The neck-and-neck 2022 US Senate race in Nevada has already drawn national attention. And the candidates understand that no one’s going to be given the seat—especially the challenger.

After a 6-stop tour and driving over 700 miles in one day, Republican candidate Adam Laxalt, the former Attorney General of Nevada, made his final stop at Wahoo’s Fish Tacos in Henderson, to grab a bite and speak to the Nevada Young Republicans. The Nevada Globe was able to chat with Laxalt for nearly 20 minutes about what he learned in 2018, what he is doing to win in 2021, and what he will do in 2022 should he win the US Senate race by defeating first-term Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.

The Nevada Globe: So let’s start with your race against Steve Sisolak for Governor of Nevada. What do you think went wrong, and did you take away any lessons learned from that race that you are bringing to your Senate race against Masto?

Adam Laxalt: So first and foremost, 2018 was the bluest year Nevada ever had. We all learn from things that we don’t succeed in. Of course I learned some things. We learn from anything in life that doesn’t go in the direction you want it to. Do I think anyone could have won that race? No. It was a blue year. And unfortunately, not only was it a blue year, but  we were missing over 100,000 Trump voters who did not show up because they was so disappointed in other Republicans in the state who were not supporting the President.

So we had this lethal combo of massive, near-presidential Democrat turnout and lower Republican turnout. You cannot win a close swing state when those two things happen. Yet, this is an entirely different environment, dare I say, the exact opposite environment. We have a highly engaged, highly motivated Republican electorate and someone like me at the top of the ticket who was a Trump co chair for the President, who supported the president, and now, someone who he has endorsed right out of the gate.

We believe that unifies the ticket. We believe that this will ensure Republicans turnout because they know they’ve got a champion for conservatives in this state. We think it’s really important for us to be a driving engine, trying to make sure that 2018 doesn’t happen again and that a bunch of our people are not again disaffected Republicans and just decide they’re not going to show up.

In the inverse of course, Democrats have the presidency, they have the power. It is just natural that their voters become a little less motivated. We also have the fact that independents are breaking double digits in the direction of Republicans. We all know Clark County is at least a third independent, and now they’re breaking 10-plus points for Republicans.

We need to get the voters out and make sure we continue to tell them that the Left and everything they represent is terrible for our country and our state.

We feel really confident that we are going to win this.

Non Partisans have been the largest growing segment of voter registration.  How do you convince them to vote for a Republican on election day? What is your messaging?  

Everyone has a political view. We don’t need to do anything–other than show what the Left is doing to America.

I don’t care if you’re an independent, or you’re a suburban Mom, or you’re a swing voter, or you’re a moderate Democrat–you think an open border is dangerous for our country and our state; you think critical race theory is dangerous for our children and increases, strife, and problems in our schools and for our children; you think that the BLM movement was not what they sold itself as. They’re a dangerous movement, undermining law enforcement and the rule of law in this state and makes this state, this country, and makes our communities less safe.

These issues are issues that no one is supporting–except the Left and my opponent Catherine Cortez Masto.

We have reported that she has been dancing the line between the Bernie Sanders and Harry Reid wings of the Nevada Democrat Party.  She has recently switched her position on taxing the mines….

Look, Sisolak and Masto ran as moderate centrists to win this state because we are not a liberal state.  They are chameleons and they lie to the voters, and then they get in. There is now no doubt they are hard Left Democrats. Catherine Cortez Masto has voted with Chuck Schumer 98% of the time. She is supporting this $3.5 trillion bill, as is Bernie Sanders. Does anybody think of Masto as the Joe Manchin of the United States Senate?! No, of course not.

She did not stand up against BLM when they shot a police officer in the head. She didn’t take to the microphone and say “Whoa whoa whoa, I’m the former top law enforcement officer of this state, I draw the line here and it’s dangerous for our community.”  No, she did not speak out against her radical base.

Three weeks ago she voted against the defunding of critical race theory, which is highly unpopular, because her base loves this indoctrination.

We need someone to stand up for Nevadans. She stands with the ruling elites, she stands with Washington.

Let’s talk about election integrity. Polling shows that a majority of Democrats and Republicans want safe and secure elections. You stuck your neck out in 2020 by challenging the election results and that has continued to cause attacks on your campaign and character. Can you comment on the fight over the validity of the 2020 Nevada election and your overall efforts and outcomes of your challenge? 

Yes. I have been consistent. The Democrats went into a special sessions 97 days before the biggest election in the history of our state. They went in and they gave us mail-out balloting, ballot harvesting, drop boxes. We had never done any of these things before. We didn’t have clean voter rolls. The Clark County Registrar admitted that they knew that the system wasn’t ready for this, but they gave in anyway. That very night, I put out a tweet, and called out the Democrats and what they’re doing and President Trump  jumped on top of it.  We said, look at what the Democrats are doing. They’re changing the system to defeat Donald Trump.

We spent three months highlighting numerous examples–like voters who got 19 ballots to their apartment in Las Vegas. All  the things we did was to basically say that this all mail-in election was not ready for primetime. We can’t simply switch to mail balloting with only three months til Election Day.  That is not smart. It is not going to be safe. 100,000 voters moved out of Las Vegas. When Joe Gloria, Registrar of Clark County, wasasked in a press conference about these voters, “What are you doing about this? How are you confirming whether or not they are still here or voting? He said, ” That’s not our job, we don’t have the resources to confirm that.”  This does not give anyone confidence. These are reasons why the majority of Nevadans think we didn’t have safe and secure elections, and so it’s important that we keep talking about it.  We want to raise the issues and fix the issues. No judge is going to throw out 100,000 ballots, but Clark County separated the ballots from the envelopes, so even if you knew there was a bad vote, you couldn’t get the ballot.

In blue collar or white collar crime, you have subpoena power and over a couple years you can put people under oath, you can have grand juries. You don’t have any of that stuff if you’re trying to look into election fraud within only two weeks. So, it’s a tough system.

So all we can do in 2022 is try to get people together, very early, and try to come up with a series of things we can do to do our best to make the election as safe as possible.

What are the top three things or the first three things you would do if elected?

The most important thing is to be the 51st seat in the United States Senate. When we win this race, and give Republicans the majority that stops this leftist march we are seeing out of Washington. Whether it’s $3.5 trillion, whether it’s potentially packing the Supreme Court, getting rid of the Electoral College, and we are a vote away, one vote breaking the filibuster. Our country is being radically transformed—nationalizing the election, all these things are right there. And so the most important thing is being that 51st vote that stops this leftist march in its tracks, until we go back and win the presidency, which we have to do to go save our country.

You know things that I’m particularly passionate about– judges. You know that is one of the most important things we can do is make sure we’re getting good, constitutionally-inclined judges, and certainly something I hope to be very much involved in. I served in Iraq, served in the Navy, and would certainly love to be involved in trying to expose what happened in Afghanistan, and actually bring more attention to this.

And then, you know, our state is mostly owned by the federal government, a lot of it, and so certainly I would like to do Interior. We have a lot of land issues and we need to make sure we’re doing our best to try to stand up for the people that are trying to earn a living in this state and the radical environmental left continues to crush those people, and these are the people that are getting left behind in Biden’s America.

Have Governor Sisolak and Senator Masto performed better, as you expected, or worse than you expected?

Sisolak had no qualifications to be a governor. He was a county commissioner and never led anything and it shows. He has been a terrible leader. He has been terrible at actually communicating what’s really happening and he’s led by a bunch of liberal activists. He has done a terrible job.

Masto hides out on everything that matters, and she has stood either silently or actively by the radical left for the last five years, and Nevadans need someone who’s actually gonna stand up for them. We believe this is the exact time when people are going to pick someone who’s going to stand up for Nevada and not side with big tech big corporations, the media, Hollywood… I mean this, this is the people who she represents, she doesn’t represent Nevadans.