The race for Assembly District 4 in the Nevada Legislature could be key to overriding vetoes issued by Gov. Joe Lombardo.
The open seat in northwest Las Vegas is being vacated by Assemblyman Richard McArthur, a Republican, who launched an unsuccessful bid for state Senate. The seat has been Republican-held since 2020, but it is no stranger to tight races and has narrow voter registration margins between the two major parties.
The stakes are high. Democrats are vying for a two-thirds supermajority in the Legislature, which would allow them to override any veto issued by Lombardo, who vetoed a record 75 bills last year. While Democrats are one seat shy of a supermajority in the Senate, they hold one in the Assembly, but only barely — 28 out of the 42 seats — meaning they have little room for error in November.
Because Assembly District 4 is likely the only pickup opportunity for Democrats, a victory could bring some breathing room if a Democratic seat turns red.
The two candidates are Democrat Ryan Hampton, an addiction recovery advocate, and Lisa Cole, a lawyer and the vice president of an economic development small business.
In an interview, Cole said she never seriously considered running for office until last summer, when Lombardo’s team gauged her interest to run for the open seat. Cole had recently been featured in a Las Vegas Review-Journal article about the Apex Industrial Park, an area in North Las Vegas that officials have long hoped to turn into a manufacturing hub and where Cole’s business has coordinated infrastructure projects.
Cole said she has an “interesting skill set” for a first-time political candidate, touting her knowledge in land development and water rights and that she passed the bar exam last year.
Hampton also had not considered running for office until he learned that McArthur was vacating the seat. In an interview, he touted his nationwide advocacy for addiction recovery, role in authoring state and federal legislation and collaboration with multiple presidential administrations from both parties.
Hampton condemned accusations from the Better Nevada PAC — a group tied to Lombardo that has endorsed Cole — that he supports the “effective legalization of fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine,” despite his own past struggles with opioid use disorder.
When asked for the basis for these accusations, a PAC official referred to two posts on X by Hampton related to a (since-scaled back) Oregon measure that decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs. The first post does not appear to show Hampton’s support for the bill (he instead copied the description of a linked video where another person said it was “the right approach”) and the second linked to a video where Oregonians expressed support for the measure, though Hampton did not explicitly say where he stood. The measure also did not legalize hard drugs but rather expanded access to drug treatment and recovery services that would be paid with marijuana tax revenue.
The official also referred to a quote from Hampton last year that he does not support criminalizing addiction, though that is a different stance than legalizing hard drugs.
“They really should be ashamed of themselves,” Hampton said. “I believe some of these tactics are just building into the stigma that folks have been trying for a long time to combat, and I, for one, am ready to just cut through it.”
See below for a closer look at both candidates’ policy views.
School choice
An education policy that will likely resurface during next year’s legislative session is Opportunity Scholarships, a program that helps subsidize the cost of attending private schools in Nevada for certain low-income students that is championed by Lombardo and opposed by Democrats.
Cole said she thinks school choice options such as Opportunity Scholarships “make a lot of sense.”
“It’s unfortunate that we have as many one or two star schools that we do in Clark County,” Cole said. “Providing somebody a lifeline for their children to be able to get a better education than what they’re zoned for, I think is really important.”
Meanwhile, Hampton expressed some reservations about Opportunity Scholarships and the use of public dollars for private schooling, but he said there should be exceptions for people currently receiving the scholarships and would be open to providing such scholarships for siblings of current recipients.
“I don’t think that we should be disrupting the education of students who are already involved,” Hampton said.
Health care
In his campaign, Hampton has focused on his efforts on a 13-part plan to tackle the state’s drug crisis.
The plan includes enforcing laws that guarantee insurance companies will cover mental health and addiction treatment, increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates and upping the state’s supply of Naloxone, a drug that can save people experiencing an opioid overdose
He has also emphasized his experience taking on pharmaceutical companies — he once represented thousands of people with claims against Purdue Pharma, the company headed by the notorious family of David Sackler, who Hampton has personally faced off against during court proceedings.
He wants to lower prescription drug costs — he expressed an openness to supporting AB250, the bill vetoed by Lombardo to allow the state to adopt drug prices negotiated by Medicare — and have a mental health care system that aligns with a Recovery Oriented System of Care, such as building up the state’s network of recovery options, including community groups and housing.
Cole, meanwhile, said she is “neutral” on AB250, which did not receive any Republican support in the Legislature last year, and that she would like to learn more about adopting drug prices negotiated by Medicare.
Her priorities on health care include bolstering the number of medical residencies in the state to help shore up doctor shortages, and looking into increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates.
Cole and Hampton said they would be open to supporting but would have to look more into AB108, a bill that stalled last year where Nevada would join a nurse licensure compact, allowing Nevada nurses to have a multistate license recognized by any of the pact’s participants.
Elections
Nevadans will vote on a ballot question this year to require voter ID — and the candidates have differing opinions on it.
Cole said a voter ID requirement makes “a lot of sense” to improve trust in the state’s election system, while Hampton worried that the practice could lead to voter disenfranchisement.
Hampton also defended the security of the state’s election system (there is no proof of widespread fraud in Nevada’s elections) and supports how the state runs its elections.
A particularly politically contentious issue is so-called “ballot harvesting,” the process legalized permanently in Nevada in 2021 that allows voters to collect and submit ballots of people they know. Former President Donald Trump and his allies falsely claimed in 2020 that this practice led to massive voter fraud, but Republicans have since moderated their positions because of its legality.
While Cole does not believe there was widespread fraud in 2020, she said she would be open to changes in the state’s ballot collection system, such as limiting the number of ballots someone can collect. She also worried that the permanent legalization of the practice in 2021 could allow it to become “unfettered.”
Hampton strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying there is no reason to believe it could become out of control because there is no evidence that it leads to widespread voter fraud.
“These are fear-based tactics,” Hampton said. “Let’s start operating on fact instead of fiction.”
Housing
An issue with rare bipartisan support in Nevada is the freeing up of federally owned land for affordable housing development.
Cole said she supports the idea “100 percent” because she thinks the current situation creates land shortages and drives up prices. She is interested in looking into more areas within Clark County that can be nominated to be freed up by the feds.
Meanwhile, Hampton also said he was open to the proposal, but he cautioned that any effort has to include guardrails to prevent massive property owners and “Wall Street” companies from purchasing the available land and maintaining high prices.
A housing policy with less bipartisan support is the state’s summary eviction process, where the tenant is required to make the first legal filing in an eviction lawsuit, not the landlord. A proposal stalled in the Legislature last year that would have required the landlord to make the first filing.
Hampton said he would support reforms to the process, including a requirement that the landlord file first.
Cole, meanwhile, supports the system as is.
“Creating a system that is too onerous for landlords leads to less supply of available units and thereby increases costs,” Cole said. “We all know that’s not a good idea.”
Gun control
Lombardo vetoed a trio of gun control bills last year that would have placed restrictions on gun ownership for people convicted of a hate crime, raised the legal age to purchase certain firearms to 21 and criminalized bringing a gun within 100 feet of an election site.
Cole said she supported all of these vetoes, and that there is a “pretty high bar” for gun regulation in the Second Amendment, which states that the right to own a firearm “shall not be infringed.”
Hampton said he supports gun control measures but notably, he said he opposes a ban on assault weapons in the state — a divergence from Democrats across the country who have sought to impose such a ban.
Hampton is a gun owner and said he thinks that the state can institute policies “protecting the rights of responsible gun owners and keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals without imposing an assault weapons ban in the state.”
“I do know plenty of people who own assault weapons, for sport or otherwise, who are responsible gun owners,” Hampton said.
Environment
As a recently licensed lawyer, Cole said she is well versed in water law.
One piece of legislation related to water rights that stalled in the Legislature last year, SB176, sought to address a problem known as over-appropriation, where state regulators issued more rights to use water than there was water to use. The bill would have created a program where the state would buy back water rights to prevent overuse.
“I think when you have a willing water right holder that has been pumping water, and if they want to sell their water rights back to the state to solve it … it makes some sense,” said Cole, who acknowledged the existing issues surrounding the funding of such a program.
Hampton, meanwhile, said he was aware of the legislation but did not say directly how he would vote on it. He added that he would back “common sense policies for water conservation.”
Criminal justice
Hampton expressed support for SB35, a bill passed last year that lowered the quantity of fentanyl a person must possess to trigger a drug trafficking charge.
Cole, meanwhile, also indicated support for the legislation, but said the measure should apply to other banned drugs as well.
They both expressed a desire to reduce recidivism rates in the state, a goal that was the impetus of a sweeping criminal justice reform package in 2019 that Lombardo failed to scale back last year.
Hampton said he views prisons as a way to isolate certain members of the community, but also as a place for rehabilitation. He wants there to be more vocational training and job placement programs for incarcerated people, more transitional housing for prisoners upon their release and increased treatment of opioid use disorder in jails.
“It’s become a revolving door because we’re not actually getting to the root causes of why people are incarcerated,” Hampton said.
Cole agreed that “the whole point of a prison is to rehabilitate the person,” but that there needs to be easier ways for prisoners to transition back into society, which could include easing job access.
“We need to make sure that we have enough programs that support people who really want to change their lives,” Cole said.
Tax credits
Lawmakers are set to once again seek a tax credit to bolster film production in Nevada, continuing a trend of tax credits that balance efforts to diversify the state’s economy while bringing community benefits.
Cole cautioned that the state would need to ensure the film crews would consider Nevada a home base, rather than just filming here briefly and then leaving town. She also said the state should be “very careful” in how it crafts tax credit agreements.
“The state should get more than it’s moving, like that would be the reason why you would do it,” Cole said.
Hampton argued that any tax credit should prioritize good paying jobs and diversifying the state’s economy, and that he would be open to supporting a film tax credit but needs to look into it more.
Elsewhere, he would support a tax credit for businesses that voluntarily opt in to a program to become a “Recovery Friendly Workplace,” which have been shown to reduce the impact of alcohol and addiction in the workplace and eliminate barriers for employees seeking recovery treatment.
Vetoes
Lombardo issued a record-number of vetoes last year, and Cole’s website lists protecting Lombardo’s veto power as a top issue as to why she’s running.
She acknowledged that she did not read about all of Lombardo’s vetoes, but she emphasized that she thinks his veto power is “a sign that our governmental system works.” She also said that “checks and balances will be rendered useless” if Democrats obtain a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers.
Meanwhile, Hampton said he did not even know that Lombardo’s veto power was on the line until he had already announced his candidacy, and that he is not focused on the stakes of the veto power in his campaign, but rather he wants to focus on specific policy areas.
Hampton added that he thinks “democracy thrives in the middle” — away from extremes on the left and right — and that he wants to work with Lombardo no matter whether Democrats have a supermajority in the Assembly or not.
Gaming
Lawmakers will vote next year on a constitutional amendment to remove the state ban on lotteries — and Cole and Hampton said they have concerns.
Cole was skeptical that the amendment would bring in much money to the state, while Hampton worried that the introduction of a lottery could lead to increased gambling addiction in the state, “creating social costs that may outweigh any financial gains.”
Updated on 9/20/24 at 7:55 a.m. to correct that Cole wants to increase Medicaid reimbursement rates and clarify Hampton’s meeting with David Sackler.
