LAS VEGAS (AP) — With control of the U.S. Senate on the line, Nevada’s protracted ballot count ground through a fourth day Friday as election officials tallied thousands of votes ahead of a Saturday deadline to accept late-arriving mail-ins.

Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was running barely behind Republican Adam Laxalt, but with the remaining tens of thousands of uncounted ballots mainly coming from the state’s urban cores, her campaign expressed optimism she could overtake her challenger. Laxalt, meanwhile, has steadily predicted he’ll stay in the lead as the count drags on.

“We are doing everything in our power to move ballots forward just as quickly as we can,” Joe Gloria, the registrar in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, said at a press conference Friday.

Gloria’s office posted tabulations Friday evening for more than 27,000 ballots that put Cortez Masto within a few hundred votes of Laxalt, with an estimated 23,000 more votes in heavily Democratic Clark County yet to be tallied.

With the Senate evenly divided, Nevada is one of two undetermined races that will determine which party controls the chamber, after Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won his bid for reelection in Arizona late Friday.

If Democrats win Nevada, they will have control even before a December runoff in Georgia between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker, with Vice President Kamala Harris able to break a tie. If Republicans win Nevada, control of the Senate will be decided in Georgia.

In another key race, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak lost his reelection bid to his Republican challenger, sheriff Joe Lombardo, on Friday night.

Nevada’s count has taken several days partly because of the mail voting system created by the state Legislature in 2020 that requires counties to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day if they arrive up to four days later. Even after the counts are finished this weekend, voters have until the end of the day Monday to “cure” — or fix clerical problems with — their mail ballots, enabling those to be added into the final tally. Gloria said there are 9,600 ballots in the “cure” stage in Clark County, home to three-quarters of the state’s population.

Nevada, a closely divided swing state, is one of the most racially diverse in the nation, a working class state whose residents have been especially hard hit by inflation and other economic turmoil

Roughly three-fourths of Nevada voters said the country is headed in the wrong direction, and about 5 in 10 called the economy the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of 2,100 of the state’s voters.

Voters viewed the economy negatively, with VoteCast finding nearly 8 in 10 saying economic conditions are either not so good or poor. Only about 2 in 10 called the economy excellent or good. And about a third of voters said their families are falling behind financially.

But that didn’t necessarily translate into anger at President Joe Biden or his party. About half considered inflation the most important issue facing the U.S., but they were evenly split over whether they think higher prices are due to Biden’s policies or factors outside his control.

Nevada is also a famously live-and-let-live state, and Cortez Masto and other Democrats made preserving abortion rights a centerpiece of their campaigns. According to VoteCast, 7 in 10 wanted the procedure kept legal in all or most cases.

Republicans, however, relentlessly hammered the economic argument, contending it was time for a leadership change. They also sought to capitalize on lingering frustrations about pandemic shutdowns that devastated Las Vegas’ tourist-centric economy in 2020.

On Thursday morning, The Associated Press declared Republican Stavros Anthony the winner in the lieutenant governor race, while Republican Andy Mathews was elected state controller.

The state’s lone Republican congressman, Mark Amodei, easily won reelection in his mostly rural district in northern Nevada. The state’s three Las Vegas-area Democratic members of the House were also reelected.

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By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and KEN RITTER Associated Press

Associated Press writer Scott Sonner in Las Vegas contributed to this report.