Nevada Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak addresses his Republican opponent in the upcoming midterm election, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, during a debate Sunday in Las Vegas. The two squared off on a number of issues, including taxes, education, former President Donald Trump and his successor President Joe Biden.
Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022 | 2 a.m.
The gubernatorial debate had been over for a few minutes when both candidates — Gov. Steve Sisolak and Republican challenger Joe Lombardo, the Clark County Sheriff — took to social media proclaiming they had won.
The debate, which was hosted by the Nevada Independent in front of a private audience Sunday and aired Monday night on the state’s NBC affiliates, saw the candidates trade barbs on issues ranging from abortion and education to affordable housing and taxes, mostly lining up with their parties’ respective platforms.
There was a lot to unpack from what was likely the lone gubernatorial debate ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm election. Here are some takeaways:
Truth in taxing
Sisolak was pressed on a campaign ad in which he claims no new taxes were enacted during his first term and pledged another four years without a tax increase.
Sisolak was asked how he could make claims. The Nevada Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that a $1 DMV fee and an extended payroll tax enacted under Sisolak were ruled unconstitutional. He also signed off on a bipartisan agreement to raise fees on mining companies.
The fees were just that, Sisolak explained, and noted the state’s high court struck down the nominal DMV fee.
“We did not raise taxes on everyday citizens, as you were saying, Yes, we did extend the department of motor vehicles fee. We did extend some fees that were already in place,” Sisolak said. “So since the Supreme Court has opined and said it’s not a tax increase, we haven’t raised any further taxes.”
Lombardo stopped short of saying he would cut taxes as governor, but alluded to former President Ronald Reagan’s theory of “trickle-down economics,” and vowed not to increase taxes at all, if elected.
“I’m telling you at this point, right here, in front of the audience and public viewers, I will not raise taxes,” said Lombardo. “Never.”
“My position is that it flows downhill. You’re not hitting everyday citizens, but if you put it upon businesses, then it does hit the everyday citizen.”
Lombardo was stopped mid-answer and asked if he would resign if for some reason taxes did go up under a Lombardo administration. “If you say there’s a situation where we say we need to raise taxes, I say we look inside first,” he continued.
Agreement on teacher pay but not school vouchers
Both Sisolak and Lombardo said teachers needed a salary increase.
The sheriff said educators got a 3% across-the-board raise in 2019 and said it’s time to give them another because of inflation and higher costs for housing. Without adequate pay for teachers, Lombardo said, Nevada will continue to rank poorly against other states in education.
Sisolak agreed, and said he’d explore another raise in his second term, as well as up the starting pay for entry-level teaching positions.
“There’s not one teacher in the classroom today that couldn’t make more money doing something else,” Sisolak said. “They teach because they love the discipline of teaching, they love the students. But it shouldn’t be that they can’t afford things.”
They had vastly different opinions on other education-related topics.
They disagreed about how per-pupil spending from the state should be allocated, but Lombardo said he would support the using tax dollars to support Nevada students attending private and religious schools under voucher programs.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled some voucher programs were constitutional, and such funding in Nevada would give parents more of a say in their child’s education, Lombardo said.
“It’s been tested, it’s been tried in other jurisdictions, and why not bring the paradigm forward?” Lombardo said. “It’s a core responsibility of the government to provide education, and teachers and parents should have choices.”
Parents and teachers do have the choice to send their kids where they want and where they want to work, Sisolak said, but it’s not the state’s responsibility to fund private education. Private schools, as they are now, can set their own rules and could turn away students with disabilities or conflicting beliefs, the governor said.
Additionally, Sisolak argued, such a voucher program could cost the state up to $300 million, making it a matter of dollars and cents.
“We just simply cannot afford it,” Sisolak said.
Questions of integrity
The candidates took turns defending accusations of corruption.
Sisolak was pressed about his relationship with a coronavirus testing company out of Chicago that was licensed in Nevada but was found to have produced inconsistent test results.
The sons of a Sisolak campaign donor were contracted to collect samples and send them to Northshore Clinical Services for processing. After a news story detailed Northshore missing positive cases — albeit on a sample size of 51 test samples — attack ads said the company used “political connections including contracting with sons of a close friend to the governor, to fast track its state laboratory license application,” and secure other testing agreements throughout the state.
Sisolak said his administration was cooperating with a probe into Northshore, citing that as the reason the public wasn’t notified until the news story was published. He also refuted giving favoritism based off of personal connections, and said the decision to fast-track Northshore’s application to operate in the state was done out of the necessity for expanded testing in the pandemic’s early stages.
“We were at a time when it was taking seven to 10 days to get those results back,” Sisolak said. “But I never intervened on behalf of this company. They never got one penny of the state’s resources, this company. And as soon as we found out there was a problem, we immediately suspended their operations.”
Reporting by the Sun found the claims of fast-tracking were not true and the potential scale of the issue was distorted because of the small number of tests examined for accuracy. The report found it questionable to extrapolate the accuracy of thousands of other tests conducted by Northshore based on 51 samples.
After Northshore was initially licensed, no mechanism existed to continue ensuring the accuracy of test results, the Sun’s reporting found.
There are no clear lines of responsibility for scrutinizing collection facilities and labs to ensure results are accurate and administered properly. Health officials only launched an investigation into the tests involving Northshore after someone filed a complaint.
Yet, the Republican Governor’s Association is running an ad claiming Sisolak is part of a federal investigation because of the incident, which is false.
Lombardo was asked why the ad hasn’t been pulled, or why he would breathe air into a false claim that Sisolak is the subject of a federal investigation.
“I’m not saying it. The PAC said it,” Lombardo said, referring to the association’s ad. “(And) I haven’t seen any evidence contrary to that point.”
A short time later, Sisolak took a swipe at Lombardo’s decision as sheriff to not give line-of-duty death designations to Metro Police officers who died of COVID-19.
The Sun reported in June that two widows had tried repeatedly to get Lombardo to rule the deaths of their husbands — Officer Phil Closi and Sgt. Doug King — as line-of-duty deaths. President Joe Biden last November signed the Protecting America’s First Responders Act, which presumes if a first responder dies of COVID-19 that it was contracted while on the job.
Lombardo ultimately decided not to give six of Metro’s eight officers who have died from COVID the designation, and said after conducting contact tracing investigations those officers did not qualify.
Sisolak reiterated that he tried to explain to Lombardo at a police memorial event in Carson City that’s not how contact tracing works. The governor told the Sun in June about the conversation, but Lombardo claimed Sunday it never happened.
The sheriff doubled down, with widows Jen Closi and Cinnamon King sitting in the front rows as guests of Sisolak. Lombardo said they and other family admitted their husbands did not contract COVID at work, a claim both widows said was false.
Lombardo also said Sisolak’s decision to attend a memorial service for Phil Closi amounted to “political theater.”
“It was just absolute shock,” Jen Closi told the Sun Monday in a phone interview. “This is what you’re saying? The sheriff didn’t even say that. He could have easily looked at us and said, ‘Jen and Cinnamon, I’m sorry for your loss.’ I don’t even think that was an option for him.”
Closi said Lombardo had a “severe lack of empathy,” and that made him unfit for the state’s highest office. Cinnamon King agreed, and said Lombardo’s jab was “another stab in the heart for our husbands and our own families.”
“How can he have integrity to do the right thing when nobody is looking when he doesn’t do the right thing when everybody is looking?” King said.
On Trump, Biden
In a break from many conservatives vying for elected offices, Lombardo stopped short of calling former President Donald Trump a “great” commander-in-chief, while Sisolak touted Biden as a “very good” leader who inherited a slew of problems from his predecessor.
“I wouldn’t say great — I think he was a sound president,” Lombardo said of Trump, the only president ever to be impeached twice. “I think he had policies that he brought forward that were beneficial to the country and supported the country and moved the country forward versus backwards. ... Under the current tutelage of President Biden, we’re going backwards.”
Lombardo also said he disagreed with Trump’s assertion the 2020 election was “stolen” because of widespread voter fraud — a claim that has repeatedly been debunked, but said there was likely some fraud, though it wasn’t enough to sway the results.
Trump is staging a “Save America” rally in Minden, south of Reno, on Saturday. Lombardo, who has won Trump’s endorsement, and other high-profile Nevada Republicans are expected to be in attendance.
On Biden, Sisolak said the president has been unfairly blamed for record-high inflation as well as soaring gas prices, both of which have been spurred by supply chain woes and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
“He doesn’t control the price of gasoline, no more than I control the price of chicken and ground beef at the store,” Sisolak said.
Sisolak hasn’t personally asked Biden to campaign in Nevada on his behalf, but said the 79-year-old Biden is welcome to the Silver State any time.
