Nevada was won by incumbent United States Vice President George H. W. Bush of Texas, who was running against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

Bush carried Nevada with 58.86% of the vote, while Dukakis received 37.92%, a victory margin of 20.94%.

Bush carried Nevada by a landslide margin of 21%, making the state 13.2% more Republican than the nation overall.

The Mountain West had begun trending Republican in 1952;[2] in that election, Eisenhower overperformed in Nevada as he did in the rest of the region, after it had unanimously voted for Truman in 1948.

This was at the same time as some other Mountain West states, such as Colorado and Montana, wavered in the strength of their traditional Republicanism, amid the 1980s farm crisis.