Laxalt, Brown face off in first debate of Republican Senate primary – The Nevada

In their first debate of the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, former Attorney General Adam Laxalt and newcomer Sam Brown collided over personal histories and “election integrity,” even as the pair hewed to a familiar conservative mold on other major issues. 

Monday’s meeting between the two candidates, replete with attacks from both sides, marks a tone-shift for Brown, whose early advertising centered largely on biographical or issue-based information. Brown has so far struggled to seriously dent Laxalt’s lead in public polls (at least 27 points with 15 percent of respondents undecided, according to a survey last week from The Hill and Emerson College), despite filling his campaign warchest with at least $1 million in each of the last three quarters. 

The hour-long debate — moderated by veteran broadcaster Sam Shad and Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Victor Joecks and initially aired online by the program Nevada Newsmakers — also comes just three weeks before the beginning of early voting, and just over two weeks before a deadline for counties to send mail ballots to voters. 

Laxalt entered the race last year as the presumptive favorite of national Republicans, and has since gained the backing of a number of prominent politicians within the conservative wing of the party — most notably former President Donald Trump himself and rising stars such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

The winner of the June 14 primary will likely go on to face incumbent Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who was first elected to the seat in 2016 by a margin of 2.4 percentage points in a race against then-Rep. Joe Heck. 

An ‘election integrity’ flashpoint

In a moment that came only in the debate’s final minutes, Brown sought to undermine Laxalt’s position as a defender of “election integrity” — a catch-all term that has come to encompass not only long-term Republican policy aims, such as enacting voter ID laws, but also unproven or debunked claims that the 2020 presidential election result was illegitimate. 

Echoing rhetoric that first appeared on an attack website last week, Brown said that Laxalt “failed us” on the issue during his time as attorney general. 

That website accused Laxalt of having “ignored voter fraud” in 2016 and 2017, when Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske alleged that DMV voter registration policies had allowed non-citizens to register to vote, and ultimately accused three non-citizens of voting in the 2016 election. 

Those three cases were apparently not pursued further after they were announced, unlike two fraud cases in 2016 — one during the primary and one following the general election — that led to arrests. 

It was an attack that Laxalt — who served as the co-chair of Trump’s re-election bid in Nevada and was front-and-center during the campaign’s efforts to legally challenge the election results — rebutted as “pretty comical.” 

“We sounded every alarm imaginable,” Laxalt said of 2020, before pivoting to the 2016 allegations. “… The reality is, it’s the secretary of state that’s empowered with investigating voter fraud in this state. President Trump looked at the camera and said the only person that he can trust in this state is me.” 

But in a rebuttal of his own, Brown targeted Laxalt on the 2016 allegations again. 

“The fact of the matter is, you knew as attorney general that non-citizens were registered to vote, and you did nothing,” Brown said. “You knew that in 2016, non-citizens did vote, and you did nothing about that. And then in 2020, when President Trump, Nevadans and Americans were relying on you to be the one to challenge any sort of issues, the only thing you did was to file a lawsuit that, by your own admission, was late.” 

In response, Laxalt hit back, echoing an attack website of his own: He said Brown was “running [for office] in Texas [in 2014] and living in Texas” in 2016.

Brown moved to Nevada in 2018, but had previously lived in Texas. In 2014, Brown launched an unsuccessful bid for a Dallas-area seat in the Texas Legislature, in which he placed third. That website also attacks Brown’s familial ties to the billionaire Brown family who own the Cincinnati Bengals NFL team. (A spokesman for the campaign confirmed Monday that Bengals owner Mike Brown is the candidate’s great uncle.)

Laxalt — the grandson of the highly influential former Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt — also spent most of his life outside Nevada, only moving to the state a few years before running for attorney general in 2014. 

In defending his actions during 2020, Laxalt also touted his endorsement from Trump and laid blame at Democrats’ feet for having “went in late and changed the rules” of the election, a reference to the vast expansion of mail balloting and same-day registration in the summer of 2020. 

“Does President Trump know that you filed the lawsuits late, though?” Brown said. “”Does he know that when you lost to Steve Sisolak [in the 2018 governor’s race], you blamed 100,000 Trump voters for that loss?”

Laxalt said Trump was “well aware” that the 2020 lawsuits were filed late, but also that he, personally, was not in charge of those suits as the co-chair of the campaign. 

In response to the 2020 election, the Trump campaign in Nevada, including Laxalt, held a press conference alleging that “illegal votes” had been cast in Clark County. Multiple lawsuits were filed in the days before and after Election Day, including a Trump campaign suit that sought to expand Republican access to the ballot counting and signature verification process. That suit was dismissed shortly thereafter. 

Another suit from state Republicans and Trump campaign electors sought to annul the results of the election entirely and declare Trump the victor. And a separate suit, the only one in which Laxalt was named as an attorney, challenged the state’s ability to keep non-citizens off voter rolls and alleged that votes had been diluted as a result. 

Those suits were also ultimately dismissed. 

Still, Brown stayed on the attack, asking Laxalt: “At what point do you accept responsibility for the lack of lawyers’ performance, for the failure of lawsuits to be filed on time?” 

“I just don’t understand, when President Trump has asked you to prove that leadership position for Nevadans, including folks like me, who volunteered to get him reelected, [who] are counting out some of the top to do something, and you did nothing,” Brown said.

Laxalt defended his actions, including his appearances in post-election press conferences, in part by pointing to a national Republican strategy to challenge election results that was “caught flat-footed.” 

“I was the one that had to stand on the line there, to the end, as the media was attacking me, even challenging my patriotism as someone who served our country in uniform,” Laxalt said. “The reality is presidential campaigns are run by the national presidential campaign. It’s always done that way. I was incredibly upset that action came late, but I wasn’t in charge. And President Trump understands what happened. He’s not happy with it.”

Taking aim at Democrats on the issues

For the majority of the debate, the two candidates set their sights squarely on Democratic politicians, namely President Joe Biden and incumbent Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

On the issue of surging inflation, Laxalt laid the blame on “massive spending” by the government, and alleged that COVID-era shutdowns have led to ongoing issues with the supply chain that have compounded broader economic concerns. 

“The Democrats decided to go the shutdown route,” Laxalt said. “Many warned that you might be able to flip the economy back on and suddenly everything would be okay. Those warnings were ignored.”

Moderator Sam Shad pressed Laxalt, noting both that the shutdowns began under Trump and were ordered on a state-to-state basis. Laxalt, in turn, pointed to Florida — which largely eschewed COVID restrictions — as a success story and criticized Cortez Masto for having “marched right along with Gov. [Steve] Sisolak” down a “terrible path.”  

Brown, similarly, blamed congressional spending for the rise in inflation, while also criticizing “out of touch” lawyers and politicians in Washington, D.C., and a Federal Reserve that he described as “a partisan tool of the administration.” 

“They’re talking about, “Well, maybe we do a half point [increase in interest rates] here, half point there,’” Brown said. “No, the answer is we have runaway inflation that is the highest it’s been in over 40 years. They should be raising rates 2.5 points or more immediately to try and combat…