on the voter rolls weren’t strong enough to prevent ineligible voters from slipping through. The DMV does ask applicants to confirm citizenship. Critics contend that isn’t enough.
Contributing to the GOP registration gains is the fact that Nevada ranks No. 1 for California refugees –and most are Republicans.
According to a July 2025 Public Policy Institute of California study, “California’s Republican Exodus,” between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, about 39 percent of registered voters who left California were Republicans. Only 25 percent were Democrats.
Many of these Republicans ended up in Nevada.
A separate PPIC report, “Who’s Leaving California—and Who’s Moving In” (Updated January 2026), found that Nevada ranked first in the entire country for gaining California residents, pulling in 13 new arrivals for every 1,000 residents in 2024.
California’s population actually shrank between July 2024 and July 2025.
Eric McGhee, a policy director at PPIC, noted that the people leaving were often high earners.
“Way more Republicans are leaving,” he said. “Higher income people are more likely to move to states without an income tax.”
Nevada, of course, has no income tax. That’s a big deal.
McGhee points out that Nevada and Tennessee saw heavy migration during and after the pandemic, driven by three things coming together at once: the rise of remote work, no income tax, and a lower cost of living than coastal metro areas.
For a small business owner or a professional who can work from anywhere, the calculation isn’t difficult. Why stay in California, where the state takes a big chunk of your income when you can live in Nevada and keep more of what you earn?
The influx of conservative, higher-income Californians boosts Nevada’s Republican coalition and registration advantage.
For Gov. Lombardo and Nevada’s other Republican leaders, the message should be clear: keep taxes low, keep regulation reasonable, and keep government out of people’s pockets.
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Nevada News & Views.
