Retired Army Capt. Sam Brown mounts 2nd bid for US Senate in Nevada after losing GOP primary in 2022

SPARKS, Nev. (AP) — Retired Army Capt. Sam Brown made his long-awaited U.S. Senate candidacy official on Monday, jumping into the race to take on Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen a year after losing the Republican nomination to challenge Nevada’s other U.S. senator.

In a nearly 30-minute speech Monday afternoon in the city of Sparks, which neighbors Reno, Brown spoke of his military background and family devotion while repeatedly casting himself as an outsider fighting against “Rosen and her D.C. friends.”

“She is a foot soldier for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Chuck Schumer,” Brown said in a warehouse where fans and shade helped shield more than 100 supporters from the summer heat. ”They’re all about those D.C. priorities. And she is carrying out their mission instead of ours.”

Brown, a Purple Heart recipient, was a heavily recruited candidate for Republicans in Washington looking to avoid a repeat of their lackluster showing in last year’s midterms, when flawed GOP candidates helped Democrats win battleground races and hold on to the Senate majority.

He will face a challenge in the Republican primary from Jim Marchant, a former state Assembly member who lost last year’s race for Nevada secretary of state after promoting Donald Trump’s lies of a stolen 2020 election.

Rosen, a first-term moderate in a presidential battleground state, is one of Republicans’ top targets in 2024. Democrats are facing a challenging 2024 Senate map, where they must defend incumbents not only in red states — Montana, Ohio and West Virginia — but also in multiple swing states.

Brown, who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan that scarred his face, made military service central to his unsuccessful 2022 Senate campaign. He finished second in the Republican primary to former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who went on to lose the general election to Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. Brown’s first campaign came in 2014, when he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Texas state Legislature.

Brown campaigned on the slogan of “Duty First” in 2022 and founded the Duty First PAC after his loss to support conservative candidates. At campaign stops, he often told the story of the bomb that hit him, the dozens of surgeries that followed, the leadership he learned while in the Army and his Christian faith and sacrifice — “suffering that builds our endurance.”

Brown struck a similar message on Monday, running on broad conservative tenets such as support for increased border security, law enforcement and more parental control of K-12 education curriculum. He railed against teachers unions and pinned Nevada’s low national rankings in education on Rosen and federal policies.

Then Brown shifted to local concerns, criticizing Rosen’s support for solar projects in Nevada, a state that is leading the charge in manufacturing the form of renewable energy. Some residents of rural communities have pushed back against solar projects, saying the added infrastructure could harm the surrounding communities and local environments.

“They’re being built on our land, and not for our benefit,” Brown said. “But for the benefit of Jacky Rosen and her friend Gavin Newsom in California.”

Brown and Laxalt agreed on almost all policy stances during their sometimes-heated primary battle last year, though Brown said that Laxalt did not push hard enough in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results when Laxalt chaired Trump’s 2020 Nevada campaign. Brown helped Laxalt campaign after losing to him.

Brown dodged two questions from reporters after his speech regarding whether he stood by those comments. Instead, he criticized Rosen’s vote on spending bills while speaking of leadership experience he gained while in the Army.

Rosen has posted strong fundraising numbers in her first reelection run, announcing on Monday a $2.7 million fundraising haul in the second quarter of 2023, leaving her with $7.5 million cash on hand.

An ally handpicked by legendary Nevada Democrat Harry Reid to run for the Senate, Rosen has steered a moderate path during her first term in the chamber. She was a first-term congresswoman from a Las Vegas-area district when she defeated GOP Sen. Dean Heller in 2018. Before that, she was president of a prominent Jewish synagogue in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson.

National Republicans had long recruited Brown, seeing his ability to raise money from the party’s grassroots and his profile as a war hero as positives in a solidly purple state known for often unpredictable, razor-thin outcomes.

In 2022, Nevada featured the closest Senate race in the nation when Cortez Masto defeated Laxalt by just 8,000 votes. The race was decided by mail ballots that arrived at county offices days after Election Day and resulted in a nearly weeklong vote count that ended up securing Democrats’ control of the Senate.

Marchant, the other major Republican candidate, has pushed to eliminate voting machines and has falsely said that all Nevada elected officials since 2006 have been “installed by the deep-state cabal.” Asked about Marchant’s campaign in the press gaggle, Brown again shifted his focus to Rosen and did not mention his primary opponent.

“Any time you see a crowded field, that means you have a lot of people who are disappointed by whoever’s currently leading there,” he said. “So this is an indictment on Jacky Rosen that so many people are interested in running.”

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Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Stern on Twitter: @gabestern326.

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This story was first published on July 10, 2023. It was updated on July 11, 2023, to delete an erroneous reference to Harry Reid’s Senate seat.

Gabe Stern, The Associated Press