A crowded Democratic primary taking place in a Nevada swing district in just three weeks has been roiled by Rep. Steven Horsford’s confession to an extramarital relationship with a staff intern.
Horsford won back his old seat in 2018 after serving a single House term from 2013-2015. On June 9, he’s set to face off against five other Democrats in the sprawling district, with a population base in the Las Vegas suburbs of northern Clark County, along with huge swaths of mostly open desert.
But Horsford, 47, recently released a statement acknowledging that he had an affair with Gabriela Linder in response to a local report.
“It is true that I had a previous consensual relationship with another adult outside of my marriage, over the course of several years,” Horsford said in the statement. “I’m deeply sorry to all of those who have been impacted by this very poor decision, most importantly my wife and family. Out of concern for my family during this challenging time, I ask that our privacy is respected.”
Linder was 21 years old and an intern for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Las Vegas office when she met Horsford, who at the time was majority leader in Nevada’s state Senate. The relationship started in 2009 and ended a year later, but the two kept in contact and began to become intimate again between 2017 and 2019. Prior to Horsford’s remarks, Linder described their previous relationship through podcasts and Twitter posts under a pseudonym.
The 4th Congressional District, located in central Nevada, is rated by the Cook Political Report as “Likely Democrat with a Partisan Voter Index of D+3.” However, FiveThirtyEight’s September 2018 elasticity score for states and congressional districts shows “how sensitive it is to changes in the national political environment.”
Horsford was elected to the seat in the Democrats’ 2018 midterm “blue wave” election cycle. He’d won a previous term in 2012, beating Republican Danny Tarkanian by eight points. But the district swung back to the GOP and elected Republican Crescent Hardy.
In 2016, Democrat Ruben Kihuen defeated Hardy by four points. Yet Kihuen was only in the House a single term, before bowing to pressure not to seek reelection following sexual misconduct allegations against him by a female campaign staff member.
