LAS VEGAS — Sam Brown, a first-time Nevada candidate who could take control of the Senate in November, could pull off an upset against first-term Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, GOP leaders say.

Brown, a 40-year-old war veteran who suffered severe burns when a roadside bomb exploded under the fuel tank of his car in Afghanistan in 2008, trails Rosen, 67, by 10.7 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average polling report.

Former President Donald Trump is virtually tied with Vice President Kamala Harris in the Silver State. The Democratic candidate has an average RCP poll lead of 0.6%, well within the margin of error. But a Brown campaign insider said the internal polls show that the Senate race also falls within the margin of error.

While the late Democratic Sen. Harry Reid — who served in the upper chamber for 30 years, including eight as majority leader — remains an influential presence here three years after his death, there are signs that Nevada could tilt toward the GOP, especially if Trump wins the state this year.

Two years ago, Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, whose father preceded Reid as Nevada senator, lost a Senate bid to Catherine Cortez Masto by 8,000 votes. That’s about four ballots per precinct, noted Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who heads the GOP’s Senate campaign arm. Bad weather on Election Day 2022 — snow in northern Nevada and light rain in the southern part of the state — may have deterred GOP turnout, he added.

And that’s without even mentioning the tough battle for turnout in the midterm elections, where no presidential candidate topped the ticket, as was the case in 2022. But Daines stressed that the trends are favoring the GOP in 2024.

“Remember that night… Joe Lombardo was also elected governor,” Daines said. “So Nevada elected a Republican governor in 2022, the only Republican gubernatorial election in the country” that year.

“Brown’s voters haven’t come home yet,” Daines said of the state’s Republicans, “but they will come home.” He said the efforts of groups like the Club for Growth, which is pledging $2 million to support Brown’s bid, will also pay off.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who led the Republican Party’s campaign for Senate during the last midterm elections, was similarly optimistic about Brown’s prospects when he spoke to reporters last week.

“I think Sam is going to win,” said Scott, who is running for majority leader if Republicans regain control of the Senate. “He’s clearly a war hero, he’s gone to serve this country. He has the right views. He knows we can’t have an unaccountable government. We have to support Israel. We have to destroy Hamas.”

Rosen has been thwarting Brown’s campaign with ads claiming the Republican would support a nationwide abortion ban, which he denies. She claimed Brown “will say anything to get elected while trying to cover up his decades-long opposition to abortion rights.”

But the Brown campaign insider said Rosen’s abortion refrain is an attempt to distract from issues that affect Nevadans’ wallets: “They only want to talk about abortion because Jackie’s record on affordable housing and voting for spending packages that have only increased inflation, increased our national debt, which hits everybody in the wallet.”

Rosen and Brown will meet on October 17 in a televised debate hosted by KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. Their discussion will be simulcast in Reno and later broadcast locally in Spanish by Univision.