Nevada Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sam Brown and Sen. Steve Daines, R-MT, campaigning in Las Vegas Tuesday. (Photo: Dana Gentry/Nevada Current)
With a week to go until Election Day, Montana’s U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, ticked off a handful of states with competitive Senate races where his presence is warranted. Nevada is one of them.
“The reason I’m here today is because we’re watching this race here in Nevada tighten up at the very end,” Daines said at a media event in Las Vegas Tuesday with Sam Brown, the Republican candidate challenging U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat. Rosen served one term in the House of Representatives and was elected to the Senate in 2018.
“It’s no secret, the polls are showing Sam running behind for several months, being massively outspent in resources. The reason there’s a lot of resources now pouring into Nevada in the last 10 days, is because this race is surging in the direction of Sam,” Daines said, noting “internal polling. The Republicans are moving a lot of big resources here too” as the race appears to be tightening.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, is pumping more than $6 million into Nevada to support Brown, NBC reported last week.
Daines noted Republicans have a statewide early and mail voting advantage of 38,000 voters in Nevada as of Tuesday morning.
“When you see that enthusiasm, that excitement, that intensity, prognosticators usually will say independent voters probably will follow more of where the surge is occurring than not, which means you’re seeing the polls tighten up.”
In a Senate map heavily weighted in their favor this cycle, Republicans are well-positioned to take U.S. Senate control away from the Democrats even if Rosen wins in Nevada.
Rosen remains ahead in most polls, with an average lead of seven percentage points, according to aggregator fivethirtyeight.com. Only the Senate Opportunity Fund, a partisan sponsor of the Republican Party, had the race even last week.
Real Clear Polling has Rosen with a seven-poll average lead of 4.7 points – ranging from a low of +2 to a high of +9.
“We’ve got the momentum. The issues are on our side,” Brown said.
Given the opportunity to embrace a key issue of former Pres. Donald Trump’s agenda, the planned mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, Brown, who has said that it would be a “very big logistical undertaking,” declined to say whether he agrees with Trump’s plan, talking instead about the need to secure the border.
“Once we secure our border, I do think that we need to relook (at) our immigration policy and make sure that people who are going to be good contributors to the United States of America, good members of society, have an easier way to do that legally, and then we make it harder for people who are criminals or will not be good members of our society and country, to make it harder for them to be able to do it,” Brown said.
Brown, a West Point graduate and captain in the Army, was badly burned by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan. Until recently, he was the owner of Palisades Strategies LLC, a company that provided pharmaceutical benefit services to military veterans. The company won more than $2.7 million in federal contracts from 2020 to 2021.
A report released earlier this year by a team of medical experts says VA reimbursements for companies such as the one previously owned by Brown increase costs, pose an existential threat to the VA health system, and put veterans’ care in jeopardy.
The cost of referring veterans to non-government providers has increased from $14.8 billion in fiscal year 2018 to $28.5 billion in 2023, thanks to the Veterans Choice Act passed during Pres. Barack Obama’s administration, and the Mission Act, passed in 2018 during the Trump administration, according to the report.
Cutting costs for Americans has been a central promise of Brown’s campaign.
The higher costs of privatization can be attributed to government bureaucracy, Brown suggested. If veterans’ healthcare relies on expanding access to the private sector, he said, “then we need to do that, but we don’t need to dismiss the VA completely, either.”
Daines defended the higher costs, noting that sparsely populated rural areas in Nevada and other western states lack VA resources and are reliant on private sector providers for veterans.
“This is about taking care of veterans – to give them the choice,” he said, praising Trump’s 2018 policy. “Look, they paid the price.”
Asked how important Nevada is in next week’s election, Daines pointed to the fact that Trump was in the state last Thursday and is returning this week. “I’m here today,” he said. “I don’t need to say more.”