Lombardo’s disappointing turn toward Trumpism may be his undoing in election

Sunday, March 13, 2022 | 3 a.m.

Amid signs that principled Republicans have had it with Donald Trump and are supporting candidates who oppose the party’s move to the alt-right, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo is looking more and more cowardly in his decision to pose as a true-believer Trumpist in his run for governor.

Lombardo, the presumptive front-runner in the crowded Republican field, looked like anything but a right-wing extremist in winning two terms as sheriff, and could have positioned himself as moderate for the GOP primary.

He didn’t, though. Instead he bowed to group-think that GOP candidates wouldn’t stand a chance in a primary unless they catered to Trump’s extremist followers, whom Republican strategists contended would be the most likely to turn out for a primary.

This thinking had some basis in reality: There was a time not so long ago when, for Republican candidates, getting Trump’s endorsement was like being handed a machine gun on the way to a knife fight within the Republican Party. Trump’s blessing would send potential rivals scattering and virtually guarantee that any other GOP candidates who chose to stand their ground would be wiped out in a primary election.

But increasingly, there are signs that Trump’s endorsement is losing its force within the party. Just ask former Georgia Sen. David Perdue, who’s getting clobbered in the polls despite being Trump’s pick against the state’s governor, Brian Kemp. Or ask Senate candidate Ted Budd of North Carolina, who’s polling 11 points behind his main rival despite having Trump’s backing. And across the country, both non-Trumpist GOP candidates and Democratic candidates are significantly outraising Trump’s minions.

In other races, candidates are sticking around despite not drawing Trump’s endorsement. Those candidates include Nevada’s Sam Brown, who’s putting up a spirited fight against former state attorney general Adam Laxalt in the GOP’s bid to unseat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. Brown, a first-time candidate, has raised more than $1 million in campaign funding in each of the last two quarters despite Laxalt being Trump’s pick.

Brown can’t be described as a moderate, but he at least has acknowledged that Joe Biden was the duly elected president. Laxalt, on the other hand, served as Trump’s Nevada version of Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election, attempting to cheat Nevada voters by filing a string of baseless lawsuits aimed at overturning Biden’s win here.

Brown’s performance thus far strongly suggests that a significant number of Nevada Republicans are bridling against the GOP leadership’s assault on voting access and election verification.

Lombardo had an opportunity to appeal to these voters and inspire them to turn out for the primary.

In winning two terms as sheriff, he expressed moderate, socially responsible stances on such GOP hot-button issues as gun safety, immigration and police reform/accountability.

But a new Lombardo emerged when he launched his campaign for governor. He tap danced on questions about voter fraud, initially refusing to say whether Biden’s election was legitimate. He rescinded a responsible mandate for all incoming Metro officers to be vaccinated for COVID-19. And after once telling the Sun he was concerned about the amount of firepower in civilian hands — suggesting he would be open to reasonable gun safety reforms — he promoted himself as a gun-rights absolutist.

More recently, Lombardo played to the worst impulses of the extremist-right wing of the party when he made a qualified response to the profane and racist verbal assault of Gov. Steve Sisolak and first lady Kathy Sisolak at a Las Vegas restaurant. Lombardo condemned the assault — no problem there — but couldn’t help using the situation to his political advantage at the expense of the Sisolaks.

“If you’re frustrated with this governor and his policies, like I am, the appropriate recourse is to vote him out at the ballot box this November,” read part of his statement on the appalling incident.

Lombardo at every step has followed the crowd to the party’s Trumpian dark side instead of taking a principled stand for sensible conservatism and presenting himself to moderate voters as a good alternative to the extremists in the field.

Now, his cowardice increasingly looks like the wrong move politically and morally. He should have run as a moderate, not a right-winger, but he went the extremist route in a purely careerist move.

Not that he’s the only cheap opportunist in the party who’s done this. Plenty have either corrupted their principles or revealed themselves as the true extremists they’ve always been in chasing Trump’s supporters.

Trump certainly is popular among the GOP — he handily won a straw poll of potential 2024 presidential candidates taken at the recent CPAC conference — but that feeling isn’t universal among Republicans. There are devoted yet principled Republicans who either voted against Trump or voted for him and came to regret it. Sun political reporter Jessica Hill recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to cover a convention of such individuals — a gathering of about 500 anti-Trump conservative leaders. As Hill wrote, the tone of the event was crystallized by a comment by one participant that she hadn’t left the Republican Party but rather the Republican Party had left her.

But Lombardo, in taking the weak way out, now is wallowing around in the muck with such bona fide Trumpers as Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore and former boxer Joey Gilbert, who are also part of the crowded field for governor. Say this about Fiore and Gilbert: At least they didn’t put on different stripes when they got into the race, unlike Lombardo.

Lombardo also has demonstrated a lack of guts and character by refusing to answer questions from the media or participate in candidate debates. His campaign said he would start participating in debates after the candidate-filing period closes March 18, but his ducking and hiding thus far reveal him as someone who wouldn’t deal with Nevadans openly and forthrightly as governor.

Lombardo only answers questions that come from sources he presumes will play softball — another evidence of his lack of spine that is disqualifying in a leadership role.

Now Lombardo has to live with his choice to chase far-right votes, and bear the consequences of promoting the party’s extremist stances.

Maybe he’ll win the primary. But in a general election, Nevadans won’t forget that he took his extremist turn. And it’s well worth remembering that Trump lost twice in Nevada.