Adam Laxalt has two things going for him that few other Republican candidates for U.S. Senate can boast: The first is a full-throated endorsement from former President Donald Trump; the second is an unofficial but clear nod from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as his choice in the Nevada primary.
In this volatile time, politicos and reporters tend to demand that you belong in one silo or the other. Yet smart GOP primary candidates such as Laxalt understand that voters are more flexible than that. Indeed, the Nevada hopeful has pulled off balancing his appeal with both factions of the Republican Party with such aplomb you have to wonder if it is really such a stretch to be supported by both the Trump-favoring populists as well as the establishment.
Laxalt, for his part, is confident that this two-group appeal is the path forward for him, and for likely every Republican running in the party’s primary, to win in the November 2022 midterm elections and for the Republicans to take back the Senate majority many agree they never should have lost in Georgia last January.
“Our voters want people that are going to fight for them,” said Laxalt in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I think that has a very unifying effect when you get away from politicians that don’t really say much, don’t fight for anything, and take passes on all the hard stuff.”
He sees the rising conservative-populist coalition within the Republican Party as a mix of suburban voters, blue-collar whites, Hispanics, and blacks, and people of faith. “That is why we think we’ve got a good — really, really great shot. I think we’re due for a red wave. And I think we’re going to be leading that way,” he said of his candidacy.
A former attorney general for Nevada, Laxalt was Trump’s campaign co-chair in 2020 and a prominent voice in the federal lawsuits filed in court over how the election was conducted. He is the son of former New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici and the grandson of former Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt. His lineage became a bit of a story back in late 2012 when his father publicly revealed their son’s paternity.
The odds in that 2014 race overwhelmingly favored Ross Miller, the son of a former Nevada governor. But it was Laxalt who won, to the surprise of everyone except himself. He ran for governor in 2018. Those midterm elections were a very bad year for Republicans in the state, which had not supported Trump two years earlier, and Laxalt lost his gubernatorial bid by 4 percentage points.
Three years later, with the winds blowing in a more favorable direction for Republicans, he is running again, this time for the Senate. Laxalt hopes this, and his understanding of the complicated archetypes of the Republican coalition, will carry him to victory.
Here in Nevada, the legendary political and money machine built by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is still very much in place — with establishment Republicans often utilizing its power as much as Democrats do. Many such Nevada politicos thought Laxalt had gotten out of line when he ran for attorney general in 2014, definitely thought that when he ran for governor in 2018, and hold the same sentiment about his current run for Senate.
This does not dissuade the Navy veteran, who earned both his bachelor’s and law degrees from Georgetown University and has been no stranger to tough assignments throughout his career. These include working as legal counsel on detainee operations in Iraq, as an aide to John Bolton in the State Department, and as a law clerk for the U.S. Air Force general counsel. But before he can face Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in the general election next year, he must triumph over three other candidates in the Republican primary: Army veteran Sam Brown, small-business owner Sharelle Mendenhall, and Air Force veteran Bill Hockstedler.
Laxalt calls his race “the race for 51.” “I absolutely believe this is the 51st seat,” he said. “And as terrible as this business of politics is now, getting worse by the hour, our family is putting ourselves back in the line of fire, to protect this country for at least a few years until we can get a new administration.”
Laxalt looks around his state and sees something everyone sees in every corner of the state, and every corner of the country for that matter: small businesses unable to stay open one year after being forced to close because of the pandemic. Laxalt said the severity of this crystallized for him recently when he went to pick up lunch for his family at a very popular deli in Reno. It is the kind of place that you expect to wait 30 minutes for at any given time but are still happy to do so, but when he arrived, he found the door shut. “It had a sign on there saying we had to take a week off because our workers are simply overworked and we cannot find enough staff,” he explained.
“Right before the pandemic hit, we were poised for a massive recovery in the state. Unfortunately, the policies we’re seeing in Washington have taken us in the other direction. And of course, we can see now rampant inflation in this state, combined with this employment situation. And I’m very, very worried for what the economic landscape is going to look like in this state in the coming year, year and a half,” he said.
When it comes to Nevada Sen. Cortez Masto, his Democratic opponent should he reach the general election, Laxalt says he is most frustrated by her lack of accomplishments on human trafficking and her partisanship on the crisis at the border. Border Patrol reported almost 200,000 encounters with illegal immigrants along the southern border in July, the largest monthly figure in more than two decades after successive months of record crossing numbers. Increases in human trafficking are a direct result of illegal border crossings, and the UNLV Center for Crime and Justice Policy reported Nevada tied for ninth in the nation for human trafficking cases reported in 2017, with the proportion of sex trafficking victims in the state, 89%, exceeding the national average of 71%.
“The open border has led to a dramatic increase in human trafficking, and opioids and terrible drugs coming across these borders that are killing our kids and really, really affecting our communities,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Laxalt said from a national security perspective, we cannot allow the border to remain open: “It must be secure. We have to know who’s coming and going. Or we are going to risk a bomber in our own country. This is not political. Secure the border. And then have a great debate over who gets to come in and who can’t come, in the democratic process.”
Cortez Masto is attempting to pretend that she’s a centrist, says Laxalt, but unlike Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, she is not one. “She’s supporting sanctuary cities, which are incredibly dangerous and is irresponsible from a former law enforcement officer. And she refuses to stand against her party on this border crisis.” Laxalt said one of his greatest concerns with her is that she votes 99% of the time with Chuck Schumer. “Yet in every local interview, she pretends that she’s this centrist nonpartisan. It’s just simply not true.”
Laxalt brings to the race youthful exuberance, charisma, and honesty on his past challenges and accomplishments. These points provide him the authenticity necessary to earn both upper-middle-class, college-educated suburban voters as well as the working-class voters who have recently joined the conservative coalition. He seems a natural in the campaign business, connecting with workers at their job sites as easily as he does a conference room visit with business leaders.
He is also deeply passionate. Our interview was delayed a few days because of the terror attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 13 U.S. military service members and the botched exit from the country that left American citizens, green card holders, and Special Immigrant Visa applicants behind. “I didn’t even want to do interviews last week because I just didn’t want to be screaming in a phone,” the Navy veteran said bluntly, the emotions still clearly raw.
“Absolutely none of this needed to happen. They need to be held accountable. People need to be fired. Real investigations need to be conducted. This is why people in Nevada and across the country have lost faith in our institutions,” he said of the negligence of the Biden administration in how the U.S. military left Afghanistan.
“If Washington can’t safely conduct an evacuation of our troops and our allies, then what are we doing? I know that the other side is going to pretend like it’s hyperbolic, and the media will downplay it. But it is an absolute fact that 13 Marines died because of a horrific plan,” he said.
Laxalt, who served in the Navy for five years, said no one needed to die. “If we maintained our assets there, and we created a real perimeter and kept the Bagram Air Force Base, we could have slowly, peacefully, and methodically evacuated our people. No shots would have been fired. No one would have died. That is just a fact. And they did it the opposite way.”
Salena Zito is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.
