Teresa Benitez-Thompson became the first Democrat ever to win Northern Nevada's 2nd Congressional District as a nationwide blue wave slammed into Nevada.
The social worker, former pageant queen and former Assembly majority leader defeated small business owner David Flippo (R) in a district President Donald Trump won by double digits. She joins the state's Democratic House incumbents, whose races were called early Wednesday morning as well.
Results didn't start trickling until nearly midnight. Flippo did not speak or give interviews. Benitez-Thompson spoke to voters and the press early in the evening.
Addressing the crowd as Democrats won nationwide, she sounded almost breathless with excitement.
"I know you guys have been waiting for a long time to take a crack at Nevada's Congressional District 2, and when the seat came open, I thought, 'I have got to run for the seat. I will regret it every single day if I don't get out there and fight for each of you,'" she said.
The race in the 2nd Congressional District, where longtime Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) announced his surprise retirement in February, quickly became the state's most closely watched. Election watchers have long considered the seat safely Republican — in 2024, Trump won it by 14 points.
But after a contentious GOP primary, in which Trump-endorsed Flippo defeated Amodei's preferred successor, Democrats saw an opening.
Flippo had been running for Horsford's seat and had moved to Reno specifically to switch races, so the attacks suggesting he was a carpetbagger were predictable. What was less expected were controversies over his military record and honors, as well as a missing personal financial disclosure, both of which drew heavy scrutiny from local and national media.
Benitez-Thompson is known for her polish. She campaigned even in the district's reddest "cow counties" and ran on affordability, emphasizing her legislative experience on economic issues and fighting corruption. Though she was known as a moderate in the Assembly, she did embrace some progressive causes this year, including conditioning aid to Israel. She told The Nevada Independent she spent Tuesday launching canvassers, encouraging UNR students to vote and helping people get ballots to drop boxes.
"We've been running all day," she said. "We're not taking one single vote or one single minute for granted."
As for the blue wave, she wasn't paying attention to partisan battles happening outside the district.
"I know there's great races happening across the country, but I've been so laser focused on what our unique region needs, and that's where my focus continues to be tonight," she said.
Polling showed a single-digit margin between the candidates. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put Benitez-Thompson on its Red to Blue list, which is normally reserved for candidates in swing districts, and a clean energy group called Invest in Tomorrow Coalition invested $2 million in flipping the seat. On the Republican side, the Freedom Caucus, the Club for Growth, and other GOP-aligned groups invested millions on Flippo's behalf.
This election became the most expensive in the district's history, per a Nevada Independent analysis conducted with the help of an AI coding tool. The outside spending is historic as well.
In the last weeks of the election, pop-up Super PACs spent thousands of dollars directing Republican voters to Independent American Party nominee Lynn Chapman. Chapman performed about as well as she did when she ran for the same seat in 2024.
James Peters, a 38-year-old Republican who told The Nevada Independent that he has libertarian views, was still undecided about how he would vote in the congressional race when he showed up to vote on Tuesday.
"I just don't see a lot of good from David Flippo, basically," Peters said. "I don't even know that I've really seen ads that make any sense or anything. So I think it's pretty tough to vote for him. To be honest, I don't know why I would. … It would be very hard for me to vote for a Democrat for Congress, so I'll probably vote for the nonpartisan."
Even some voters who backed Flippo had mixed feelings. On Tuesday, Jeff Hohnholz, a 48-year old salesman and a Reno Republican, told The Nevada Independent he voted for Flippo.
"I picked the lesser of the two evils," he said.
In Southern Nevada, Reps. Dina Titus (D-NV), Susie Lee (D-NV) and Steven Horsford (D-NV), who have each represented their districts for years, easily dispatched Republican opponents.
Their seats are considered the state's traditional battlegrounds. Lee was one of just 13 House Democrats in the country who won in a district that voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 red wave.
National Republicans recruited video game composer Marty O'Donnell (R) to run against Lee and state Sen. Carrie Buck (R-Henderson) to run against Titus. O'Donnell, famed for his work on the music of Halo and Destiny, poured $4 million of his own money into his bid. Buck became one of the Republicans' best fundraisers nationwide, outraising the Democratic incumbent several quarters in a row.
But money couldn't overcome deepening voter anger over high prices and the president's sinking approval rating. By October, the GOP's chances of flipping any of the Las Vegas-based seats were clearly slipping away. A Trump-affiliated PAC that had originally planned to spend $3 million in support of O'Donnell, for instance, canceled its ad reservation to triage races elsewhere.
Piper Heath and Tabitha Mueller contributed to this story.
