Decision Desk has called the Nevada gubernatorial race for Republican Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who received 49.24% of the vote to Democrat incumbent Steve Sisolak’s 46.99% as of this reporting.
Sisolak faced the same headwinds that Democrats across the country have faced in 2022. President Joe Biden’s poor approval ratings along with high inflation, other economic concerns, and a crime wave hurt Democrats’ polling numbers throughout the summer and fall.
In addition to a hostile election environment, 68-year-old Sisolak faced numerous charges of corruption from Republicans after a ProPublica investigation revealed in May that Sisolak’s administration had fast-tracked a lab license and awarded several COVID testing contracts to Northshore Clinical Labs.
Northshore is closely linked with the family of Peter Palivos, a well-known Nevada political contributor who has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Sisolak’s campaigns over more than a decade.
After Northshore was awarded five testing agreements with government entities, their testing kits were found to miss 96% of COVID cases. The revelation set off a series of circular finger-pointing among Sisolak and others involved in the scandal.
“The day the state was made aware of Northshore’s deficiencies in January we ordered them to stop their PCR testing operation, opened an investigation, and worked to correct the testing issues,” Sisolak said in May. “We believe Nevada was the first state where Northshore operations were suspended due to the state’s inquiries into the reported deficiencies.”
Sisolak seized on abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. In June, he signed an executive order barring state employees from assisting any other state seeking to prosecute someone for receiving an abortion. He also attempted to paint Lombardo as an extremist on the issue, claiming that the sheriff would try to ban contraceptives, an allegation that Lombardo has denied.
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