Can Nevada Democrats Roll a Trifecta?

LAS VEGAS – By all available polling, the race between Nevada’s Democratic attorney general, Aaron Ford, and the incumbent Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, whom Ford is seeking to unseat, is close. A better one-word description of the race, however, would be asymmetric.

Ford is campaigning on working-class economic themes that stand out, even amidst all the other such campaigns that Democrats are waging across the nation this fall. His is the only 2026 platform I know of that features a promise to repeal his state’s “right-to-work” law, a promise made more plausible by the Democrats’ substantial majorities in the Nevada legislature, which don’t look to be diminished by this November’s elections. Ford’s attacks on Lombardo center on the governor’s opposition to policies that would make life in Nevada more affordable, like his support for subsidies to data centers and his vetoes of bills passed by the Democratic legislature. This includes bills that would have capped the cost of prescription drugs at levels negotiated, or to be negotiated, by Medicare; provided paid family leave to Nevada workers; prohibited private equity and big banks from the mass purchase and ownership of housing; and established universal free breakfasts and lunches for K-12 schoolchildren.

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Lombardo’s campaign, by contrast, doesn’t focus on policy very much. Rather it’s rooted in attacks on Ford, less for the policies he’s supported than for what it claims are Ford’s self-interested and alien-to-Nevada priorities. It has relentlessly publicized California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s endorsement of Ford (Newsom has endorsed a host of Democratic gubernatorial candidates this year) as proof positive of Ford’s embrace of crazy California creeds, which the Lombardo campaign feels no need to enumerate.

That these attacks have had real effect was evident at a recent Ford Q&A session with some Las Vegas Teamsters that I attended. One Teamster actually asked Ford to tell him what he’d learned during his years in California. Ford has never lived in California; he was born and raised in Texas, to which the traces of his Southern accent still attest.

Lombardo’s other attacks focus on Ford’s extensive travel record during his past two terms as state attorney general. Many of those travels, Ford’s campaign has documented, were to out-of-state trials and negotiations for settlements, or for meetings of multiple states’ attorneys general, some of which concerned the suit they’d brought against Meta (aka Facebook) for addicting children, for which Meta recently agreed to pay $17 billion in damages and alter some of its practices. But some of the trips were clearly not work-related.

Most notable about these particular ad blitzes is that the Lombardo campaign began them this spring, well before Nevada’s primary elections, much less the general. They had decided that the way to ensure Lombardo’s re-election was to avoid campaigning on the incumbent’s record and to make Ford himself the issue, however much that entailed inflated, dubious, or just plain ridiculous characterizations.

Hence the asymmetry that defines the state’s gubernatorial contest.

In a different economy, a different year, and a different country, Lombardo’s strategy might clearly work. A larger reality, however, is preoccupying Nevadans this year. That reality was on display down the block from where the Teamsters had assembled for their meeting with Ford. At the corner, a gas station was selling regular at $5.49 per gallon, and diesel at $6.79. Those prices had drawn the attention of the Teamsters and, not to put too fine a point on it, damn near everybody else.

Two September polls show how close the race has become: One has Ford up over Lombardo by two percentage points; the other has Lombardo leading Ford, also by two percentage points. The latter poll also shows Democratic candidates for other statewide offices leading their Republican opponents by considerable margins. Those Democrats, of course, haven’t been subjected to the kind of ubiquitous attacks that Ford has endured. Neither are most of them Black, as Ford is. In a state that is roughly 11 percent Black (as well as roughly one-third Latino, 11 percent Asian, and 45 percent white), Blackness likely does not constitute an electoral advantage. As one of those polls showed Ford up by roughly 30 percentage points among likely Latino voters, the opposition to Ford is clearly rooted in the state’s white communities.

THE OVERWHELMING SHARE OF NEVADANS do share a common class identity, however. They’re working-class, more so than the population of any state outside Appalachia and the Deep South. Nevada ranks seventh among the states with the lowest percentage of college graduates, trailing only West Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Alabama. Nationally, the share of Americans who are college graduates is 34.9 percent; in Nevada, it’s 27.6 percent.

Ford is not only running on a working-class platform; he also touts his working-class roots. When he was growing up in Houston, he told the Teamsters, “My dad sold candy bars. He brought home the leftovers for me to eat. I was no highfalutin rich kid with a silver spoon in my mouth. We didn’t even have a spoon.” As a young adult, he adds, “I was a single parent when I was in college, and I seriously considered dropping out. I couldn’t focus on education until I got my son fed. I relied on welfare, on food stamps, on Medicaid.”

One of the many jobs Ford took during that time was that of a waiter at an Outback Steakhouse, perhaps a point of connection with Nevada’s largest voter outreach and mobilization operation: Las Vegas’s storied hotel and restaurant union. At other times in his pre-law days, he was a high school math teacher.

That kind of economic precarity has shaped his views to this day, Ford noted during an interview with the Prospect. In the early years of his now three-decade-long marriage, he was somewhat bewildered by his wife’s desire to purchase a home. “My American dream was to rent your home, with an electric stove for when your gas was cut off,” he said. (Ford met his wife, attorney Berna Rhodes, in college; she is the general counsel for Nevada State University. They have three adult sons.)

Ford’s young family moved from Texas to Nevada at the turn of the century, after his wife got a clerkship with a Nevada-based federal judge. He worked in private practice as a partner in two successive law firms, chiefly on commercial litigation, usually representing small businesses, but also representing plaintiffs in class action suits. What he mainly learned during those 15 years, he said, was how to reach a settlement between opposed parties—a skill, he added, that would be particularly useful for a governor.

Encouraged by Steven Horsford, Nevada’s only Black member of the U.S. House, Ford first ran for office in 2010, losing an election to a seat in the state legislature. He won election to the state Senate in 2012, where his dealmaking prowess helped him became the Democratic leader two years thereafter. In 2018, he was narrowly elected as the state’s attorney general, to which he was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2022. In that office, he’s focused on consumer and public-health issues, and corporate accountability, a concern epitomized by his role in compelling Meta to alter its practices in engaging with children.

DURING HIS MEETING WITH THE TEAMSTERS, one member asked Ford what his “three top issues” would be if he became governor. “I have only one top issue,” he replied. “Affordability. We have to deal simultaneously with housing costs, the price of health care, and utility bills. We ain’t got the time to go one at a time.”

Crafting and signing the new versions of the legislation that Lombardo vetoed would be one way, Ford told the Prospect, to begin to tackle the costs of living. “We now have a governor who says he can do nothing about affordability,” Ford said. “He vetoed the bill that would ban private equity’s purchase of homes; he vetoed a prescription drug affordability bill; he has failed to guarantee a free school lunch program.” Lombardo, he continued, calls billionaires job creators and has provided tax benefits for their data centers. This presents Ford with something of a hanging curveball amid the cross-partisan outrage over these massive, energy-sucking behemoths.

As states go, Nevada has a very high share of uninhabited land where the arrival of a data center would encounter few human neighbors it might upset. It also, however, has a very limited supply of water, something that data centers gulp down in huge quantities. When I first asked Ford about those centers, his immediate response was “We’re in a desert. Data centers’ consumption of water affects us all. They’ll have to find a way to use something other than fresh water.”

Beyond that, he added, “locals have to have a real say. Communities have to accept them as a condition for their construction, which means they’ll have to get not just alternatives to fresh water but also must produce their own clean energy. They can’t be on the grid, raising people’s electric bills. Their tax breaks are completely out of hand.”

That’s not, please note, a call for a moratorium on all data center construction and operation. Nevada does have a lot of open land and an economy in need of other industries besides tourism and gambling. Ford’s position is crafted to address those needs (including jobs for construction workers), but within the strictures of affordability and desert life.

FORD CERTAINLY DOESN’T DEFINE HIMSELF as a progressive in the Sanders-Warren-Mamdani camp. He seems to fit comfortably into the mainstream of somewhat social democratic, non-nationalistic Black Democratic politics, citing Barack Obama as his hero. To that, however, he appends his particular interest in working-class issues. “I’m going to be the most pro-working-class governor this state has ever seen,” he told the Teamsters. He termed his initial round of campaign travels around the state as the “Working Class First” tour. And the priority he gives to ending Nevada’s status as a right-to-work state does single him out from the rest of the national Democrats’ Class of 2026. (Or 2025, given recently elected Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s reluctance to eliminate that state’s right-to-work policy, despite a working Democratic majority in the legislature.)

The strength and power of Las Vegas’s union of hotel employees—the 50,000-member Culinary Local 226 of UNITE HERE—has obscured the fact that Nevada’s right-to-work status impedes efforts to unionize workers. All else being equal, most unions are reluctant to organize in such states, because right-to-work laws allow union members to decline to pay dues to the union that represents them. The Culinary is an exceptional union in which more than 80 percent of its members pay dues anyway. (It’s also exceptional because its members turn out far more precinct walkers and phone-bankers for pro-union, almost invariably Democratic, candidates than any other organization of any kind.)

Nonetheless, 226 Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge told the Prospect that his union would certainly hire more organizers if right to work were repealed; so did the Teamsters’ state political director, Ross Kinson. “It’s not 2024,” Kinson told the Prospect, referring to a year when many Teamsters and other blue-collar workers voted for Donald Trump. “This year,” he said, “a lot more of them will vote Democratic.”

Ford can count not only on Black voters, but most Latino voters as well. Election after election and poll after poll make clear that Latinos are the most bread-and-butter sector of the American electorate, attuned most directly to such economic basics as jobs, wages, and the costs of living. Should that not suffice, Ford’s repudiation of Lombardo’s policy of having local police agencies cooperate with ICE and the Border Patrol in their orgy of deportations should be another factor in bolstering his Latino support. Ford is also a staunch critic of Lombardo’s relative indifference to education, as signaled by the governor’s refusal to raise teachers’ wages by more than 2 percent. Attuned as they are to the prospects for intergenerational upward mobility, Latinos have been shown to be strong supporters of better (and better-funded) schools.

The remaining hurdle that Ford must clear if he’s to win in November is to convince those other sectors of the state’s working class that they’ll benefit from his emphasis on their economic concerns. That means he needs to break through the Lombardo ads that could lead a truck driver to think that Ford was some kind of crazy Californian, toting alien values over the Sierras into the Nevada flatlands. That means Ford’s proposed remedies—partial though they must be—for the high costs of housing, medication, and goods with tariffs slapped on them must register with Nevada’s cash-strapped and disenchanted electors. In that sense, Ford’s challenge really is to convince them that he’ll be the most pro-worker governor that Nevada’s ever seen.