Nevada’s incumbent attorney general Aaron Ford (D) is projected to win his second term in that office, 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 developed a reputation for offensive comments.
As attorney general, Ford secured hundreds of millions of dollars for the state in settlements with drug manufacturers and distributors as a result of lawsuits over opioid addiction. He’s also been supportive of criminal-legal system reform efforts, as well as new laws limiting no-knock warrants and giving his office authority to pursue so-called “pattern and practice” investigations into civil rights complaints against police departments.
Chattah, on the other hand, has said Ford is “anti-police” — but that’s just the start. “This guy should be hanging from a fucking crane,” she wrote in a text message that later became public.
She later said of the text: “I would never attribute a racial context to hanging from a crane” and “That is my culture … that’s what is done to people in the Middle East, to traitors. And that’s just part of my vernacular.” Chattah is of Yemenite Jewish heritage. ”We’re the Blacks of the Middle East,” she said separately.
Ford, who is Black, said Chattah’s remark about him being hanged showed she “doesn’t respect my dignity as a human.”
Separately, in a tweet, Chattah said America needed “a lot less pronoun badges, trannies, criminals and corruption.” When challenged over her use of a slur to talk about transgender people, Chattah defended doing so by saying the word was “part of the American culture.” She has also said “sexually deviant curriculums” should be removed from schools. “I don’t find any reason for drag queens reading books to children,” she told Nevada Current.
Chattah gained notoriety in the state for her lawsuits — one successful, one not — against COVID safety measures.
Ford, on the other hand, said it was incumbent upon the state to protect public health amid an uncertain pandemic.
“We worked very hard to be certain that we stayed on the right side of the Constitution, which is evidenced by the fact that the courts agreed with us 99% of the time on these restrictions,” he told Nevada Newsmakers.
Nevada law protects the right to an abortion through 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 any woman for terminating a pregnancy, nor will I extradite for prosecution to another state when an action is legal in Nevada.” But she has also said that she personally believes “life begins at the fetal heartbeat” and wrote on her campaign website that she would support “a ‘heartbeat’ ballot question similar to what Texas has passed.”
Ford said on Nevada Newsmakers that Chattah was “unfriendly to this notion of pro-choice that we have in this state, and we need to be concerned about that.”
The Republican made an issue of crime rates during the campaign, even as The Nevada Independent reported that the state had broadly seen a decline in crime levels during Ford’s tenure.
Unlike some other Republicans nationwide, Chattah has said she does not believe the 2020 election was stolen, citing the lack of “concrete proof that there was a steal.” Still, she told KLAS in Las Vegas, “we have evidence of voter fraud.”
Legitimate criminal cases of voter fraud are exceedingly rare. In Nevada, there’s been only one prosecuted case related to the 2020 election, against a man who pleaded guilty to voting on his late wife’s ballot. The man, Kirk Hartle, was the chief financial officer of a company that had hosted a rally for Donald Trump; he’d claimed before being charged that it was “sickening” that a ballot had been cast for his late wife.
“Voter fraud is rare, but when it happens it undercuts trust in our election system and will not be tolerated by my office,” Ford said when Hartle was charged. “I want to stress that our office will pursue any credible allegations of voter fraud and will work to bring any offenders to justice.”
Nonetheless, Chattah has supported requiring voter ID and represented a political action committee that supported opposing the state’s universal vote-by-mail law, the Independent reported.