By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

CQ Politics Presidential Race Rating: No Clear Favorite

Electoral Votes: 5

Neither regional pride toward the Republican nominee from Arizona nor GOP candidates’ wins in eight of the state’s past 10 White House contests will spare John McCain from a tough and uncertain battle for Nevada.

While Republicans took the state 1968-1988, the state’s relatively new status as a presidential tossup began with Bill Clinton’s narrow victories in 1992 and 1996. George W. Bush returned Nevada to the Republican column by fewer than 4 percentage points in 2000 and held on four years ago by fewer than 3 points.

Nevada is home to the Senate’s top Democrat, Majority Leader Harry Reid , but the state is also represented in the chamber by Republican John Ensign , chairman of the GOP’s Senate campaign organization.

The rapid expansion of the state’s population, including a Hispanic constituency that now makes up more than a fifth of its residents, has had political implications. Democrats, as of May, gained a 43-percent-to-38-percent lead over Republicans in party registration — a 56,000-voter advantage — though the 20 percent identified as nonpartisan or “other” can swing statewide races to the GOP.

For Barack Obama to win Nevada, he will need to accomplish two aims. One is to boost turnout in Las Vegas and Reno, the state’s urban Democratic hotbeds. Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, is by far the state’s biggest population center and home to both an organized labor presence and much of the state’s strongly Democratic minority population.

The other is to limit John McCain ’s margin in conservative, rural Nevada, which is usually overwhelmingly favorable to Republicans.

Obama may gain from the fact that the economy is front and center in the state. The home foreclosure rate in Las Vegas is five times greater than the national average, and the state is facing the worst budget crisis in its history.

McCain’s prospects of galvanizing Republican enthusiasm in the state are clouded by political, personal and legal controversies surrounding its top GOP official, Gov. Jim Gibbons . McCain bypassed Gibbons and selected Lt. Gov. Brian R. Krolicki in June as chairman of his Nevada campaign. “You would think, if you were a Republican nominee for president, that it is a big advantage to have a Republican governor in a state. Here it is a disadvantage,” said Nevada political analyst Jon Ralston.

The down-ballot focus in Nevada is on Democratic bids to oust the two Republican incumbents in the state’s three-member House delegation.

Democrats argue that Rep. Jon Porter is vulnerable after winning by just 2 percentage points in 2006; his district, taking in part of strongly Democratic Las Vegas and its more Republican-leaning Clark County suburbs, was designed to be rather evenly divided between the parties. Dina Titus, the Democratic challenger, is a longtime state senator remembered for her close loss to Gibbons in the 2006 race for governor. CQ Politics rates this race No Clear Favorite, our most competitive category.

Democrats also are taking another shot at the rural 2nd District, where freshman Republican Dean Heller faces a rematch of the 2006 contest in which he defeated Democrat Jill Derby by 50 percent to 45 percent. Heller drew attention — and some negative feedback from fellow House Republicans — in early July when he told the Las Vegas Review Journal that the Republican Party needed “to clean house,” adding, “I think the next couple of election cycles are going to do that.” CQ Politics race rating: Leans Republican.