In 2010, two years into a painful recovery process from the burns that consumed 30 percent of his body, sustained in an explosion while deployed in Afghanistan, Sam Brown first visited Nevada. 

It was November, and his wife, Amy, had received a four-day weekend military pass. Eager to explore, the Texas residents booked a trip to Reno to hike around Lake Tahoe. The trip could have been a disaster. Novices to hiking and the region’s wildlife, they carried dog treats for their dog Leonidas that was with them — and when they heard the telltale growling of a nearby bear, they ran 2 miles back to their car.

Brown found the experience funny, and the natural beauty of Lake Tahoe vivid and memorable. Through another year of intensive physical therapy, various career starts, a political run and business school, the region remained on his mind.

“Something about the place felt spacious and expansive — it felt easier to dream here,” he wrote in his 2024 memoir Alive Day.

That love of hiking — and an interest in Nevada’s small-business-friendly climate — drove the Browns to move to Reno in 2018, he said. 

As a love of the outdoors blossomed in the years after the devastating injuries that abruptly cut his military career short, so too did his interest in politics — that would ultimately launch him into one of the country’s most competitive Senate races. 

Brown, who medically retired from the Army in 2011 with the rank of captain, first explored running for office in a failed 2014 legislative bid in Texas. Disgusted by the world of political consulting and feeling unmoored in his career, he vowed to never run again. But by 2021, he announced a bid for U.S. Senate in his new home state, ultimately losing to former Attorney General Adam Laxalt in the primary. Running for the third time, Brown became the early GOP favorite this cycle, backed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), and easily won the Republican primary in June, setting up a general election showdown with Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV). 

In Nevada political circles, there’s some skepticism about a relatively new Nevadan attempting to make the jump to the U.S. Senate without having held an elective office — and some observers suggest he should have started with a smaller race.

“There were a lot of concerns from the start that he didn’t have the substance or depth of knowledge of the state of Nevada,” Amy Tarkanian, a former Nevada GOP chair, said.

Brown, when asked at IndyFest why he didn’t start smaller, said that his wife challenged him in the months after the inauguration of President Joe Biden to be a leader — and he identified the U.S. Senate as the area of greatest need. (That account is somewhat rebutted by reports that he explored a run for the Legislature in 2020 — a Nevada political consultant with knowledge of the race said he was talked out of it after learning the race he was targeting was unwinnable for a Republican, while the campaign says local consultants tried to recruit him, but he did not seriously consider it.)

Politicos who know Brown laugh at the Democratic insinuation that he’s an also-ran who moved to Nevada for a political future. (“It’s funny when I hear people say he moved into Nevada to run for office,” said a Republican political consultant who has worked with Brown. “If you’re a Republican, stay in Texas.”)

But his desire to represent Nevadans — to be a politician — was formed even before he arrived, in the destabilizing tribulations of a military leader with a belief in service whose near-death experience in Afghanistan left him without a constituency to guide and a conviction that his life has divine purpose.

“I have needed to be helped by so many people,” Brown said in an interview. “I literally had a number of months where I couldn’t feed myself. I couldn’t change my bandages. I couldn’t even drive anywhere. And so going from a place of total dependence on other people’s love, grace, [and] leadership — that I see reflected in my faith — is how I attempt to try and love, serve, lead and sacrifice for others.”

On the trail

Brown sees representing Nevadans as his new mission. He tells the story of his injury and recovery as a testimony about hope. Brown speaks about politics in much the same way — the American dream, as he tells it, is becoming increasingly out of reach. A surprise medical bill or home repair is enough to put the dream out of reach; political leaders, then, should fight for the restoration of hope. 

It’s a message, ironically, somewhat reminiscent of Elizabeth Warren or Barack Obama, whose magnetism his staff compares him to — complicated significantly by his trailing in the polls and embrace of the former president, whose agenda Brown says would be his first priority in the Senate.

Those who know him describe Brown as warm, a listener, an avid reader with a dry sense of humor.

“Even though he believes in MAGA policies, very much like (former President Donald) Trump and (Sen. JD) Vance, he definitely has a different personality,” said Pauline Lee, a former Nevada Republican Club chair who first met Brown in the 2022 cycle and is conducting outreach on his behalf in Las Vegas. “He's very laid back. And most importantly, I think he really is very good at listening to people.”

David Duffield, a tech billionaire who lives in Incline Village, gave a super PAC supporting Brown $2 million last year. Through a spokesperson, he said Brown’s honest character, compassion and political outsider status impressed him.

And yet a combination of persistent Democratic attacks, a nearly 3.5-to-1 spending disparity between Rosen and Brown and his embrace of Trump — who, it should be noted, is outperforming him in the polls and has a 50-50 shot of winning the state — have perhaps rendered those stylistic differences moot. 

Brown is trying to run a different type of Republican campaign than past candidates, actively targeting Latino, Asian American and rank-and-file union members at community events with local leaders and pop-ups. 

“In studying campaigns and politics here over a couple of cycles, I thought that Republicans had left some meat on the bone with Hispanic voters,” Brown said. “What I have seen in the past is kind of a check-the-box effort on outreach with folks who really want to build a relationship.”

At the same time, like the past two Republicans who have run and lost for Senate in Nevada, he’s clung tightly to Trump, appearing at rallies and events, following his lead on policy and highlighting their alliance in campaign materials. 

The increasingly blurred lines between the Trump playbook and the Brown campaign has some Nevada Republicans worried, wondering if he should emphasize Nevada-specific issues, his humor and relatability — Brown is a millennial, parent of three school-age kids, lives in a three-bedroom home in Reno and, with a net worth under $1 million, would be one of the least wealthy senators if elected — rather than national themes. They fear the campaign has gotten too negative and partisan, potentially turning off independents or crossover-curious voters.

“He's gone overboard in kissing the ring,” said Tarkanian. “It's painfully obvious. You still have a lot of voters, especially in Nevada, who are double hater voters — I’m one of them. So I don't want to hear you fawning.”

The campaign insists Brown has a distinct brand, and believes it’s connecting. While he may not talk about it on the trail, Brown says he is interested in bipartisanship — especially because if elected, he’ll have to work with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who he would have faced in 2022 if he won the Republican primary.

“I don’t have to wear it on my sleeve,” Brown said. “The reality is, Sen. Cortez Masto and I have each other’s phone numbers. I actually texted her after the debate.” 

But Democrats feel confident about the race, in large part because of their significant financial advantages and a number of messaging opportunities they think Brown has provided them with — an unforced error on Yucca Mountain, his shifts on abortion, past support for drastic cuts to federal departments and playing footsie with election denialism, among them. (At IndyFest, Brown confirmed that he believes Biden is the duly elected president and that the 2020 election was fair.)

Nevada Democrats have launched a “Too MAGA for Nevada” messaging campaign against him and the Rosen campaign got out to a quick start on the airwaves, defining him as extreme on abortion. Rosen ran her first general election ad in early April; Brown spent the spring fending off primary challengers, parrying attacks about his MAGA bona fides and trying to earn a Trump endorsement that eventually came in the eleventh hour. 

Democrats have highlighted his record on abortion to great effect all year, releasing ads featuring a woman forced to flee Texas in order to abort a fetus who doctors said would not survive, among others, with an overarching theme of portraying Brown as too extreme for Nevada, a state where a majority of voters support abortion rights.

Brown’s opinion has shifted during his political career, from supporting a 20-week ban in Texas, where a majority of voters oppose abortion rights, to filing out a campaign questionnaire in 2022 saying he did not support abortion even in cases of rape, incest or threat to the life of the mother (which he said was filled out erroneously by a staffer), to saying he supported exceptions to ultimately coming out against a national ban. 

In audio obtained by The Nevada Independent, Brown said he would not vote for a ballot question to enshrine abortion protections in the state’s Constitution. He’s released his own ads stating his opposition to a national ban — and said at IndyFest that he told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who proposed a 15-week abortion ban, that he would not vote for such a bill — but Rosen’s ad onslaught has been persistent and better funded.

An internal polling memo from a Republican super PAC obtained by Politico noted that Democrats were winning on abortion — and in the race. The early October poll found Brown down 7 percentage points.

“Sam Brown has struggled to close the gap in this race, largely due to nonstop ads savaging him on abortion,” wrote Steven Law, the group’s president. “

In a crowded cycle, where national Republican groups’ attention — and resources — are being pulled in numerous directions, including red states such as Ohio and Montana and swing states that look closer, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, one strategist with knowledge of the race said Brown’s campaign has not been impressive enough to warrant the level of investment needed to compete with Rosen. Bullish at the beginning of the cycle based on the state’s transience, economic struggles and Rosen’s relatively low name identification for an incumbent, Republicans now grouse that Brown’s political novice status was always apparent.

“He’s done this multiple times,” the strategist, given anonymity to speak candidly, said. “He’s not built for politics, is the honest truth.

“[The NRSC] screwed up, because [chairman Sen.] Steve Daines (R-MT) rode around with him on a bus and thought he was a cool guy, and they were like, “Oh, this is the guy’,” the strategist continued. “They don’t think that anymore. They know he’s not a good candidate.”

NRSC communications director Mike Berg rebuts that narrative, saying that “Sam Brown has begun rapidly closing the gap with Jacky Rosen now that he is more heavily advertising on TV.”

Paul Snow, a canvasser with Teamsters 986, has been door-knocking for Democrats in Las Vegas since late September. In that time, he said he’s only seen one Brown canvasser. He has encountered split ticket voters, including those who have Trump paraphernalia at their house but have pledged to vote for Rosen — and disparage Brown. 

“One voter said, ‘I’m voting for Trump,” Snow said. “I asked about Rosen. He said, ‘She’s the one running against Scam Brown, right?’”

‘Browns serve’

The oldest of five children, Brown was born in 1983 near the town of Conway in rural central Arkansas. His father served in the military, and Brown knew early on that he wanted to as well, poring over recruitment brochures and cherishing a souvenir First Infantry Division coin he had picked up on a family road trip.

Their family mantra was “Browns serve” and the military remained his prevailing focus as a young adult. Brown said he knew his parents were Republicans, and that his earliest political experience was seeing President Ronald Reagan from his kitchen countertop television as a kid.

Single-minded in his pursuits, Brown attended the United States Military Academy at West Point. He had always thought of himself as a leader, and the military gave him an opportunity to build that skill. During infantry officer training at Fort Benning, he got word that he would be deploying to Afghanistan. 

The best-known part of his story — the chapter whose scars he bears — comes next. As a platoon leader in Kandahar, Brown’s humvee was hit by an improvised explosive device. Ejected from his vehicle, Brown furiously attempted to put out the flames engulfing his body and had the terrifying realization that he was going to burn alive. 

In the moment of certainty that his death was imminent, Brown wrote in his book that he realized he had fallen short as a Christian — that although he grew up going to church, his life had been in service to himself rather than God. Even before his physical salvation, he accepted a spiritual one — that whatever came next in his life was divinely authored, that his purpose was to serve the Lord.

His life was forever changed by the spiritual reckoning that moment brought, the permanent damage done and the voice of his gunner who rescued him from the flames: “Sir, I’ve got you.”

His painful, harrowing rehabilitation experience — a three-year physical therapy journey — was well-documented in a 2012 GQ article. 

Brown met his wife, Amy, while she was serving as a dietician in the burn unit. Those who know the Browns speak of them as a unit — partners in each decision. In another well-chronicled piece of their history, Sam met Amy in the weeks after she had an abortion — a decision she said she felt pressured into making quickly.

“I thought I had chosen freedom, but I did not feel free,” she wrote in her chapter of the memoir.

With his help, she rediscovered her faith and belief in the power of divine forgiveness. The couple opened up in an interview with NBC News during the primary about her abortion.

Finally, the injury and Brown’s subsequent medical retirement from the Army displaced his fundamental sense of self. He had achieved the rank of captain and made returning to Afghanistan a goal throughout his rehab — only to learn it would not be possible.

“Who was I supposed to be, if not a leader?” Brown wrote in his book. “What was I supposed to do now, if not serve?”

The arc of his career since then has been in service to that question. 

Business experience

After recovering at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Brown rediscovered some of his old passion in stepping up to encourage fellow veterans in their recovery. In 2011, he met former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, who told him he was starting up a nonprofit organization to help veterans in North Texas and wanted Brown to join the team.

Seemingly a fit, Brown said he found himself disillusioned and feeling like a charity case. During his recovery, his mother had given him a Purple Heart hat to wear by way of explanation for his facial wounds in public; Brown felt this only invited pity and stopped wearing it.

He left the nonprofit circuit and tried out management consulting, launching a global logistics business called Pruitt, Winston & Brothers in 2012 with a fellow veteran. 

“I remember it just being sort of this abrupt moment where suddenly now I'm out of the military, and had no kind of on-ramp to life after that,” he said. “I think that parallels a lot of adult life.” 

In Texas, he and Amy had done some political volunteering with local groups; in 2014, he was approached by political consultants he had met about exploring a run for Texas House. He got some splashy press and proved adept at attracting donors, but ultimately finished third. Brown wrote he felt used by the political consultants who had encouraged him to run, nothing more than a Wounded Warrior meal ticket.

While it may not have been a success for him, his Texas House run proved fertile opposition ground for Nevada Democrats, who have gotten tons of ad mileage out of his support of a Texas law banning abortion after 20 weeks, when he called “issues of life” a “nonnegotiable” for him.

Brown did some political consulting in the following years, including managing an unsuccessful campaign for fellow Texas veteran and West Point classmate Sam Deen in 2018. 

In 2015, deciding he needed more training, he enrolled in business school at Southern Methodist University while working at a title company. After earning an MBA, Brown — who had been promised a role at a private equity management firm only to see the mentor who had offered him the job leave due to health issues — decided to move to Nevada. He looked for roles at Amazon fulfillment centers and took a job as an operations manager at a warehouse in Reno.

In his book, he wrote that though he felt he was overqualified for the job, he enjoyed leading a team again and having identifiable goals to meet. But he found Amazon itself frustrating, treating employees as expendable in its never-ending pursuit of quotas. Attempting to help his employees struggling to make enough, he saw government aid as “temporary or insufficient, which gets people stuck waiting on the government’s aid — even though it’s not enough.”

Throughout this period, he also volunteered on local races, including door-knocking for the Trump campaign in 2020. 

In the meantime, Brown began exploring starting a small business. He had registered Palisade Strategies, a pharmacy benefit management firm connecting Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers with pharmaceutical companies, in Texas in 2012. In 2018, the year he moved to Nevada, Palisade entered a mentor-protégé agreement with Heritage Health Solutions, a larger health care logistics company. Brown’s status as a service-disabled veteran made the business eligible to compete for set-aside government contracts; between 2020 and 2021, before Brown ultimately sold the business to an executive at Heritage Health, the company was awarded $2.7 million in federal contracts.

Brown said the experience was rewarding — a way to “stand in the gap” between the VA and emergency medication needs. He described one case where a veteran needed a specialty compound medication, but the reimbursement rate was lower than the cost of the material needed to create the solution, so the pharmacy decided not to do it. 

Brown said he decided to pay the cost so the veteran could get the medication. He later learned the client had been at risk of permanent blindness.

“I was proud to be able to provide that service, in pursuit of my own version of the American dream,” he said.

Pharmacy benefit managers such as Express Scripts and CVS Caremark have come under scrutiny from both parties in Congress as targets for reform regarding allegations that they inflate drug prices; the Federal Trade Commission concluded in a report that they drive costs up and reduce consumer choice.

Brown argued that overregulation contributes to high costs, but agreed reform is needed — he called for eliminating rebates from pharmacy benefit managers to providers, a bridge further than the prevailing proposal in Congress and one backed by antitrust think tanks and more populist Republicans.

None of Brown’s business associates contacted by The Nevada Independent for this story responded to interview requests.

Politics, again

In his book, Brown writes that he began to think about trying politics again on a hike with his wife and children, when Amy asked if he felt like he was living out the purpose for which God had saved him in Afghanistan. Brown writes that he did feel content, and when political consultants came calling again about a potential run, he entertained them at his house with the hope that Amy would be the bad guy and shoot down the idea. 

Instead, she told him that she had come to the same conclusion in prayer as the consultants — that God felt they were wasting their time, that the Browns were made for more than hiking and that a leader like him was needed in politics. 

That conversation has led him to three years on the campaign trail. It also underscores the centrality of Amy’s role — a partner who the campaign considers a key asset.

“Not only is Sam such an incredible man in his own right, he has got a wife, Amy, who is caring, considerate, just absolutely fantastic,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who campaigned for Brown with Amy in Las Vegas in September. “She is on the trail for Sam and doing really good things with the women demographic.”

Amy has hosted events up and down the state and been featured in fundraising blasts, particularly those targeting parents. In October, the campaign cut an ad with her speaking directly to the camera about her abortion. The Browns homeschool their kids — “I’m a Bible-believing momma who puts Bible lessons in our family’s homeschool curriculum,” one fundraising email signed by Amy reads — and Sam calls his kids every night from the campaign trail to lead them in prayer. 

Republicans also think Brown’s story will resonate with voters — he used his time on stage at the Republican National Convention to share his experience in Afghanistan and recovery, and connect it to the theme of hope that he’s tried to center on the campaign trail.

“It's a great American kind of warrior hero story,” said Daines, the NRSC chairman. “And I think it'd be a compelling story for ‘24.”

People who have worked on his campaigns — past and present — say Brown is magnetic in person. They believe the energy they see in rooms on the campaign trail has not been reflected in polling, and that the race is closer than the margins indicate.

Staff say he feels compelled by a sense of duty — the same mission-bound responsibility he felt in the military — to run for office, rather than any interest in personal gain or desire for power. (Democrats, of course, note that this is his third run for office — and he’s spent a lot of time online and on the trail in recent months promoting his book.)

“He's just a people person,” a staffer said. “He's very relational. If there's a person in the office, he knows that person's name. If it's a volunteer, whoever it is, he's going up, he's talking to them. He's telling me about their story. That's why he's attracted such a loyal following of staffers.” 

As an example, one staffer said Brown found himself on a flight with then-Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) last cycle, and switched seats in order to sit next to him. They spent the flight chatting, and by the end, the staffer said Sisolak told Brown that he would win the state if every voter could spend five minutes talking to him. (According to a former Sisolak aide, the two did sit next to each other on a plane, but Sisolak never said anything of the sort.) 

On policy

Staff say Brown’s main focus is economic policy — proposals include ending taxation on tips and Social Security benefits, opening up more federal land for housing, lowering taxes and cutting government spending and regulations.

His overall approach is standard GOP orthodoxy — less government.

“The Democrat Party sort of represents an intrusion and additional involvement in people's lives that tends toward higher taxes, more regulations, just less freedom at the end of the day,” he said. “I aligned myself with a party that believed in smaller government, and individual freedoms and allowed people to pursue a life of the American dream.”

He has a particular interest in energy policy, which is spurred by a belief that federal investment in renewable energy is the wrong approach. As a lover of the outdoors, he said he is concerned by the Bureau of Land Management’s plan to designate as much as 12 million acres of federal land for utility-scale solar development. 

“Our family’s a very avid outdoors family,” he said. “I don’t want to see 12 million acres covered with solar panels or highly reflective metals. That’s going to destroy part of the beauty (of) what makes Nevada attractive.”

Brown is also a strong backer of the cryptocurrency industry, saying that Democrats, including Rosen, prefer the banking system in order to spy on Americans’ bank accounts via the Internal Revenue Service, and that crypto offers privacy and security — and needs to be protected from government regulation. 

And he said he also believes that Nevada needs a more aggressive approach in Colorado River water negotiations, wanting to be a federal voice calling for greater accountability for California rather than increased conservation efforts in Nevada.

The prevailing thread in his ambitions — from the military to the campaign — has been a conviction in his leadership abilities. It’s the quality that draws staff to him, making him an inspiring figure, and frustrates some in the Nevada political class, presenting as an arrogance about his role in the state he’s called home for six years. 

Above all, it’s why he’s running.

“Our country needs people who can stand up and lead on behalf of all of us,” Brown said. “[The Senate] was where there was maybe the highest need. And so that’s where we jumped in.”

This story was updated at 5:30 a.m. on 10/23/24 to include comment from the NRSC. It was updated against at 6:30 a.m. to reflect the current spending disparity between Brown and Rosen.