Is that his veto face? (Photo: Richard Bednarski/Nevada Current)
Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo backs Donald Trump for president. But Lombardo’s top priority of the 2024 election season is not Trump winning the battleground state of Nevada. As you may have noticed, Lombardo has not appeared at any Trump rallies in Nevada this year.
Lombardo has also endorsed Republican Sam Brown in the race for U.S. Senate. But Lombardo has not been a fixture – or even a presence – in Brown’s campaign. Beyond the endorsement announcement, Lombardo has given very little indication that he’s particularly interested in seeing Brown defeat Nevada Democratic incumbent U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen, even though a Republican victory in Nevada might have gone a long way, maybe all the way, to giving Republicans control of the Senate.
Lombardo’s fellow Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives, for now. But the Republican majority there is tiny and precarious. Most forecasters project Democrats will gain control of the House, but they also project it is going to be super close.
It doesn’t look that way now, but for a minute there, around the start of this year, it was imaginable that all three Nevada Democratic U.S. House members could be in tough reelection races.
At roughly the same time, Lombardo made crystal clear that Nevada doing its bit to keep the U.S. House in Republican hands was definitely not among his top priorities.
One of those three House races in particular might have been much more competitive than it has turned out to be. State Republican Assemblywoman Heidi Kasama had announced she would challenge incumbent Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in Nevada’s third congressional district. National media was frequently mentioning Kasama with a handful of other Republican congressional recruits as bringing “candidate quality,” as Republican Sen. Mitch McConelll would say, to the Republican effort to not only keep a majority in the House but even expand it.
But Kasama, who had been recruited to run for Congress with the blessing of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, got recruited by someone else, Lombardo, who wanted her to stick around and win reelection so as to bolster the Republican headcount in the state Assembly.
Kasama bailed from the House race in January. By April, Lombardo was publicly swooning over legislation sponsored by Lee to hire more federal land appraisers to help the private sector obtain federal lands.
The person Lombardo endorsed to run against Lee, by the way, ended up losing the primary to a guy named Drew Johnson, who according to one forecaster has only a 9% chance of beating the Democratic incumbent in CD3.
Relevance is job 1
Lombardo’s top priority of the 2024 election cycle obviously appears to be getting enough Republicans elected to break the current Democratic supermajority in the state Assembly. That would guarantee that even if Democrats win a two-thirds majority in the state Senate, Lombardo’s vetoes could continue to automatically serve as the final word on legislation he and/or his supporters don’t like.
But his most pressing immediate concern in the 2024 election feeds directly into what, for Lombardo’s career anyway, is an even weightier longer term concern – his reelection in the 2026 election cycle.
Spoiler: Even if they don’t have supermajorities, Democrats are going to control both houses of the Nevada Legislature when it meets early in 2025 for its last regular session before the 2026 general election.
Democrats also controlled both houses the last time the Legislature met, in 2023.
That year, Lombardo’s first as governor, the highlights of his agenda were: a $250 million gas tax holiday; $500 million of public money for private schools; millions more for a Lombardo-controlled slush, er, economic development fund; repeal of criminal justice bills that Democrats had passed in earlier sessions; end universal mail balloting that Nevada voters love more and more with each election; and divert more authority and power away from legislators and to the governor’s office.
With the exception of some compromise offered by Democrats on the criminal justice front, each and every one of those Lombardo initiatives went nowhere. And their demise came not after knock-down drag-out fights with Democratic legislators. Rather, legislative Democrats just sort of casually shrugged them off.
But Lombardo still got to look more or less like a governor in 2023.
For one thing, he got to call a special legislative session to give millions in public subsidies to a California billionaire who owned a baseball team, which is always the sort of splashy/silly thing bound to be met with rousing bipartisan support in Nevada.
But more importantly for his aspirational brand as a strong governor capable of “getting s**t done,” Lombardo got to issue vetoes. Lots of vetoes. More vetoes than any Nevada governor had ever issued.
Lombardo vetoed bills that would have provided tenants more protections against junk fees and quickie evictions and empowered local governments to confront the housing crisis. He vetoed bills designed to lower health care costs and increase access to care. Outlawing fake electors, expanding free lunch programs for students, gun safety, even bills broadly viewed as innocuous that passed with broad bipartisan support – issue after issue and item after item, Lombardo had a veto for that.
Lombardo was to vetoes what Oprah was to cars that one time – you get a veto, and you get a veto, etc.
Lombardo, Kasama, and other Republicans now would like voters to believe that if Democrats hold on to their supermajority in the Assembly and also gain a supermajority in the Senate, the Democrats will go hog wild with the socialist radical leftism or whatever and enact legislation to tax business more and pummel poor people less.
Lombardo and his allies know full well that given supermajorities in both houses, Nevada Democrats would do nothing of the sort.
What Democratic supermajorities could – not necessarily would, but could – mean, however is that many (but not all) the modest laws Democrats did pass, such as those vetoed in 2023, would be implemented over Lombardo’s veto.
Have veto pen, will swagger – that was the narrative marketed by the Lombardo camp after his first legislative session as governor.
Neutralize that veto power, and the importance, the meaningfulness – the point – of Lombardo’s governorship would be greatly diminished.
Feckless bystander might not be the greatest look when heading into a reelection campaign.