A key county in the middle of the 2024 race tries to pick sides

RENO, Nevada — The road to the White House in 2024 runs through a handful of places like Washoe County and “The Biggest Little City in the World.”

The home of Reno is the most purple county in a critical purple state, the crucial battleground of Nevada. And with Republicans putting their presidential primary behind them, the onus is now on appealing to voters in the middle in places like this. Washoe is both a key focus and potential problem spot for both parties heading into the 2024 election.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the county over Donald Trump by just over 1 percentage point. Four years later, Joe Biden extended that local lead to 4.5 points, but the result in this year’s contest is far from assured.

The latest numbers from Nevada’s Secretary of State show Republicans with a roughly 7,000-person lead in registered voters over Democrats out of 311,000 voters overall. That’s up from a registered voter lead of just over 1,000 in 2020. Unaffiliated voters not registered with a party make up roughly a third of the Washoe rolls.

Like their counterparts across the country, Nevada Republicans hold widely-varied views on their nominee. To the diehards, Donald Trump is a messianic figure. To others, he’s too controversial.

“I would have to say that the majority of the Republicans in Washoe County are on board with President Trump,” says Washoe GOP Chair Bruce Parks, who spoke with fellow Republicans at last weekend’s county convention. “There were not even a handful of people [there] that expressed dissatisfaction with President Trump, but they all said they vote for him anyway. Because they cannot in good conscience vote for anybody that would do what the current occupier of the White House has done to this