In Nevada Senate race, Democrats turn to a battle-tested abortion message

Hours after Sam Brown clinched Nevada’s Republican Senate nomination Tuesday night, his Democratic opponent released an ad highlighting his support of a 20-week abortion ban in Texas a decade ago — turning to a battle-tested playbook as Democrats look to fend off Republican inroads here.

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen’s ad features a Nevada woman who says she was not able to get the medical care she needed to terminate her pregnancy in her then-home state of Texas because of its 2013 ban on abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation — even though she had learned from her doctor that her son’s brain was separated from his spinal cord and he was unlikely to survive. Brown, while running for a Texas state House seat the year after the law passed, said he supported it.

“Because of the law Sam Brown pushed for, I had to leave Texas to get the care that I needed,” Valerie Peterson says in the ad scheduled to began airing in Nevada on Wednesday morning. “Now I live in Nevada, and I can’t watch Sam Brown take away our rights here, too.”

As Democrats navigate difficult political and economic terrain in Nevada, some believe their best hope for victory — both in this Senate race and for President Biden’s reelection — is to boost turnout among disenchanted Democrats and independents by convincing them that abortion rights are at risk, even in a state that is among the most supportive of abortion rights in the country.

Vice President Harris, second gentleman Doug Emhoff and other Democratic officials have tried to raise alarms in Nevada about the prospect that GOP control of the Senate and the White House could make a national abortion ban a reality. A coalition of abortion rights groups recently announced that they have gathered enough signatures for a Nevada ballot measure enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution, which Democrats hope will be another driver of turnout.

Brown, a retired Army captain who served in Afghanistan, insists he will not interfere with Nevada’s laws allowing abortion up until 24 weeks — protections overwhelmingly supported by voters in a referendum decades ago. He has said he will not vote for a national abortion ban in the Senate if Republicans gain control of that chamber. And in a February interview with NBC, he spoke of his empathy for women, including his wife, who have made the difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy.

Rosen has dismissed his assertions, relentlessly arguing that voters should focus on the support he expressed for the 2013 Texas abortion ban. “Believe his record,” Rosen said. “He is only softening himself for the November election.”

Brown described Rosen’s statements as an effort to mislead voters about his position.

“For Democrats to try to scare people around an issue that is so personal and requires empathy, requires support — it’s sad to me,” Brown said. “They should be running on a record of delivering for people, but they can’t.”

Interviews with more than two dozen women across Nevada in recent months suggest that Democrats’ biggest challenges will be changing the perception that abortion rights are safe in Nevada and countering the desire of many voters to simply tune out the election.

When Democrats earlier this year were predicting that the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision reviving a near-total ban on abortion would send shock waves across the nation, 40-year-old Vivian Garcia wasn’t paying any attention to the legal battle in her neighboring state, she said.

Watching her children play on the lawn of an outdoor mall here, Garcia questioned why Democrats were so fixated on issues like abortion when, in her view, they should be explaining how they would ease the financial burdens of “people that work really, really hard and pay their taxes.”

“It’s like they are trying to get your attention on something else when they really need to focus,” said Garcia, who works as an assistant director at a housekeeping business. She backed Biden in 2020 “because we wanted to see something different,” she said. Now, dealing with the rising cost of rent, “crazy” interest rates and gas prices, she’s not sure which party she will support in the presidential and Senate races.

Polls in Nevada are showing flashing warning signs for Democrats — particularly the softening support of Hispanic voters and younger voters. Biden won the state in 2020, but a New York Times-Siena College poll conducted in late April and early May showed that 38 percent of Nevada registered voters said they would support Biden and 50 percent would back Donald Trump if the presidential race was a two-way matchup.

In the Senate race, Rosen fared better than Biden in the poll — with 40 percent of registered voters stating they would back her and 38 percent stating they would support Brown before he won the nomination. But 23 percent said they didn’t know. Democratic organizers in Nevada believe abortion rights will be a salient issue for frustrated younger voters — particularly women — who are not enthusiastic about either candidate at the top of the ticket, but would turn out if they believed their vote mattered on that issue.

Facing voter discontent with the economy in 2022, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) charted much of the same strategy that Democrats are now employing in Rosen’s race. Leaning into the outrage over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, she kept a steady focus on the issue, ultimately defeating Republican Adam Laxalt in one of the closest Senate races in the country.

Just as they did in 2022, Democrats are casting Brown and other GOP candidates in critical Senate races, including in Ohio and Arizona, as extremists. But many voters here said they were paying little attention to those attacks.

“It’s bad — rent, food, utilities. You cannot support yourself even with one job; you have to have two,” said Lorena Molina, a 58-year-old Nevadan who is undecided about whether to back Democrats or Republicans in November. When asked about Republican efforts to curtail abortion rights in other states, Molina argued that couples should be more responsible about contraception and said she would rather see her Nevada representatives focus on how to keep landlords from raising rent.

Jennifer Paulson, a pharmacist from Las Vegas, said she has little interest in voting this year. But she will cast a ballot “if the threats to women’s rights feel real,” she said as she loaded groceries into her trunk.

“They should quit making it a priority to take rights away from women,” Paulson said. While she hasn’t seen clear evidence that Republicans would succeed in passing a national abortion ban in the Senate, “if that was somehow a thing, then yeah, I’d definitely go [vote], for sure.”

Lindsey Harmon, president of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom — which collected more than 200,000 signatures to ensure that the abortion rights measure qualifies for the November ballot — said the group drew “record numbers of volunteers who wanted to help us gather signatures.”

When asked whether she had concerns that some of the state’s voters are not closely following the legislative battles over abortion in other states, she said the message is that Nevadans “can’t take anything for granted.”

“We do have statutory protections in the state of Nevada. But I think what we’re learning is that border states — like Idaho, Utah, Arizona — are going to depend on our state to do what’s right, to step up, protect them and the patients that we serve,” Harmon said.

Brown has spoken about leading “with compassion” on the issue and underscores that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and risks to the life and health of a mother. When Brown’s wife, Amy, spoke in the NBC interview about her regrets over having abortion as a 24-year-old before they met, she said she did not feel judged by her husband even though he describes himself as “pro-life.”

But the Republican candidate has been difficult to pin down on some aspects of the abortion debate. He declined, for example, to take a position on whether Arizona’s near-total ban should have been enforced (before that state’s legislature repealed it) stating simply that he is “pro-life and believe[s] the issue is now correctly left at the state level.”

When asked about his 2014 support for Texas’s 20-week abortion ban that did not include exceptions for rape or incest, Brown said there is no inconsistency, because his position then mirrored what the voters of that state wanted at the time.

Rosen said she is trying to convince Nevada voters that abortion rights are not protected in Nevada “because if Sam Brown wins — or if any of those other [Republican] candidates win — they will 100 percent put a nationwide ban in.”

“I live here in Las Vegas,” Rosen said. “I will bet the house on it.”

Brown said he will stand by the protections that voters approved in Nevada decades ago.

“I have been consistent that this in an issue that needs to be addressed by the people at a state level,” Brown said.

Carolyn Rose, a Las Vegas Republican who wants to see the GOP win control of the Senate and the White House, said she was relieved that Brown was clear about his position on abortion early in the race.

“Don’t pull punches and don’t act like you’re hiding something,” said Rose, 75, when asked how Republicans could address the issue in a more effective way. “Say it and then be done with it and move on to something else.”

By Maeve Reston

Maeve Reston is a national political reporter for The Washington Post covering the 2024 presidential race and the politics of the West. She joined The Post in 2023 after covering politics and five presidential campaigns at CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Austin American-Statesman.