LAS VEGAS — Five days after settling back into the White House, President Trump embarked on a political victory lap that took him to a rally in downtown Las Vegas.
Joined by Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, Trump told boisterous supporters that, as a first order of business, he’d directed every member of his Cabinet “to marshal all powers at their disposal to defeat inflation and bring down the cost of daily life.”
That hasn’t happened — not even close — and that failure is one big reason that Nevada’s governor is fighting for his political life.
Democrats, still smarting from their loss four years ago, have made Lombardo their No. 1 gubernatorial target this election season. Republicans are battling to keep their top-of-the-ticket foothold in a state that will, once more, stand at the center of the presidential campaign.
With just over a week to go — and with more than 335,000 ballots already cast — the contest could go either way.
After a career in law enforcement and eight years as sheriff of Clark County — home to Las Vegas — Lombardo made the leap to governor in 2022 in a pandemic-fueled backlash against Democratic incumbent Steve Sisolak.
Reserved by nature and a political civilian most of his life, Lombardo has spent the last four years focused on the basics — crime, education, job growth, economic development — and largely steered clear of the country’s incendiary culture wars.
Unlike other Republican lawmakers, Lombardo has also shied away from the provocations and flamboyant pugilism of the MAGA movement.
Still, Trump hangs like an anvil around Lombardo’s neck — a fact his Democratic opponent, Aaron Ford, exploits at every turn.
Appearing last week at a gas station two miles off the Las Vegas Strip, Ford cited record-high fuel prices — and the knock-on effects they’ve had on tourism, groceries and online shopping — and said Nevadans were suffering for no other reason than Trump’s “war of choice” against Iran.
“And where,” Ford asked rhetorically, as traffic whooshed past, “is our current governor? As usual, he’s at Trump’s feet, serving as his doormat.”
Nevada Democratic gubernatorial candidate and current Nevada Atty. Gen. Aaron D. Ford arrives at a get-out-the-vote event on Oct. 7 in Las Vegas.
(Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Ford, who’s bidding to become Nevada’s first Black governor, has one of those up-by-the-bootstraps biographies that campaign consultants see as spun gold.
He grew up in Dallas in a family that struggled to stay above water and, as a single father in his early 20s, relied on Medicaid and food stamps to get by. He worked as a waiter and a teacher to pay for law school and a Ph.D. in education before moving to Nevada in 2007. After six years in the state Senate, Ford was elected in 2018 to the first of two terms as the state’s attorney general.
Like Democratic candidates everywhere, Ford has made affordability a key component of his campaign.
Standing on the sidewalk outside a Circle K — where regular was going for $5.35 a gallon — Ford squatted to sign a blown-up copy of a “letter” to Trump demanding a $2,000 “pain-at-the-pump” rebate for every Nevada household. A line was provided, obligingly but obviously unnecessarily, for Lombardo’s signature.
Four years ago, Ford noted, when gas was around $4.68 a gallon, his Republican rival wrote on social media that hard-pressed Nevadans needed “leadership that ensures our families and businesses are protected from these disastrous policies.”
“But once he got in office,” Ford said, Lombardo “stopped fighting for us in Nevada and he started working for Trump full time.”
A few hours later, at a country-themed nightclub in northwest Las Vegas, the governor took to the stage to extol his performance these last four years.
Small-business creation and job growth are up, he told a crowd of supporters gathered on the dance floor. Teachers are better paid and more people are working in Nevada than ever before. “Kicking butt,” he said, referring to either himself, Nevada or both; it wasn’t clear which. “Kicking butt.”
Also, Lombardo added, Nevada’s crime rate has fallen for both violent and property crimes — “without any help from the attorney general.”
The words “Donald” and “Trump” never passed the governor’s lips.
Lombardo has had a somewhat mixed relationship with the president.
He kept his distance during the 2024 campaign and has occasionally, selectively, taken issue with the administration since Trump returned to office. The governor, for instance, spoke out against cuts to Medicaid as well as the shuttering of wind and solar projects in Nevada.
.
But Lombardo didn’t help himself in the least when Trump came to town in August for another rally, this one at the Red Rock Casino. He heaped praise on the president and defended, of all things, the care and feeding of Trump’s plutocratic pals.
“Quite often when the press and the media runs him down, they think about, you know, he’s taking care of his billionaire friends,” Lombardo said. “Those billionaire friends provide jobs. Unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent.”
Naturally, the moment showed up in a campaign ad, showing the grinning governor alongside a smirking Trump and ending with the tagline: “Joe Lombardo. For Trump, Not Nevada.”
For his part, the governor has portrayed Ford as feckless and borderline corrupt.
He’s seized on the attorney general’s abundant out-of-state travel — for official business, Ford says — to portray him as a high-flier beholden to the special interests that financed his jaunts.
Lombardo has also accused Ford of being weak on crime, citing, in particular, the case of a Nevada inmate convicted of manslaughter in the killing of a pregnant woman. Ford placed the inmate’s bid for clemency on the agenda of the state pardons board — an example, Lombardo claims, of the way Ford treats criminals.
The Democrat said he was merely following procedure and would have opposed the clemency request had he not missed the board’s meeting due to an unspecified family emergency.
With a big financial advantage and the benefit of a highly practiced campaign team, Lombardo has kept the race close despite the rough political climate. But to a considerable degree, his fate is beyond anything that Lombardo can control. The key question is how big the Democratic wave is on Nov. 3 and how strong the Trump undertow.
Those forces of red and blue — more than anything either candidate says or does — will determine the winner in this most purple of states.