RENO, Nevada – Retired Army Captain Sam Brown waits a late endorsement of former President Donald Trump will help propel him to victory in the state Senate’s GOP primary on Tuesday and give him the momentum he needs to win a general election race that Republicans see as one of their best chances of winning a seat in the closely divided chamber.
The winner of Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary will face the incumbent Democratic senator. Jacky Rosen in a fierce Senate race in a swing state.
Rosen, a first-term moderate defending her seat in a state that could also carry significant weight in the presidential race, is one of Republicans’ top targets in 2024. Democrats are defending many more Senate seats than Republicans this year, including open swing-state seats in Michigan and Arizona and seats held by incumbent Democrats in the competitive states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as Nevada.
Republicans also hope to gain seats currently held by Democrats in red regions of Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.
Brown, a Purple Heart recipient who was wounded while serving in Afghanistan, has long been considered the Republican Party’s front-runner in a crowded primary field since announcing he was running last summer, less than a year after losing his bid to challenge Nevada’s other Democratic senator in the western swing state.
He was heavily recruited by Republicans in Washington, D.C. and received the endorsement of the National Republican Senatorial Committee as soon as he announced his candidacy.
National Republicans have been deliberate in their attempt to avoid a repeat of their poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats exceeded expectations and maintained their tenuous majority in the Senate.
Before he can face Rosen, who faces token opposition in the Democratic primary from two challengers, Brown must weather a crowded field of primary opponents who criticized him for skipping debates and voted him as the establishment’s hand-picked candidate. The criticism echoes campaign themes made by Brown two years ago, when he was seen as the insurgent candidate against former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt. Laxalt won the Republican Party primary but lost to Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.
This year’s field of a dozen GOP candidates includes Trump’s former ambassador to Iceland, a dermatologist Jeff Gunterwho portrayed himself as “110% pro-Trump” and criticized Brown as the establishment’s choice.
Also in the race is Jim Marchant, who ran for Secretary of State in 2022 on a platform of election denial spurred by Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential race was stolen. Marchant raised his national profile in 2022 as organizer of a coalition of 17 Republican candidates who falsely challenged the election result. Every elected official in Nevada since 2006, he said, was “installed by the deep state cabal.”
Brown, who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan that left scars on his face, has made military service central to his message this campaign cycle, as he did during his unsuccessful 2022 Senate campaign. .
At campaign stops, he often recounted the explosion and the dozens of surgeries that followed, praising the leadership skills he learned in the Army and the Christian faith that sustained him during his recovery.
Trump’s endorsement on Sunday further boosted a candidate who already enjoyed a substantial fundraising advantage over his opponents. Trump repeatedly said he liked many of the candidates in the race and teased endorsements for weeks before officially announcing his support for Brown.
