I commute 35 miles each way to work. In my comparatively compact and fuel efficient car, that works out to a gallon of gas each way. At current fuel prices, it costs me about $12 each day to get to work.

It adds up. It’s frustrating.

I’m not the only one with fewer, less experienced coworkers sharing the same work. I’m not the only one looking at the rising cost of everything — rent, fuel, food, and so on — and wondering when it will stop. Yes, wages are higher, especially for entry-level employees, and that’s great, but the constant shortages of basic goods and services since the pandemic started a couple of years ago has been irritating. Violent crime is increasing as well — no, the Bronx isn’t burning, but just as we shouldn’t wait for live-action reenactments of the Laramie Project before we take white nationalists showing up to violently disrupt Pride events seriously, we shouldn’t wait for American cities to look like hollowed out war zones again before we take crime seriously, either.

I’m also not the only one who’s noticed that the people in charge don’t seem to have any fixes for these problems.

I understand, then, why so many political analysts believe Republicans will have a banner year this year. Democrats are currently in charge (for whatever definition of “in charge” any political party can be said to be in our famously fractious country) and things are a little rough at the moment and getting rougher. Naturally, many voters will likely conclude, rightly or wrongly, that throwing today’s bums out might make things better — at least until tomorrow’s bums either wield political power effectively enough to create other problems or are unfortunate enough to be “in power” while we create entirely new and novel problems for ourselves.

What I don’t understand is what Nevada’s Republican primary voters, especially in Washoe County, think they’re doing about any of this.

Start with the gubernatorial primary, which produced one of the more comparatively sane outcomes. Whether you agree or disagree with Lombardo’s positions or policies, nominating a sheriff for governor is a logical thing to do if you’re a voter who’s worried about crime. What’s less logical, however, is nominating a conspiratorial former boxer and current ambulance chaser who thinks “the establishment” is conspiring to deny him his place on the general election ballot and consequently refuses to concede his race despite receiving nearly 30,000 fewer votes than the victor — never mind how many Democratic political organizations, including here in Nevada, spent millions of dollars propping candidates like Joey Gilbert up.

But that ambulance chaser is exactly who a plurality of Republican voters in several counties — including our state capital — wanted for governor. Even in Washoe County, Gilbert was fewer than 300 votes away from Joe Lombardo. If Clark County Republicans didn’t think so fondly of their sheriff, Sisolak would have needed to recruit Ross Miller as a stunt double in the next gubernatorial debate.

What made Joey Gilbert appealing? It wasn’t his willingness nor perceived ability to solve Nevada’s problems — it was instead his willingness to fight reality itself. According to his headcanon, Donald Trump was still president, COVID-19 wasn’t real (and, if it was, it was a “plandemic” anyway), and Nevada’s students can’t read because they don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance often enough. Does any of that have any relationship with reality? Well, no, but reality left Joey and his supporters behind years ago.

Then there’s Jim Marchant. Marchant is running for secretary of state on a platform of replacing every voting machine with thousands of bleary-eyed precinct captains hand-counting every ballot, handwriting their tallies with fountain pens on parchment, then delivering election results by Pony Express. If you ask him, every election result since Mark Twain published Roughing It has been fraudulent, including every primary and Assembly seat he ever won. He’s running because, as he readily admits, QAnon organizers — the sort who are waiting for John F. Kennedy Jr. to arise from his watery grave off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard so he can run as Trump’s running mate in 2024 — saw him as a kindred spirit and asked him to.

Is he a delusional crank spouting unhinged nonsense? Absolutely. In a just world, would he file as a paper candidate, pick up a couple thousand votes statewide from voters who had no clue who he was, then die in obscurity? You bet. Is he instead the Nevada Republican Party’s general election candidate for secretary of state this year? By a landslide. Will electing him secretary of state make Nevada a better place or address a single meaningful problem faced by residents of our state? No, but if Otero County in New Mexico, a jurisdiction which refused to certify its own election results, is any indication, he’ll at least keep our judicial system gainfully employed.

Perhaps Nevada’s Republicans had more sense when it came time to select their candidate for Treasurer. Surely — surely — they wouldn’t support someone with a history of failed businesses, sweetheart deals for family members, constant out-of-state distractions, bullying and fighting fellow Republicans, and a scrambled misunderstanding of germ theory to manage the state’s money.

Don’t call them “surely”. Fiore was the most popular candidate on the Republican statewide primary ballot. More than 125,000 Republicans voted for Fiore — that’s more votes than Adam Laxalt or any statewide candidate received.

Does she know what the job of a state treasurer is? Does she know how to balance a checkbook? Is she self aware enough to realize she’s actually the angry racist aunt instead of the fun-loving party girl at every family gathering? The answer to all of these questions is almost certainly no. Did that stop Republicans from putting her on our general election ballots? The answer to that question is also no.

What about the position of attorney general — the chief prosecutor for the state? Did Nevada’s Republicans select someone who will be tough on crime? Or did they select someone who “jokes” about lynching people and is an open embarrassment in court? Does thirty men breaking into a local jail to kill a man while the local constable is asleep sound like law and order? As Republicans selected Sigal Chattah to run against Aaron Ford, it seems we have four more months to find out.

Then there are the races further down the ballot. 

Washoe County Republicans — the same bunch which used to reliably produce moderate Republicans like Bill Raggio, Brian Sandoval, Jill Tolles, Ben Kieckhefer and Heidi Gansert — instead chose to replace an incumbent Republican county commissioner with a county assessor who’s still not allowed in his own office. Instead of ensuring county properties were assessed fairly and equitably, Mike Clark used his time and resources to obsess over a picture of one of his staff members in a bikini — a picture which he bundled in 162 novella-length mailers he sent to elected officials and county employees, each labeled as if they came from someone else’s address.

Nothing says moral courage like trying to pin your mailed rants on someone else’s head.

Then there’s Jeanne Herman. I’ve written about Washoe County Commissioner Herman before — she’s the one who wanted to deploy the Nevada National Guard to every single precinct in the county to shoot voter fraud because a Californian cryptocurrency lottery winner told her to. Did the Republican residents of Reno’s exurbs use the ridiculous press she generated from her buffoonery to select someone who will do the job of county commissioner quietly and effectively? Or did they double down on the election denial and Bircher-grade conspiracy theory spinning?

Take a guess.

Finally, we have the elections for Washoe County School Board. Districts B, C, D and F face election this year. Each of them face incumbents who, at the time of the writing of this piece, are leading in their races — Ellen Minetto, Joe Rodriguez, Beth Smith, and Adam Mayberry, respectively. Three of those four, however, will face a general election against candidates handpicked by “Save WCSD,” a far-right organization obsessed with the notion that Critical Transgendered Race Theory (or whatever) is being taught in Reno’s famously progressive classrooms — Beth Smith handily dispatched her “Save WCSD”-anointed opponent, Ed Hitti, in the primary.

As I pointed out fairly recently, the “Save WCSD” candidates sincerely believe Washoe County students will read better if they have the power to control which books Washoe County students read — just don’t ask them which books your students will be able to take home. Either they’d rather we found out which books were fit for reading and which books were fit for their Säuberung by surprise, or the Californian cryptocurrency millionaire funding their organization failed to furnish them with his list of forbidden books before they were interviewed by local media. Whether these candidates are mendacious or ignorant, it’s extremely unlikely electing any of them to my county’s school board will have a positive effect on any child’s education.

***

Will pretending Donald Trump was actually elected in 2020 resolve our nation’s supply shortages? Will electing an innumerate bully with a gun fetish make our state’s finances more sound? Will lynching political opponents make our streets safer? Will banning books raise Nevada’s educational results? Will throwing every election machine into the nearest river reduce inflation? Will electing a disgraced assessor with a temporary restraining order against him as county commissioner make Washoe County great again?

I don’t see how.

Are any of these candidates offering a single tangible policy solution that can be delivered by our existing political processes that might concretely benefit Nevadans?

Not that I can see.

That’s a shame. We have real problems in this state which call out for real solutions. There was a time when voters in Nevada’s second-largest political party took itself seriously enough to address them and selected candidates accordingly. Unfortunately, last week's primary has demonstrated they’d rather add their collective delusions to the list instead.

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 nonpartisan 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].