Incumbent Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) and Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo faced off in a 90-minute gubernatorial debate moderated by The Nevada Independent CEO Jon Ralston, parsing political positions and wading through loaded accusations waged by campaigns and Super PACs leading up to a high-stakes gubernatorial election.

The debate was available in a limited capacity as part of The Nevada Independent’s IndyFest event on Sunday and aired on local television stations on Monday night. It is the only Nevada gubernatorial debate to have taken place so far and occurred less than three weeks before the start of early voting in the state.

Sisolak is hoping to secure a second term as governor after being election in 2018, and previously worked as a Clark County commissioner for almost a decade. Lombardo as worked more than 20 years in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and was elected Clark County Sheriff in 2014. Recent polling suggests Lombardo may have a narrow edge over the incumbent, though most are within a margin of error.

Debate Highlights 

Sisolak called President Biden a “very good” president, even when presented with Biden’s dismal approval rating, both nationally and among Nevada voters.

“I think Joe Biden inherited a lot of problems from Donald Trump that he’s working through,” he asserted.

He also claimed that Biden and Democrats’ rampant spending is not to blame for the skyrocketing inflation crippling American families.

“He’s being accused of these inflation situations that are not necessarily his fault. I mean, he doesn’t control the price of gasoline no more than I control the price of chicken and ground beef at the stores,” he claimed.

When Ralston asked Lombardo if he thinks former President Donald Trump, who endorsed the GOP candidate in April of 2022, is “great,” Lombardo said he “wouldn’t say great.”

“I think he was a sound president,” he said. “I think he had policies that he brought forward [that were] beneficial to the country and, and supported the country, and moved the country forward versus backwards. And under the current tutelage of President Biden, we’re going backwards, in my opinion.”

After the debate, Lombardo’s campaign released a statement saying in part that “by all measures, Donald J. Trump was a great president and his accomplishments are some of the most impactful in American history.”

Lombardo said he did not believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, but said he believes there was a “modicum of fraud” and not enough to “change the election.”

“You’re never going to agree with anybody, 100 percent, with everything they do,” Lombardo said. “Even in my own party, there are people that don’t agree 100 percent of what I present forward. But you know, you’ve got to look at the totality of the person and their ideas and their leadership and support it in that aspect, because you’re never going to have the perfect candidate.”  

Crime 

Given Lombardo’s role as sheriff in Nevada’s largest county, crime has arisen as a hot topic on the campaign trail. Sisolak has accused Lombardo of overseeing an increase in crime, while Lombardo has accused Sisolak’s soft-on-crime legislation of boosting certain kinds of crimes. 

Lombardo responded to one political attack ad which accuses him of cutting 112 officer positions, disbanding the department’s gang unit, and giving contracts to campaign donors. He clarified that the positions cut were not police officer positions, were the result of budget shortcomings during the pandemic, and have reportedly been restored. He said the gang unit was not disbanded, but was instead moved out to different area commands to boost investigation quality. Some of the officers who were moved to area commands have since been placed back in another gang unit to retain “intelligence functions.”

Regarding the accusation that issued contracted to donors, he said the contract referred to in the ad is an $18 million contract with Motorola for radios and was signed under the previous sheriff — he continued the contract with the approval of the department’s fiscal affairs board.

Lombardo also commented on certain crimes rising in Clark County and blamed Sisolak’s passage of soft-on-crime legislation.

“For six years of my tenure, crime, in totality, went down 35 percent,” he said. “The last two years, crime has increased. Last year it was 5 percent, this year, year-to-date, is 3 percent. And that is a direct result of the Legislature, the management and the oversight that is provided by our sitting governor.” 

“The threshold associated with larceny [went from] from $900 to $1,200 — larceny numbers have increased 17 percent as a result of that. Stolen vehicles, you can’t get a conviction on first time offense. Stolen vehicles has increased 22 percent. Thresholds associated with sales and trafficking of narcotics…90 percent of all crime has a narcotics nexus,” he continued. 

Northshore Labs

The Northshore Labs debacle has provided fuel for the Lombardo campaign, in what The Nevada Independent describes as a “politically well-connected firm…which ran COVID tests for the City of Henderson and UNR before having its contract terminated after a review from UNR found 96 percent of a sample of tests conducted at an on-campus site were false-negatives.”

ProPublica and The Nevada Independent published the investigation in May which detailed “the company’s connections to the state and the contracting process.”

Ralston asked Sisolak why he did not notify the public as soon as he knew the tests were faulty and the company was corrupt, to which Sisolak said he was cooperating with a federal investigation.

“We were trying to expand our testing capabilities, our capacity,” Sisolak said, explaining that several other states were using the company’s services. “I never intervened on behalf of this company, they never got one penny of the state’s resources, and as soon as we found out, we suspended their operations.”

He also denied fast-tracking the contract as a political favor for a major donor to his campaign, whose sons were both involved with the process of Northshore Labs coming to Nevada.

“This guy, on my life, on my mother, my children, my wife’s life, never asked me about this,” Sisolak said.

Lombardo contended that Sisolak’s actions represent “vicarious liability” and said a governor must account for “everything that [his] agency does.”

“You should have, front facing, as the leader of the state, said, ‘Hey, if you took this test, come in and get another test because we have determined that a percentage of the majority were false, for your personal safety,” Lombardo said. 

 Education, Coronavirus Response, and Abortion

Sisolak said he is actively against school choice because the state “cannot afford to have school choice right now,” and claimed Lombardo’s voucher program plan could take $300 million in state money from public schools.

Lombardo fired back saying that students’ access to education should not be limited “because of the ZIP codes we live in.” Lombardo also argued school choice would not take money from public schools and instead is a “different way of doing business.”

 Lombardo also hammered Sisolak’s “draconian” coronavirus pandemic response, and slammed him for taking his cues from radical-left California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). In 2020, Sisolak ordered most businesses to shut down, including hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. The closures lasted through June 2020, and other restrictions like masking continued through 2022.

“We were caught up in the COVID malaise and the economy and the mortality much longer than we should have been,” Lombardo said. 

Sisolak said that he was more focused on limiting coronavirus deaths and that he did the best he could with the limited information he had during the beginning of the pandemic. 

“I had regular consultations with our medical community, our medical advisory team and the business community,” Sisolak said. “At the time, it was predicted we could lose upwards of 40,000 Nevadans. We still lost, at the last count, 11,501. I’m sorry about every one of those lives lost. Yes, our businesses suffered, but we have come back stronger than anybody anticipated.”

On the topic of abortion, Sisolak affirmed his pro-abortion position, but shied away from the extreme position held by many Democrats that women should have the ability to terminate their pregnancies through all nine months.

“Let me make this crystal clear … I support unequivocally a woman’s right to choose; her health care decisions are between her and her doctor,” Sisolak said. “…I do not think that she would have a right to make that decision at 35 weeks, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Sisolak, like many other vulnerable Democrats, has made abortion central to his campaign after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The embattled governor often claims Lombardo would not “hesitate to implement abortion bans and restrictions in Nevada,” despite the fact that Nevadans voted to codify the “right to abortion” up to 24 weeks in 1990. The law can only be overturned by Nevadans, not the state legislature or governor.

“It’s unfortunate the governor doesn’t have enough respect for the voters to realize that it’s codified in law,” Lombardo said. “There’s nothing that the governor can do to change it.”

Lombardo clarified the parameters of his pro-life stance, noting that he supports parental notification with exceptions for rape and incest, as well as contraceptive access. He also said he would favor mandatory waiting periods but does not support mandatory ultrasounds. He said he would support Nevadans if they wanted to vote to limit the ability to procure an abortion more than 24 weeks.

“My personal belief is pro-life. That’s what I believe internally,” he said. “It’s a vote of the people. And if the people want to change it, I will support that.”