Ford banking on the ‘many’ to beat the ‘money’ in November

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat who is challenging Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, has an affordability message focused on housing, healthcare, and utilities that is likely to resonate with inflation-weary voters. But with a little more than two months to go in the campaign, Ford is just now getting the message out, with television ads going up in Reno and Las Vegas, a spokesperson says.  

In one ad, Ford says the “Lombardo/Trump economy doesn’t add up” and asserts that “you deserve a fighter who will lower costs, raise wages, create opportunity.” 

In another, Ford talks recalls his childhood and his family’s economic struggles, and notes that in the “Lombardo/Trump economy” such challenges are “all too ordinary.”

Lombardo, the former Clark County sheriff who is seeking a second term, enjoys a significant fundraising advantage over Ford. Lombardo lately has also benefited from heavy advertising paid for by a group connected to the Republican Governors’ Association.

In contrast to his opponent’s emphasis on affordability, Lombardo has stood up for billionaires who “provide jobs.”

“Unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent,” Lombardo said during a campaign event with Donald Trump in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Ford’s campaign issued a rapid response video online featuring Lombardo’s comments about billionaires, but the lines Lombardo delivered at the Trump event, which garnered national attention, are not included in the Ford campaign ads going up now.

Being outspent notwithstanding, what polling has been done on the race has found Ford within the margin of error against the well-financed incumbent.

The campaign “was always going to be about the money versus the many, and we have many people supporting us,” Ford said Wednesday during an outdoor news conference, where his message was undermined by the Southern Nevada heat, which rendered some television news cameras and reporters’ phones temporarily inoperable.   

For the second time in two weeks, Ford’s campaign focused on his newfound concern regarding data centers, which the candidate attributed to being “responsible and responsive” to the will of voters he encountered during campaign stops throughout the state.  

He said under his administration, data centers in Nevada would encounter “the strictest rules in the country” and would not increase electricity bills by “even one cent.” He vowed Wednesday to require new data centers to import their own water, to prohibit wasteful evaporative cooling, and require that sustainable jobs go to Nevadans.  

He also said that if he’s elected, federal land would be reserved for affordable housing, not data centers. 

Ford announced last week that if he’s victorious in November, he’ll pause tax incentives for new data centers pending an audit to determine if they are delivering on the benefits they promised in return for more than $200 million in tax abatements from 2021 through 2024. 

Ford said the zeitgeist in 2015, when he and other state lawmakers championed tax incentives to attract data centers, is “apples and oranges” from today. 

Lombardo, he noted, has called the proliferation of data centers in Nevada a “gold rush.” 

Neither Ford nor Lombardo responded when asked if there’s a threshold at which time the data center economy will be sufficiently diversified and no longer in need of incentives.