Assembly District 9 has been blue for a decade. Could it turn MAGA this election? 

Addiction recovery advocate Ryan Hampton (D) and small-business owner Erica Neely (R) are vying to fill the seat left by one of the Legislature's most powerful players, Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas), who announced his retirement late last year.

The race has partly become about whether the district — which has been held by Democrats for more than a decade — will embrace MAGA politics. Neely, whose husband is a manager for conservative advocacy group Turning Point Action, is well-known in local political circles. She is a vocal advocate of President Donald Trump, voicing support of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement on social media and the controversial SAVE America Act, which would require individuals to provide a passport or birth certificate to register to vote and present a photo ID to vote. 

Hampton has criticized her support of Trump. 

"She's, quite frankly, Trump's lieutenant in this race," Hampton said in an interview. "She's running on Donald Trump's agenda. I think we now know it's costing jobs. It's making life more expensive for folks." 

Neely did not respond to multiple requests for an interview but has expressed that Democrats have failed to adequately represent her and other Latinos. On her website, she said she was a registered Democrat until she was "mugged by reality," including losing "everything" during the 2008 Great Recession. 

She wrote online that her race "isn't about left vs. right" but "about right vs. wrong."

The race is likely to be close, although Hampton has a significant fundraising advantage. Neely already carries name recognition in the district after narrowly losing the general election for the seat in 2024 and the district is politically split. Democrats maintain only a slight edge over Republicans at 30 percent to 26 percent, while nonpartisans make up nearly 40 percent of registered voters.

Whoever wins the district, which covers a large swath of southwest Las Vegas, could help determine whether Democrats maintain a supermajority in the Assembly.

Hampton has already won the endorsement of more than 20 unions, including several political powerhouses, such as the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and the Clark County Education Association. He has raised more than $67,000 in direct contributions during the second quarter of the year, while Neely has raised less than half of that, with $30,600 in direct donations. 

Neely, meanwhile, has scored the endorsement of Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) and Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill. Chuck Muth, a prominent Nevada conservative activist, wrote in Neely's self-published ebook that she was "one of the best candidates I've ever worked with."

The Lombardo-affiliated PAC, Nevada Way PAC, donated $5,000 to her campaign in the latest quarter.

Meet the candidates 

Hampton has gained a national reputation as an addiction recovery advocate, creating the largest recovery advocacy network in the nation in 2015 and representing a cohort of victims in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case. 

Hampton, who struggled with opioid addiction throughout the 2000s, has described his recovery work as a motivating factor in running for office. He told The Indy if elected to the Legislature, he would like to be a leader in healthcare policy and has said that addressing Medicaid reimbursement rates — the amount that the state pays healthcare providers for services — is a top priority. 

"I've spent my career as an advocate, getting regular people organized to take on some really powerful interests," Hampton said. "I've taken on Big Pharma, I've taken on big insurance. … I've turned that pain that I went through into a fight against the companies that caused it."

Hampton previously ran for Assembly District 4 in 2024 but lost by nearly 10 percentage points against now Assm. Lisa Cole (R-Las Vegas). He likewise made healthcare a centerpiece of that campaign, unveiling a 13-part plan to tackle the state's drug crisis and voicing support for lowering prescription drug costs.

Similarly, Neely's entry into politics came from a personal place. Originally from California, Neely was born to immigrant parents from Mexico and El Salvador. She eventually moved to Las Vegas in 2005 to escape rising living costs, but wrote on her website that after the Great Recession, she realized that "the same policies she'd fled in California were being imported to Nevada" and switched her registration to Republican.  

Neely, who homeschools her children, has made education a key policy issue, embracing school choice initiatives. In 2022, she ran for Clark County School District Board of Trustees, running against "so-called progressive curriculum" and criticized a 2021 bill that made civics, financial literacy and multicultural education part of homeschooling curriculums. She lost that race. 

She's placed a particular focus on the participation of transgender athletes in school sports. This year, Neely helped lead a proposed ballot initiative from Lombardo to limit transgender female student athletes' participation in school sports based on their sex at birth. 

Hampton said that Neely is "trying to rile up a base" by treating the participation of transgender athletes in sports as an issue. He said that he's never heard the issue come up on the campaign trail and that voters are more concerned about kitchen table issues, such as grocery costs. 

Mudslinging and mischaracterizations

Neely has falsely claimed that Hampton is in favor of decriminalizing hard drugs, despite his past struggles with opioid addiction. In a blog post from this May, she claimed that Hampton supported Oregon's plan to decriminalize possession of heroin, fentanyl and methamphetamine — a claim also made by Cole in the 2024 race.   

In her self-published e-book, Neely also called Hampton a "one-trick pony" for making addiction recovery a focal point in his 2024 and 2026 campaigns. She wrote that Nevada "has real problems that have nothing to do with addiction policy."

Hampton has staunchly pushed back against Neely's characterizations, saying that the accusation that he supports hard drugs is the "most absurd thing in the world" and has repeatedly said that the economy is a top issue for him. 

"It is a complete mischaracterization of everything I have done in my life," Hampton said. "I think the idea of legalizing drugs is insane and I have never suggested it. I have never supported it. I never will."

On the policies

The Nevada Independent is taking a new approach to inform readers about the candidates running for state Legislature: A survey asking candidates to rate their agreement with a series of policy statements, with the option to elaborate on their answers. 

Use the tool below to see how the AD 9 candidates responded. (Note: Neely did not respond to the survey.)