With a week left until Election Day, Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has garnered attention in a handful of states with Senate races that warrant his presence. Nevada is one of them.
“The reason I’m here today is because I’m watching this race tighten to the very end here in Nevada,” Daines said Tuesday in Las Vegas with Sam Brown, the Republican challenger to Sen. Jacky Rosen. He spoke at a media event. , a Democrat. Rosen served one term in the House of Representatives and was elected to the Senate in 2018.
“It’s no secret, but polls show that Sam has significantly depleted resources and has been trailing for months. The reason why so many resources have flowed into Nevada in the last 10 days is because this race is Sam’s “Because it’s pushing in that direction,” Daines said, adding, “It’s an internal voting effect.” Republicans are putting a lot of big resources into this as well, as the race appears to be heating up.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, has poured more than $6 million into Nevada to support Brown, NBC reported last week.
Daines noted that as of Tuesday morning, Republicans had an advantage in Nevada with 38,000 voters in early voting and mail-in voting across the state.
“When you see that enthusiasm, that excitement, that intensity, prognosticators would typically say that independent voters are probably going to follow where the surge is happening, which means the polls are getting tougher. .”
The state of the Senate this cycle favors Republicans, and even if Rosen wins Nevada, Republicans are in a good position to wrest control of the Senate from Democrats.
According to the aggregator site Fivethirtyeight.com, Mr. Rosen still leads in most polls, with an average margin of seven points. Last week, only one Republican partisan sponsor, the Senate Opportunity Fund, campaigned.
Real Clear Polling has Rosen leading by an average of 4.7 points across seven polls, ranging from a low of +2 to a high of +9.
“We have momentum. The problem is on our side,” Brown said.
He was given the opportunity to embrace the former president’s important issues. Regarding President Donald Trump’s plan to mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, Brown said it would be a “very large scale logistical undertaking,” but asked whether he agreed with Trump’s plan. declined to make a statement, instead speaking about the need for border security. .
“Once we secure our borders, I think we need to rethink our immigration policies and make sure there’s an easier way for people to be good contributors to the United States and good members of society.” By doing so, we make it harder for criminals and people who are not good members of society and our country to do it,” Brown said.
Brown, a West Point graduate and Army captain, was severely burned by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan. He was most recently the owner of Palisades Strategies LLC, a company that provides pharmaceutical benefit services to veterans. The company won more than $2.7 million in federal contracts in 2020-2021.
A report released earlier this year by a team of medical experts found that veterans’ reimbursements for companies like the one formerly owned by Mr. Brown increase costs and pose an existential threat to the VA health care system. They say it is putting the care of veterans at risk.
The cost of referring veterans to non-governmental health care providers increased from $14.8 billion in fiscal year 2018 to $28.5 billion in 2023 due to the Veterans Choice Act passed during the presidential campaign. The mission law was passed in 2018 during the Barack Obama and Trump administrations, according to the report.
Cutting costs for Americans was a central promise of Mr. Brown’s campaign.
Brown suggested that the high cost of privatization could be due to government bureaucracy. If veterans’ health care relies on expanded access to the private sector, “we need to do that, but we also don’t need to completely fire the Veterans Administration,” he said.
Daines defended the rising costs, noting that the sparsely populated rural areas of Nevada and other Western states lack resources for veterans and rely on private providers. did.
“This is about taking care of our veterans; it’s about giving them options,” he said, praising Trump’s 2018 policies. “Look, they paid the price.”
Asked how important Nevada is to next week’s election, Daines pointed to the fact that Trump was in Nevada last Thursday and will return this week. “I’m here today,” he said. “There’s no need to say more.”
