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.
The rest of Tuesday’s ballot filled in the November undercard. State Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro took the Democratic nomination for attorney general with 62 percent over state treasurer Zach Conine, and will face Republican Adriana Guzman Fralick, who beat Danny Tarkanian with 60 percent. Assemblywoman Sandra Jauregui won the Democratic nod for lieutenant governor with 60 percent, drawing Republican Stavros Anthony, who ran unopposed.
The secretary of state contest carries its own warning label. Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic incumbent who spent his first term defending Nevada’s election machinery, was unopposed, while Republicans gave 61 percent of their vote to Jim Marchant, the election denier who built a movement around the claim that Nevada’s elections are rigged and lost this same race in 2022. His return puts the administration of the 2028 presidential vote squarely on Nevada’s November ballot.
In the congressional districts that perennially decide House control, all three Southern Nevada Democratic incumbents advanced. Steven Horsford was unopposed in the 4th District and will face Republican Cody Whipple, who took 61 percent. Susie Lee advanced in the 3rd District, where Marty O’Donnell edged a Republican field with 43 percent over Jeff Gunter, and Dina Titus advanced in the 1st.
Tuesday extended a pattern that has run through the June primaries nationally. As The Eastern Herald reported from Maine, where oysterman Graham Platner won the Democratic Senate nomination to challenge Susan Collins, and from South Carolina, where the Republican governor’s race went to a runoff despite Trump’s intervention, the president’s endorsement has proved a blunter instrument this cycle than his allies advertise, mobilizing primaries while complicating the generals that follow.
Nevada will now host one of the country’s most closely watched governor’s races, a contest between a sheriff who needs Trump’s voters without Trump’s baggage and a prosecutor betting that the distinction no longer exists. Ford put the wager plainly on Tuesday night, and Lombardo’s answer, five months before the vote, was to talk about the price of groceries and hope nobody asked who has been setting it.
