LAS VEGAS — Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford won the Democratic nomination for governor on Tuesday, taking 60 percent of the vote in election-night returns, and within hours of the polls closing he had already written the script for the next five months, telling supporters that Nevadans have seen what their state looks like when Joe Lombardo, in his words Trump’s human doormat, is at the helm.
Ford defeated Washoe County Commission chair Alexis Hill by a wide margin, celebrating what he called a decisive victory on stage with his wife Berna Rhodes-Ford at the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 headquarters in Las Vegas, the ritual launching pad of Democratic campaigns in the state, the Las Vegas Sun reported. He pledged to win the general election by building a multiracial working-class coalition united around the promise of a better future for Nevada’s working families.
The man waiting for him cruised through his own primary. Governor Joe Lombardo, the former Clark County sheriff endorsed by President Donald Trump, took 91 percent against six minor challengers, ABC News reported. His election-night message conspicuously avoided the president who endorsed him. There is more to do, Lombardo said. Too many families are feeling the pressure of rising costs.
That silence is the race. Lombardo governs a battleground state where Trump’s approval has sagged, and the contest is already being read nationally as a test of whether Republican governors in swing states can keep the president’s endorsement in one pocket and their distance from him in the other. Ford’s opening line was designed to make that straddle impossible, stapling Lombardo to every unpopular thing the administration has done to Nevada.
The administration has given him material. The state’s tourism-dependent economy has absorbed the costs of the trade wars, immigration raids have rattled the hospitality workforce that keeps the Strip running, and the same Culinary Union hall where Ford celebrated has spent the year fighting federal enforcement actions against its members. Lombardo’s task is to persuade voters that none of that belongs to him; Ford’s is to make sure all of it does.
Ford arrives with history on the ballot. The former state Senate majority leader became Nevada’s first Black attorney general in 2019 and would be the state’s first Black governor, in a state whose Democratic coalition runs through the union kitchens, casino floors and immigrant neighborhoods of Clark County. His primary margin suggests the party establishment consolidated early, sparing him the bruising contests that have marked Democratic primaries elsewhere this cycle. He launched the campaign last summer on the same themes he closed the primary with, a former public school math teacher’s pitch about families getting ahead.
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