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Incumbent Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) is projected to win his second term, defeating Republican challenger Sigal Chattah, who sued the state over COVID restrictions and played up right-wing culture war issues as a candidate.
The race pitted a relatively low-key Democrat against a Republican who gained a reputation for offensive comments.
As Attorney General, Ford secured hundreds of millions of dollars to the state in settlements with drug manufacturers and distributors as a result of litigation related to opioid addiction. He has also supported efforts to reform the criminal justice system, as well new laws limit the freedom to knock and authorize his agency to conduct so-called pattern and practice investigations into civil rights complaints filed against police departments.
Chattah, on the other hand, has said Ford is “anti-police” — but that’s just the beginning. “This man should be hanging from the devil’s crane,” she wrote in a text message which later became public.
He later said of the text, “I would never attach a racial context to hanging from a crane” and “That’s my culture…that’s what’s done to Middle Eastern people, traitors. And that’s just part of my idiom. Chattah is a Yemeni Jewish heritage . “We are Middle Eastern Blacks,” he said separately.
Ford, who is black, said Chattah’s remark about his hanging showed that he “has no respect for my dignity as a human being.”
Separately, Chattah said in a tweet that America needs “a lot less pronouns, trannys, criminals and corruption.” Chattah, who courted controversy for using slurs when talking about transgender people defended doing so by saying the word was “part of American culture.” He has also said that “sexually deviant curricula” should be removed from schools. “I see no reason why drag queens should read books to children,” he told the Nevada Current.
Chattah gained notoriety in the state for his lawsuits – one successful, onenot — against COVID safety measures.
Ford, on the other hand, said it is the state’s duty to protect public health during an uncertain pandemic.
“We worked hard to make sure we stayed on the right side of the Constitution, as evidenced by the fact that the courts agreed with us 99% of the time on those restrictions,” he said. Nevada Newsmakers.
In this Dec. 14, 2018, file photo, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford speaks to The Associated Press in Las Vegas.
Nevada law protects the right to an abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy, and a ballot measure passed in 1990 protects that law from being changed by the legislature. Chattah has acknowledged the law, telling Vox, “I will never prosecute or extradite any woman to another state for an abortion if the action is legal in Nevada.” But he has also said he personally believes “life begins with the fetal heartbeat” and wrote on his campaign website that he supports “a heartbeat question similar to the one Texas passed.”
Ford said on Nevada Newsmakers that Chattah didn’t buy into the pro-choice mindset in the state, and that’s what we need to be concerned about.
The Republican addressed the crime rate during the campaign, even as The Nevada Independent reported that the state had seen an overall drop in crime during Ford’s tenure.
Unlike some other Republicans nationwide, Chattah has said he doesn’t believe the 2020 election was stolen, citing a lack of “concrete evidence that it was stolen.” Still, he told KLAS in Las Vegas, “We have evidence of voter fraud.”
Legitimate voter fraud criminal cases are extremely rare. In Nevada, there is only one 2020 election case against a man who pleaded guilty on his dead wife’s ballot. The man, Kirk Hartle, was the CFO of the company that organized the Donald Trump rally; he claimed before he was charged that it was “sick” to vote for his dead wife.
“Voter fraud is rare, but when it happens, it undermines confidence in our election system and my office will not tolerate it,” Ford said when Hartle was charged. “I want to emphasize that our office investigates all credible allegations of voter fraud and works to bring all offenders to justice.”
Still, Chattah has been supportive requires voter ID and represented a political action committee supporting opposition to the state’s universal mail-in voting law, the Independent reported.
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