Nevada Senate faceoff set between Jacky Rosen and Sam Brown, CNN projects

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Republican challenger Sam Brown will face off in one of the most important Senate races of the 2024 election, CNN projects, with both winning their primaries Tuesday.

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Republican challenger Sam Brown will face off in one of the most important Senate races of the 2024 election, CNN projects, with both winning their primaries Tuesday. Senate Democrats are facing a difficult political landscape this fall, having to defend seats in the red states of Montana, Ohio and West Virginia as well as in several other swing states. So Rosen’s seat is crucial to the party’s hopes of holding on to its slim majority in the chamber. Nevada is poised to play a key role in November’s elections, as Republicans aim to reverse years of Democratic dominance in federal races there. The last time the GOP won a Senate race in Nevada was 2012, and the party’s last presidential nominee to carry the state was George W. Bush in 2004. But Republicans flipped the governor’s office in 2022 and hope to build on those gains this year. Brown, a retired Army captain who earned a Purple Heart when he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination for the state’s other Senate seat in 2022. But national Republicans identified him as a top recruit this cycle, and he received a late endorsement from former President Donald Trump over the weekend. In Tuesday’s primary, Brown is projected to defeat a field that included Jeff Gunter, a wealthy dermatologist who was Trump’s ambassador to Iceland and spent $2.2 million of his own money on ads casting himself as the former president’s real ally in the race and portraying Brown as beholden to Washington interests. Brown ran about $840,000 worth of advertising ahead of the primary, but he’s also been supported by several outside groups that poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the primary, including: Duty First Nevada PAC, which spent more than $900,000; the Republican Leadership Fund, which spent nearly $470,000; and Americans for Prosperity, the influential conservative organization funded by the Koch family, which spent about $420,000 on the race.