Democrat Joe Dalia (left) and Republican Annette Dawson Owens (right) are running to represent Assembly District 29.
Nevada State Assembly District 29 is seen as one of the best opportunities for Republicans to flip a seat red and break the Democrat’s existing supermajority in the lower house of the state Legislature.
The district, which covers Whitney Ranch and north Henderson, is highly competitive, with a voter registration breakdown of 33.4% Democrats, 26.3% Republicans, and 32.5% nonpartisans. It is also one of just three competitive districts with no incumbent running. (Assembly District 4 and Assembly District 35 are the other two.)
Democratic Assemblywoman Lesley Cohen has represented AD29 for five of the past six legislative terms. She did not file for reelection this year, announcing she had decided to “take a step back from politics and focus on my private life moving forward.”
Seeking to succeed her are Democrat Joe Dalia, a tech privacy attorney who grew up in the district and is now raising his family there, and Republican Annette Dawson Owens, a longtime educator and advocate who says she wants to ‘help Nevada get back on track.”
Neither candidate has held elected office before, but both entered the race with strong support from the respective state Assembly caucuses. Dawson Owens was one of several candidates endorsed early by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who has been outspoken about his goal of protecting his veto power by ensuring that Democrats don’t secure supermajorities in both chambers.
Both Dalia and Dawson Owens have deep ties to Southern Nevada.
Dawson Owens did not respond to the Current’s requests for an interview. According to a survey she completed for Ballotpedia, she attended Clark County School District from kindergarten through high school and has a bachelor’s in zoology from Brigham Young University, a master’s in education from UNLV, and a master’s in administration from Sierra Nevada College.
She is currently the school readiness policy director at the nonprofit Children’s Advocacy Alliance.
Dalia, in an interview with the Current, said he attended the same CCSD elementary school where the eldest of his three daughters is now enrolled in kindergarten — “I am hyperlocal,” he jokes. His mom was a SEIU health care worker and his dad a poker dealer at Green Valley Ranch.
After graduating from Coronado High School, Dalia studied political science and economics at Boston University, then went to law school at the University of Michigan.
His legal career took him to Silicon Valley, but Dalia returned home to Henderson with his wife after she had their first daughter. Dalia describes having children as a “sobering moment” that motivated him to become more involved in making the community better.
“You become less comfortable with, ‘Oh well, we’ll just see,’” he said.
Dalia currently works for Meta, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram. He says his experience in tech and transactional law will help him contribute to legislative conversations about artificial intelligence and other issues that are expected to arise.
Dawson Owens was a classroom educator before moving into advocacy work. She has worked at both district and charter schools, according to her campaign bio, and her financial disclosure forms state she receives PERS benefits.
She has also served on Henderson’s Community Education Advisory Board and on two charter school boards.
In a survey completed for Ballotpedia, Dawson Owens’ campaign listed “improving education outcomes for students through safe effective schools” as one of the three key messages: “She will push for legislation that keeps our schools safe, and helps support students through high quality instruction and needed interventions, in order to graduate fully prepared and be successful, productive community members.”
The survey answers did not elaborate beyond that.
Dalia said as the father of a kindergartener and 3-year-old twins, education and child care are key issues for him.
“I’ve lived it,” he said. “Putting three kids in daycare is an expense most people can’t weather. It puts families we wouldn’t think of in need. There are families out there with six figure (salaries) with food insecurity because of the cost of raising kids.”
Dalia, who between his undergraduate and graduate studies took a year off to gain work experience, worked at a Massachusetts charter school serving low-income students from traditionally marginalized communities. His positive experience there gives him some unique perspective on ongoing “school choice” debates.
“Where I stand is, if we have a school that can help kids and help raise them up, that’s a good thing,” he said. “Where the nuance comes in is if we are taking away resources from other schools.”
Massachusetts, he said, is “in a fundamentally different place” than Nevada when it comes to K-12 funding.
“They had spillover to invest in charters,” he said. “They had more room to experiment. It’s a luxury and I’m not sure how much we can afford. We need to be very thoughtful, and that’s relative to our standard public school.”
Diverting money from serially underfunded district schools to private or charter schools is a scenario that ends when “the snake eats its own tail” and the funding formula is destroyed, he added.
“Some advocates are comfortable with that being the end result,” said Dalia. “As a product of our public schools, I want to make sure our goal is to improve these schools.’
Campaign finance
Dawson Owens raised $113,000 from January through June, according to campaign finance reports. Her biggest contributors were from Ben Horowitz, a venture capitalist who lives in Las Vegas, and his wife, Felicia Horowitz. Both gave $10,000. Other prominent contributors include: the Lombardo-aligned Better Nevada PAC, Keystone Corporation, Nevada Gold Mines, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
Dalia raised $94,000 from January through June, according to campaign finance reports. Top contributors include Clark County Education Association, Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro’s Battle Born & Raised Leadership PAC, Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager’s Nevada Strong PAC, and The States Project, a Washington DC-based PAC focused on supporting state legislative races.