I'm Joe Lombardo

Start with the traffic stop, because it is short and it is the whole man. On May 15 of this year a Las Vegas Metro sergeant stopped a car near Mandalay Bay for a red-light violation, a right turn onto Giles Street, and walked up to the window, and the body camera has the rest. "The reason I'm stopping you is for the," the sergeant begins, and does not get to finish. "I'm Joe Lombardo," the driver says. "I'm aware," the sergeant says, and then finishes: "For the red light violation back there. Your right turn onto Giles." "Come on man," says the Governor of Nevada. "You are good to go, sir," says the sergeant. "Appreciate you. Have a good day." No citation, and within minutes the man who ran the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for eight years before he ran the state was on his way to the airport. A Reno man filed an ethics complaint in July, and the Governor's campaign answered that he and his wife "were briefly pulled over on their way to the airport over a question about whether Governor Lombardo had come to a complete stop while turning," that he "fully complied with all instructions," that he said his name "simply" as a courtesy and never invoked his office, and that "he remains grateful for the professionalism of the officer involved." The paper does not doubt it. It would simply note that there is only one driver in Nevada for whom "I'm Joe Lombardo" is a complete answer to a traffic stop, and he is asking for four more years of it.

It is not the first time the badge has done his talking. In 2023 the Nevada Commission on Ethics looked at 34 images from his 2022 campaign in which Sheriff Lombardo appeared in his uniform and with his badge, counted 68 violations of the law that says you may not use the office to run for the next one, and its staff recommended more than $1.6 million in penalties. The commission's lawyer put the finding in one sentence: "The subject was aware of the ethics law and chose to violate the law nonetheless." The commission voted that the violation was willful, censured him and fined him $20,000, and the Governor's response was to sue the commission, on the theory that the legislature's appointing half its members deprived him of "his exclusive power to see that the laws are faithfully executed." A district judge threw the suit out; the Supreme Court revived it last year; and last fall the whole thing was settled for a $5,000 payment to the general fund that both sides agreed was not a fine, with no admission, no finding of willfulness, and no censure. The paper is told this took four years. The Governor's lawyers called the original case "gross overreach." The paper calls it the only time in his career that Joe Lombardo has been pulled over and not let go, and notes that he eventually was.

Now the record, which is mostly a record of saying no. In his first session, 2023, the Governor vetoed 75 bills, the most in the history of the state. In 2025 he vetoed 87, a new record, and the paper has read the list. He vetoed a bill barring people convicted of hate crimes from owning guns, a bill raising the age for semiautomatic rifles to 21, and a bill keeping guns out of polling places. He vetoed a cap on rent increases for seniors. He vetoed paid family leave. He vetoed coverage for IVF. He vetoed a bill that would have kept immigration agents off school grounds without a judicial warrant. And he vetoed the voter ID bill, which is the one the paper wants to dwell on, because his veto message opens with "I wholeheartedly support Voter ID and am appreciative of the effort to codify it into statute" and then explains that he cannot sign it. It is a remarkable paragraph. A Republican governor in a swing state, handed by a Democratic legislature the thing his party has demanded for twenty years, found that it was not quite the thing, and sent it back. This month he told a room of donors what he thinks of the state he governs. The Nevada Current obtained the audio of an October fundraiser: "There's no place easier to vote in the nation than Nevada. Unfortunately." The room laughed. He went on to the mail ballots that count after Election Day, "What I'm driving at is there's no excuse. No excuse," which is the Governor of a universal-mail state telling his own donors, eight days into an early vote he is asking Nevadans to join, that the ballots are suspect. The week before, the Current reports, he campaigned with Joey Gilbert, the man who sued in 2022 to overturn Joe Lombardo's own primary win on a fraud theory a judge threw out. The campaign did not answer the Current's question about what "unfortunately" meant. The paper has met this reflex before, in the 2022 debate where he was asked whether Donald Trump had been a great president and said, "I wouldn't use that adjective," and then "He was a sound president," and then, the next morning, through his campaign: "By all measures, Donald J. Trump was a great President." The man is not a weathervane. A weathervane commits.

Here is where that reflex has left Nevada. In April 2025, with the tariffs new and the Canadian visitors already turning around, the Governor went on KLAS and said this about the President's trade war: "I think we maybe need to feel a little pain in the short term and hopefully in the long-term benefit for us." Nevadans then felt it. Las Vegas lost 3.1 million visitors in 2025, a 7.5 percent drop that the convention authority's own numbers say is the steepest outside the pandemic since it started counting in 1970. Canadian visits fell 17.4 percent. By June of this year the state's unemployment rate was 5.1 percent, among the highest in the country, and barely half the hotel rooms downtown were full in August. The Governor's own summary, last August, was "Right now, we're obviously in the doldrums, right?" His campaign's summary this August was that "no governor can control every national or global economic headwind," which is true, and which is not the same as a governor who told the headwind to come on in. Meanwhile the Attorney General, Aaron Ford, who is running against him, joined 23 other states in August to sue over the tariffs, on the grounds that "these illegal tariffs are not paid by foreign governments. They're paid by Nevadan consumers and businesses." One of the two men running for Governor of Nevada went to court against the thing that emptied the Strip. The other one said it would be good for us. Diesel in Nevada this morning is $6.85 a gallon by AAA's count, $6.92 in Reno, against $3.91 a year ago, and the Governor's letter about fuel went to Gavin Newsom, about California's refineries, which is where 88 percent of Nevada's fuel comes from and is not where the tariffs or the President's October 9 diesel deal with Mr. Putin came from. The paper looked for one word from the Governor on that deal, the one six Republican senators called "a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies," and found none. His letters go to Sacramento. Nothing goes to Washington.

Then there is the hospital. The paper will be brief because the numbers are not. The President's big bill last summer capped the provider tax that Nevada uses to draw down federal Medicaid money, and the state's hospital association puts the loss to Nevada hospitals at $300 million in fiscal 2028 and $507 million in 2029; state officials in July said private hospitals could lose $600 to $700 million by the end of the next budget and that the uninsured rate could go from 15 percent to 18. About 147,000 Nevadans will be in the new work-requirement group when it starts on January 1. The provider tax that bill cut is the one that Nevada passed in 2023, with the Governor's signature, to pay for the state's first children's hospital, the one that is in more than $2.7 million of his advertising. And here the paper applies the test it applied in Iowa and Kansas, because the Governor, unlike Ashley Hinson and Roger Marshall, actually asked. In February 2025 he wrote to Senator Crapo and Congressman Guthrie, the two chairmen writing the bill, and told Nevada's legislature what he had told them: lowering the provider-tax safe harbor "would impose a major financial burden on more than 43 hospitals in Nevada," he was "actively engaged in conversations with the White House," and he wanted "a measured and responsible approach." Congress lowered it anyway. The President signed it on the Fourth of July. And the Governor praised the bill on the day it passed, for the tip deduction, and his office's position on the hospital money is now that he "supports every effort to increase access to high-quality health care for Nevada families." So the record reads: the one time Joe Lombardo asked Washington for something on paper, Washington said no, and Joe Lombardo applauded. The paper would put it this way. He built a children's hospital and then clapped for the men who took the money, and is now running on the hospital.

And then there is the President, whom the Governor cannot quite say and cannot quite not say. In November of last year he went to Washington and came home with a Truth Social post: "Joe Lombardo is SMART, STRONG, AND TOUGH, and he has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election." The Governor replied that he looked forward to continuing "our conservative agenda" and would "keep Nevada red!" In August of last year he lent 35 National Guard members to ICE, federally funded, on paper through November; the Guard later told the Nevada Independent it had been extended to this September without an announcement. In September he signed an agreement with the Justice Department and Nevada became the first state taken off the sanctuary list. He skipped the President's "no tax on tips" event in Las Vegas in April, and then in August he stood on the stage at Red Rock with the President, who asked him, "Will you please win by a big number?", and told the crowd, "But those billionaire friends provide jobs. And unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent." The pollster whose October survey has him two points up, Noble Predictive Insights, explains the lead this way: "The daylight that voters see between Joe Lombardo and Donald Trump on the economy is a key reason," and adds, "If Nevadans saw Lombardo like they do Trump, Aaron Ford could start picking out paint colors for the Governor's Mansion." The President's job approval in Nevada is 37 percent. There has been no public poll since, and the prediction markets, for whatever they are worth, have moved to Mr. Ford. The Governor's entire strategy is to be the President's man on every ballot but the one that counts, and he has been good at it, and the paper is writing this so that fewer people fall for it.

He will not debate. The paper has checked and there has been no debate, there is no debate scheduled, and there is now no time. Mr. Ford accepted two, one in the north on October 8 and one in Las Vegas on October 13 with the three television stations, and asked for a cost-of-living town hall and a Spanish-language debate on top of it. The Governor declined both and offered instead a "back-and-forth" on Alan Stock's show on KDWN, whose host told the Review-Journal he considers himself an ally of the Governor, and which Mr. Ford, for the record, has not taken either. Asked by the Review-Journal why he turned down the two debates, the Governor said, "I believe that's an environment that he has picked personally that would be conducive to him," and did not expand. Asked whether Nevadans should get to hear the two of them, he said, "No, I think they should, but they hear me every day … I haven't been hiding behind the curtains." By his opponent's count he has given nine interviews since the June primary and held one open press event; his campaign answers that he has sat down five times with the Nevada Independent and been on six podcasts. On October 8 in Carson City the forum went ahead with Mr. Ford on stage next to an empty podium, after a Republican assemblyman pulled the venue's sponsorship. "Joe Lombardo attempted to interfere and cancel today's debate because he's too scared," Mr. Ford said, to the podium. The last time Nevada elected a governor, in 2022, Mr. Lombardo debated. He was the challenger then.

What the Governor's side is doing instead of debating arrived in Nevada mailboxes on October 19. It is a mailer from something called Silver State Accountability, which registered with the state on October 8, after the last pre-election deadline for disclosing donors, so that nobody will know who paid for it until after the vote. It pairs the independent candidate for governor, Danielle Ford, a state school board member with no money and no relation to Aaron Ford, with a cutout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and calls her "the AOC of Nevada." The group's chairman is the treasurer of some eighty mostly Republican committees, its registered agent is in Oklahoma, and its address is a rented mailbox in the same complex as the Lombardo campaign office. Danielle Ford polls at 7 percent in the survey the Governor likes. The Lombardo campaign says it has no knowledge of the mailer. The paper has no reason to doubt the campaign, and every reason to note that someone with the Governor's address and the Governor's vendors is spending undisclosed money to make a 7 percent candidate sound like a Democrat, three weeks before an election the polls call a tie.

Now Mr. Ford, and the paper will do him the courtesy of starting with the worst thing. In December of last year a lawyer asked the Pardons Board to hear a sentence modification for Norman Smith, who in 2015, while out on bail for robbing tourists on the Strip, killed a pregnant woman named Tineshea Adams, and is serving 18 to 59 years. Only a member of the board can put a case on the agenda, and Mr. Ford did, the one commutation he sponsored all year. His office first said a prosecutor had written in support; the prosecutor then opposed it formally; the office then said it had meant a different letter. Mr. Ford missed the September hearing with a family emergency, the board denied the request, and his spokesman said he "would have voted no to any form of clemency or sentence modification for Norman Smith." Asked about it at the airport, he said, "Uhh, don't know which one you're talking about." The Governor has spent about $2 million on television calling this "Aaron Ford cares more about criminals than victims," with the Democratic district attorney of Clark County in the ad, and Mr. Ford calls it a "Willie Horton redo." It is not Willie Horton; nobody was released, and the board said no. It is a sloppy sponsorship followed by a worse week of explanations, and the paper, which has spent the week on a man who says "I'm Joe Lombardo" to a police sergeant, is not going to pretend it didn't notice. Nor the ads. Mr. Ford's two data-center spots open with "Data centers are raising our costs," which KTVN's reality check rated false, because NV Energy says the centers pay for their own power, and go on to "millions of dollars from data centers" and "over 200 million of your tax dollars," both rated misleading: the $2 million went to the Governor's PAC from two couples connected to the industry, and the $233 million in abatements went out under a 2015 program that a state senator named Aaron Ford co-sponsored. In August his campaign pulled an ad that used 2018 footage to suggest the Las Vegas police union was with him, after the union sent a cease-and-desist letter. The paper holds its own side to the same standard it holds the other, and that is one false, two misleading, and one pulled.

The rest of the record is the one the paper wants. Aaron Ford grew up poor in Texas, was a single parent in college on food stamps and Medicaid, waited tables, taught high school math, litigated for fifteen years, led the state Senate, and has been Attorney General since 2019. In the President's first year back he sued the administration forty times, over the dismantling of the Education Department, a frozen $6.8 billion in grants of which $53 million was Nevada's, the FEMA conditions, birthright citizenship, SNAP during the shutdown, and the tariffs. "Every time the president attempts to hand wave the Constitution away," he said in January, "he will see me in court." He brought home Nevada's $58 million share of the Purdue settlement. His campaign has one sentence in it, "I have only one top issue. Affordability," and the paper notes that he has matched the Governor's no-new-taxes pledge, which means the argument in Nevada this year is not about whether to raise your taxes but about whether the man in the mansion will say a word to Washington when Washington costs you your job. The Governor's answer, on tape, was that you should feel a little pain. Mr. Ford's answer, on the docket, was forty lawsuits. On Wednesday Kamala Harris stood with him at the Culinary union hall and told the canvassers they were "13 days away from doing something about it to stop the pain." The Governor's answer to that was a post noting she was in town.

So the paper's position. The Daily Buffoon endorses Aaron Ford for Governor of Nevada, with the Pardons Board matter on the record and not excused, because the choice in Nevada is between a man who sued the tariffs and a man who welcomed them, between a man who will stand next to an empty podium and a man who left it empty, and between a man who sponsored one bad hearing and a man who sponsored himself through a red light. Mr. Ford would be Nevada's first Black governor. He is tied, in a state where no Democrat has beaten a sitting Republican governor since 1982, against the largest war chest in the history of the office. Through Sunday night just under 400,000 Nevadans had voted, just under 20 percent of the rolls, and Democrats led by just under five points on the mail ballots the Governor finds unfortunate, while Republicans won the in-person vote; on this weekend in 2022 Republicans led by double digits. Early voting ends Friday. The paper goes on the record, dated October 26: there will be no debate; the Governor will reach November 3 without once putting the President's name next to the word "wrong"; and Nevada's hospitals will lose the provider-tax money on the schedule Congress wrote, with no public request from the Governor to delay or undo it. The paper would like Nevadans who have not yet voted to remember the one thing the Governor has never once said out loud in this campaign, which is the President's name next to the word "wrong," and to ask what he would say in a second term, when he no longer needs them.

The clowns. Four, not five, and the paper will say why, because it owes the fifth an explanation. The Governor is a careful man. He vetoes what the legislature sends him and signs what the President sends him, he stands next to the President at Red Rock and not at the tips event, he wholeheartedly supports voter ID and vetoes it, he thinks the President was sound and then great, he tells a room of donors that it is unfortunately easy to vote and then asks Nevadans to, and when the sergeant walked up to the window he did the one careless thing in four years and said his own name. The fifth clown is for men who don't know what they are doing. Joe Lombardo knows exactly what he is doing. That is the problem, and it is also why he gets four.