Catherine Cortez Masto has the dubious honor of being considered the Democrats’ most vulnerable senator in the 2022 midterms, facing off a challenge from Republican Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general.
Catherine Cortez Masto, 58, worked as a federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, before winning election to serve as state attorney general, where she spearheaded high-profile prosecutions of drug- and sex-traffickers and passed a law to make sex trafficking a felony. She also helped make it possible for victims of domestic and sexual violence to sue the perpetrators.
The granddaughter of a Mexican immigrant from Chihuahua, she was the first Latina elected to serve in the US Senate when she began her first term in 2017. And yet now she finds herself fighting for the sizeable Latino vote in her state, where the Senate race is one of the closest.
A conservative super PAC is spending nearly $2 million on Spanish-language ads looking to paint her as soft on crime despite Cortez Masto having been endorsed by the Nevada Police Union.
To hear her tell it, she always expected the race to be close.
“Nevada is a purple state and it’s independent and it’s strong,” she told Vox in an early October interview. “I also know a lot of the polling gets Nevada wrong, so I really don’t utilize or worry about that.”
But her even-handed attitude and careful demeanor may be as much of a hindrance as a help, according to at least one ally.
People “need to know that she’s genuine, that she is hard-working, and that she’s out here fighting for us”, said Chris Roberts, the Democratic Party chairman of Clark County, home to more than 70 percent of Nevadans. “We’re doing everything we can to spread that message and make sure people know that, but I can certainly understand why folks would feel a little distant from her,” he told The New York Times.
Standing in stark contrast is her opponent, Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general who has unabashedly embraced the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and who derides “wokeness”, telling an April rally that he hoped to win a Senate seat “so we can hold these leftists accountable”.
Laxalt, 44, graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University and the Georgetown University Law Center before serving as a Naval Officer. He is also an Iraq war veteran who served in detainee operations during the US surge.
He has made an effort to reach out to Latino voters and portrays himself as a devout and doting father. But issues regarding family and legacy quickly become thorny.
Laxalt grew up without his father, only finding out who he was when his mother revealed in 2013 that she had an affair with a Republican senator from New Mexico, Pete Domenici, according to The New York Times.
His grandfather, Paul Laxalt, served as governor of Nevada and as a US senator, and was a longtime figure in the state’s Republican Party and on the national circuit due to his close personal friendship with Ronald Reagan. The elder Laxalt served as chairman on all three of Reagan’s presidential campaigns.
But not everyone sees Adam Laxalt as proudly carrying on the family’s GOP tradition.
Fourteen members of his family endorsed Cortez Masto in an October 12 letter obtained by the Nevada Independent, although they did not mention Laxalt by name, instead simply saying: “We believe that Catherine possesses a set of qualities that clearly speak of what we like to call ‘Nevada grit’.”
It was not the first time the Laxalt family had gone public with comments on Adam. In a 2018 column in the Reno Gazette Journal, 12 Laxalt family members called on their fellow Nevadans not to vote for him as he sought the governorship.
“We are writing as members of the Laxalt family who have spent our lives in Nevada, and feel compelled to protect our family name from being leveraged and exploited by Adam Laxalt,” they wrote. But nearly two dozen other relatives defended the candidate in the same paper, calling the initial column a “vicious and entirely baseless attack”.
Nevada has been one of the states hit hardest by inflation, particularly rising gas prices, which – while falling – remain well above the national average. Like many Republicans, Laxalt is hoping that economic uncertainty will be a major factor in driving voters across the country to oust incumbents. And if history is to be any guide, he may be right.
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