Nevada's Washoe County could be the swing county that decides it all

While Nevada's six electoral votes pale in comparison to California’s 55 or Texas’s 38, those six could really matter in a close presidential race between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

And while Clark County with Las Vegas gets most of the attention thanks to its size and crucial turnout system for Democrats, many eyes will be on Washoe County on Tuesday.

“Does Nevada matter? Yes. Does Washoe matter? Absolutely,” said longtime Nevada political consultant Jim Denton. “Washoe County will be critical in who wins this election. This state has become really a diverse picture of what this country is. In particular, in Washoe County. It will make the difference in this election.”

Nevada's key role goes back many presidential elections.

While a voter fiasco in Florida stole all of the headlines in the race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore in 2000, Nevada played a just as critical role.

Bush needed Florida’s 25 electoral votes to surpass Gore’s 266. However, Bush also won Nevada by about 21,600 votes – about 3.5 percent. Had Gore made up those votes somehow and taken Nevada’s then four electoral votes, Florida would have been irrelevant.

The race between Trump and Clinton is just as tight.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight projects winners based on aggregate polling and outside factors. He was strikingly accurate in 2008 and 2012, missing only one state between both contests.

Silver currently anticipates three swing states left: North Carolina, Florida and Nevada. If North Carolina and Florida go for Trump and the rest of the projections go as planned, that leaves the race at Clinton with 268 and Trump with 264.

There's a possibility the electoral map could look like this on Tuesday, according to 270toWin.com:

All of a sudden, a state in the bottom half of the population decides the fate of the country for the next four years.

Most don’t argue Nevada’s importance, but to the country at large, Washoe County might just be a blip on the radar.

The general theory is that Clark County is the Democratic stronghold while the rural areas make up much of the ground. That leaves Washoe County’s 263,554 voters to help determine the outcome.

Current registration in Washoe has Republicans at 98,146 and Democrats at 94,614. But more importantly are the 51,905 registered nonpartisans.

“No question about it. It will decide the Senate race and it will decide the presidential race,” said Greg Ferraro, a political consultant and registered Republican. “And the reason why is because you have an almost equal number of Republicans and Democrats and a slightly smaller but growing nonpartisan segment. Who wins those nonpartisans is really important in Washoe.”

Races in close states are almost never won with the base, who are likely to vote for their party’s nominee regardless. Instead, the focus is on independent voters and Washoe County has them in spades.

It’s not without precedent, Denton said. In 2012, U.S. Sen. Dean Heller was locked in a close race with former U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., for Heller’s current Senate seat.

Heller ended up winning the seat by 11,576 votes, including outpacing Berkley in Washoe County by 20,164 in a year where President Barack Obama won the county by 6,956 votes.

It spans both sides as well, Denton said. U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat, was facing a grueling race against Republican Sharron Angle in 2010. Polls showed him down, but he ended up prevailing by 41,424 votes.

Reid would have won the race if all the votes were canceled out of Washoe County, largely due to the turnout factor in Las Vegas, but Denton said taking Washoe County by 7,000 votes helped provide a nice cushion during a red wave.

Washoe has become critical to all kinds of statewide races, not just candidates.

“That’s why we’ve been on the ground there since January, organizing voters and organizing a grassroots campaign to get out the vote,” said Jennifer Crowe, spokeswoman for the group pushing for the universal background checks ballot initiative.

The campaigns have done anything but ignore Northern Nevada. Trump and Clinton have both visited the Reno-area multiple times. Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence visited twice in a one-week period while Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine held a rally on the University of Nevada, Reno campus on the eve of the first presidential debate. The Clinton campaign has flooded the area with high-profile surrogates over the last week, including Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

“Years ago, Washoe County was a Republican bastion,” Denton said. “That’s not true anymore. That’s not true in how the people vote. The growth has made Washoe a very competitive and very diverse place.”