Your 2026 Nevada Republican marquee candidates: Lombardo and Flippo

The 2026 midterms have conjured up comparisons to the 2006 midterms, when a deeply and broadly disliked Republican president and his blundering warmongering prompted a blue wave in which Democrats won back control of both houses of Congress.

And in Nevada that year, a Republican who was sort of a doofus won the 2006 Nevada governor’s race anyway.

In 2026, the race for Nevada governor has gone about as expected. 

A core strategy of the Joe Lombardo campaign has involved ginning up that beloved staple of campaign professionals from coast to coast: micro-scandals that have nothing to do with real problems faced by households. To wit, the campaign’s opening gambit was Aaron Ford’s travel schedule. 

The Lombardo campaign also started by going back to the well and hauling up images of Lombardo the Lawman. Now in the stretch run, the campaign has accentuated the cop branding by tying Ford to the Black-people-are-criminals trope, which Republicans also deployed against Ford when he first ran for attorney general in 2018. 

Is that the campaign Nevada voters deserve? 

It doesn’t matter. It’s the one they were bound to get.

Affordability has never been a serious focus of the governor’s campaign, and it never was going to be. He and his people ride like they ride.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this year’s race for governor is that neither Ford nor his allies have made a big buy for an ad starring a really quite self-important and haughty Joe Lombardo declaring “I’m Joe Lombardo” and “C’mon man.” It’s probably the one thing even the most casual of voters remember about Lombardo’s performance on the campaign trail. Oh well.

Prediction markets have been moving in Ford’s favor, for whatever that’s worth. Which may not be much — there’s a school of thought that says prediction markets are “informed by polls more than anything else,” and “downstream” of polling. And there’s been a dearth of public polling on the Nevada governor’s race.

Yes, Trump’s approval rating is pathetic. 

But then, so was George W. Bush’s on the eve of the 2006 midterms.

On the one hand, judging from polling over the years, inasmuch as casual voters think about governors, if they ever do, that thought tends to be “yeah, there should probably be one,” which usually works to an incumbent’s advantage.

On the other hand, the fundamentals — a catastrophic garbage fire of a Republican president, and during a midterm to boot — work in Ford’s favor.

In any case and no matter the outcome,  there’s one thing Nevada voters can count on: That winner, if asked, will tell them that now, clearly, is no time to raise the gaming tax.

Meanwhile, David Flippo continues to impress. One of the lies Trump’s minions were telling after Trump lost Nevada in 2020 was that a bunch of dead people had voted in Clark County. Like each, every, and all of Trump’s claims about election “fraud,” the Trump troops provided no proof. Because, to reiterate, it was all lies. It always has been. It still is.

But! Here we have not a dead person voting, but a dead person contributing to a campaign.

Ha ha no we don’t.

This week  the Wall Street Journal reported that Flippo’s campaign took a campaign contribution that was twice the maximum allowed amount, and then said whoopsy they meant to assign half of that money to another person altogether. 

Who turned to be dead. 

When asked, the crackerjack professionals at the Flippo campaign told the Journal dang, whoopsy again (or words to that effect) and rejiggered the donation a second time, into a categorization that maybe/who knows?/might approximate legality.

Campaign finance violations tend to make voters yawn. That said, trying to make your campaign contribution amounts look on the up and up by reattributing some of them to a dead person is, as campaign finance allegations go, not uninteresting.

Meanwhile, led by Mark Amodei, the Nevada Republican who Flippo would like to replace in Congress, a bunch of Northern Nevada Republicans are publicly sharing their disgust with Flippo. Even if it means having to suffer a Democrat in that congressional seat for a couple years, they hope to rid the Nevada political landscape of Flippo now they needn’t bother to primary a Republican incumbent in 2028.

The Washington Post this week reported that a long-ago Nevada Republican Party chair filed a Federal Elections Commission complaint because Flippo’s aforementioned financial filings are an omnishambles (except the Post phrases it differently). 

And of course all this comes after the Post reporting last month that Flippo lied in campaign materials about his military honors because … that’s just the kind of chap David Flippo is.

All of which raises the obvious question: When Flippo hauled his carpet bag up to CD2, who had “Washington Post and Wall Street Journal both do stories about Flippo” on their bingo cards? I didn’t.

To be clear: If enough Republican voters in Nevada’s 2nd congressional district hold their noses and elect Flippo, upon his swearing in they will be represented by an immediate lame duck and the most impotent and irrelevant person in the U.S. Congress.

So Flippo should take a moment to reflect on and relish this moment. He may not realize it now, but both the Journal and the Post (twice!) writing about him likely marks the zenith of his political “career.”

And whatever happens, Flippo will always be able to say that when the chips were down, not only has Trump stuck by his endorsement of Flippo. So has Lombardo.

Portions of this column originally appeared in the Daily Current Newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.