Three days of confirmation hearings for President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, filtered into the race for Nevada’s U.S. Senate seat as Democrats eye their first confirmed SCOTUS justice since 2010. 

Jackson quickly became a target for the Republican Party’s right wing, which during confirmation hearing testimony pushed a narrative that the judge was soft on child predators and sex offenders, a strategy that has drawn comparisons to the QAnon movement’s focus on child abuse conspiracies. 

Echoing those criticisms was former attorney general and Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt, who in a statement last week called on Cortez Masto to withdraw support for Jackson. 

“Our Supreme Court should not have pedophile apologists in its ranks,” he said.

Earlier in the week, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) told Politico that she believed the narrative “has been discredited, even [Utah Sen. Mitt] Romney thinks so,” — a reference to Romney telling reporters that he believed there was “no there, there” on the most extreme claims made by Republicans. 

Laxalt’s Republican challenger, Sam Brown, criticized Jackson’s “radical nature” because of her “refusal to denounce court packing” in a tweet saying he would not vote to confirm her. 

He also tweeted shortly after that “What America needs right now is less Ketanji Brown Jackson and more Clarence Thomas.” That missive came roughly a day before The Washington Post reported Thomas’ wife, Ginni, had pushed Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to overturn the results of the election on Jan. 6.

Polls, polls, polls. Always stay glued to the CEO’s Twitter feed in case of new polls. Last week, the Democrat-aligned firm Blueprint Polling released the results of a Nevada survey that showed Laxalt up over Cortez Masto by five points, and up by 7 points among self-described independents. 

But as one Jon Ralston (who is that again?) noted, the sample skewed heavily Republican — roughly 11 points over the state’s percentage of registered Republicans. It’s a difference so large that, Ralston said, “If that’s actual turnout, red tsunami cometh.” 

And on the campaign finance front, first-quarter reports due in about two weeks will give the first serious glimpse into how much cash campaigns will have to operate through the most crucial phase of the primary. 

While we wait, the Laxalt campaign filed an amended end-of-year report from 2021, following a letter from the FEC alleging a handful of irregularities, including a number of donations over legal limits. In a response letter to the FEC posted online Tuesday, the Laxalt campaign argued that adjustments made to the upcoming quarterly report in April satisfied compliance requirements. 

Editor’s Note: This story appears in Indy 2022, The Nevada Independent’s newsletter dedicated to comprehensive coverage of the 2022 election. Sign up for the newsletter here.