Unless something truly dramatic changes, this will be my last column about former senator and current gubernatorial candidate Dean Heller. The simple truth is he’s become too unimportant and too irrelevant to write about.

This is a remarkable fall from grace for one of Nevada’s more accomplished Republican politicians in recent memory. Dean Heller started his political career in the Assembly in 1990, then continued to hold elected office for nearly three decades. He served as secretary of state for 12 years, served as Northern Nevada’s congressman for four years, then replaced disgraced former senator John Ensign (another former Republican leading light who’s best known now, when he’s remembered at all, as a character in a Netflix documentary). Heller was then reelected to the U.S. Senate in 2012 — the same year now-former President Barack Obama won Nevada by nearly 7 percent.

For ideologues like myself, Heller’s career was a constant source of frustration. We ideologues like politicians to be predictable — to stand for some particular set of principles (say, being liberal, conservative, libertarian, progressive, or whatever) and live or die fighting for them. If we disagree with their principles, principled politicians make easy villains; if we agree with their principles, they make easy heroes. Dean Heller, however, was no ideologue, no man of philosophical principle. Though he obviously came from a culturally conservative background, his primary political principle was, if we’re being generous, one of pragmatism — he would pragmatically do whatever 50 percent plus 1 Nevadans wanted him to do in any particular moment, then do something else the absolute instant one Nevadan changed their mind. By regularly changing positions to match whatever a putative majority of Nevadan voters might feel in less than Planck time, Heller didn’t just annoy anyone who wanted him to stand for a higher calling than craven political survival — he even baffled many physicists and advanced our theoretical understandings of time and our universe more generally.

Consequently, the primary difference between former Sen. Dean Heller and current Assemblyman Jim Wheeler isn’t that Heller wouldn’t vote for slavery if a majority of Nevadans wanted him to — given the opportunity and favorable poll numbers, he absolutely would. No, the primary difference is that, unlike Wheeler, Heller would have calculated before he went into that radio interview, in less time than it took to begin the Big Bang, that a majority of Nevadans wouldn’t want him to say he’d vote for slavery and he would have responded more politically judiciously.

Trouble is, Dean Heller is now running in a gubernatorial primary for a state party that has, quite frankly, lost its collective mind and grasp of reality — so, to attract a majority of voters within said party, Dean Heller is now pretending he’s lost 71 percent of his mind as well.

Seventy-one percent, according to a Heller campaign aide and a University of Massachusetts Amherst survey conducted in December (crosstabs available here), is the percentage of Republicans who believe Biden is an illegitimate president. Nine percent, meanwhile, is the percentage of Republicans in Nevada who currently support Dean Heller in the Republican primary for governor — less than a third of the support Sheriff Joe Lombardo received in the same poll. So, to appeal to the distressingly not silent majority of Republican primary voters, Heller jumped the shark and announced that he too believes Biden isn’t the legitimate President of the United States. He also announced that, once elected governor, he will abolish the Commerce Tax, ban critical race theory, make voter identification mandatory, serve dessert in the school cafeteria, abolish teachers, and make video games homework so parents would be forced to let students play games even when they’re grounded. Then, as a final coup de grâce to his observable connection to physical reality, he called the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which has been owned by a family of staunch Republican donors for years, “liberal media.” 

There are, to put it lightly, several problems with this… let’s be generous and call it a strategy, though doing so suggests a level of forethought Heller’s never demonstrated before.

First and foremost, unlike Dean Heller, most people (especially Republican primary voters, who have truly elephantine memories) can remember what Dean Heller said and did more than 5.39×10⁻⁴⁴ seconds ago. They remember that Dean Heller was a pro-choice senator who refused to vote in favor of repealing the Affordable Care Act and was “99 percent against Trump.” They also remember, after Danny Tarkanian threatened to primary Heller in 2018 due to Heller’s insufficient fealty to now-former President Donald Trump, that Heller pragmatically didn’t just change his mind, he replaced it entirely with a new one and declared that everything Trump touches turns to gold.

They also remember Heller losing the 2018 election and absolutely no one other than Dean Heller being even slightly upset about it.

In other words, Republican primary voters remember Dean Heller as a moderate Republican who, like a spurned “nice guy” who can’t understand why their crush is attracted to jerks instead, has been trying just a little too desperately since his 2018 primary to prove he’s a jerk, too. Trouble is, everyone knows his heart isn’t really into it — while he’s finally openly claiming Biden isn’t a legitimate president, his Republican gubernatorial competition is claiming they’ll lynch Biden with their bare hands if given half a chance and a piece of rope. There’s simply no way even Heller’s quantumly entangled lack of principles can match the frothing nonsense his base is currently entertained by. That’s why, rather than sounding like a formerly moderate Paul on the road to Trumpian Damascus who’s experiencing the zeal of the converted, he’s instead coming across as a pathetic, desperate milquetoast ex-boyfriend who keeps sending gym selfies.

The second problem, however, is the same one Heller ran into in 2018: Contrary to the wishful thinking of certain Republicans in this state, you can either be Trumpy or you can win statewide elections in Nevada — but you have to pick one. Donald Trump never won a single election in Nevada, nor has any statewide candidate the now-former president’s enthusiastically supported. When Republicans win in this state, they do it the same way Glenn Youngkin won Virginia — by keeping Trump and his ilk out of state and out of mind while uttering conservative-sounding platitudes which appeal to 50 percent plus 1 of our purple state’s voters.

Unfortunately for Dean Heller and his supporter (I’m sure he has one somewhere), his physics-defying political flexibility has always existed solely in the moment and has always responded solely to his immediate needs. Such reflexive flexibility is incapable of learning lessons; such flexibility is frankly incapable of realizing that, even if Republican voters settle for a moderate gubernatorial candidate, they’ll never settle for Dean Heller ever again. Whether they love or hate Joe Lombardo, at least they know the sheriff won’t embarrass them in public the way Dean Heller did.

With any luck, Lombardo will find an entirely new and novel way to embarrass Republicans. Speaking as an opinion columnist, I certainly wouldn’t mind.

As for Dean Heller, the only person he’s embarrassing at this point is himself. There’s no reason we should continue to watch, much less care, while he does so.

Correction (4:59 p.m. on 2/5/22): The original version of this column incorrectly stated that it was Peter, not Paul, on the road to Damascus.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].