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Reagan 50–60% 60–70% 70–80%
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| Elections in Nevada |
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The 1984 United States presidential election in Nevada took place on November 6, 1984. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 1984 United States presidential election. State voters chose four electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president of the United States.
Nevada was won by incumbent United States president Ronald Reagan of California, who was running against former vice president Walter Mondale of Minnesota. Reagan ran for a second time with incumbent vice president and former C.I.A. director George H. W. Bush of Texas, and Mondale ran with Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York, the first major female candidate for the vice presidency.
The presidential election of 1984 was a rather partisan election for Nevada, with about 2% of the state voting for third parties, or for Nevada's "None of These Candidates" option.[1] Every county gave Reagan a comfortable majority.
Nevada weighed in for this election as 16% more Republican than the national average. Reagan won Nevada by a resounding landslide margin of 34%. His vote share of 65.9% made it his tenth-best state nationally, and was the highest vote share any nominee of either party had won in Nevada since 1936. The Mountain West as a whole had begun trending Republican in 1952,[2] but Nevada remained more competitive than other states in the region through the 1960s and 1970s, being one of two states in the region (along with New Mexico) to vote for Kennedy in 1960, giving Nixon a plurality in 1968, and voting for Ford by just 4.4% in 1976.
A dramatic shift came with Reagan's candidacy, however, as, in 1980, Nevada gave Reagan nearly as high a vote share as it had given Nixon in his 1972 landslide. Reagan improved his vote share still further in 1984. He carried every county in the state, including the largest county, Clark County (home to Las Vegas), which had typically voted Democratic from its founding in 1909 through 1976. Not only did he carry Clark, but he got a higher vote share in it than he did nationally, becoming the first nominee of either party to crack 60% in the county since 1964. He also won over two-thirds of the vote in the state's second population center, more typically Republican Washoe County (Reno). Only in rural and sparsely-settled White Pine County did Reagan fall below 60%, and even here he won by double digits. In eleven counties (including the state's third-largest county equivalent, Carson City), Reagan broke 70%.
Nevada would remain strongly Republican in 1988, but thereafter, it would return to being a more competitive state, as Clark County returned to the Democratic fold in 1992 (and has, as of 2020, never voted Republican again). Bill Clinton won it twice, but by narrow margins; but George W. Bush also won it only by narrow margins in his two elections. No nominee of either party has received as high a vote share in the state as Reagan, as of 2020. This was the first time ever that a Republican presidential candidate won two terms by carrying all counties in Nevada in both instances.
