As women watched themselves being stripped of rights during the destruction of Roe v. Wade earlier this year, we were reminded that every time we vote to choose our leaders we embark on a new journey. Some are thrilling, some horrifying, but they are the choices we make as a society. And if we don’t show up to vote, we allow others to choose for us, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The stakes are especially high when extremists are on the ballot, as they are in Nevada.

Choosing the wrong adventure in this election, and the next one in 2024, might lead to last votes of a democratic America. Here in Nevada, if we don’t vote wisely, some extremists on the ballot would like to make 2022 the last free and fair election in our state.

It is that stark.

With early voting for the 2022 general elections getting under way this weekend, Las Vegas Weekly has once again teamed up with our colleagues at the Las Vegas Sun to offer endorsements.

For the November general-election endorsements, we took a much closer look at specific policy proposals and the candidates’ knowledge and understanding of the details surrounding them. We wanted to give candidates the opportunity to go beyond partisan talking points and answer specific questions about their vision for the future of Nevada, their proposed plans and policies and their qualifications for the office they are seeking.

In the interest of getting the greatest level of participation, we invited both Republican and Democratic candidates for every federal-legislative and statewide-executive race to schedule a one-hour block of time to speak with us, either in-person or on the phone, at any time from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. during a two-week period. Every Democratic candidate participated. Only two Republicans, Sam Peters and Mark Robertson did. For candidates who didn’t participate in the interviews, we based endorsement decisions on their publicly stated policies and supporting information we could find on their websites and in the public record.

The stakes are frightening.

The 2022 general election offers a bipolar choice between the wisdom or foolishness and belief or disbelief in the institutions that have helped the United States, and its democracy, become the most powerful and prosperous country in the world.

On one side is a vision of Nevada and of the United States put forth by a unified slate of candidates to build up business, increase public safety, strengthen public schools and defend democracy.

On the other, is a vision of Nevada and the United States from a ginned-up fever dream of fear and lies. This side offers extremist candidates who are self-aggrandizing yet uninformed, radicals who seek to tear down anything and anyone they don’t like, even if they have no plan for what to replace it with and instead only demand power. These candidates would sacrifice our economy, our education system and our democratic institutions in the process.

To many of our readers, this binary tale of two potential futures might sound like an overly dramatized and dystopian fiction—an exaggeration akin to the click-bait that now dominates online and cable news. But after spending months researching candidates for state and federal office, inviting them to speak to us and answer questions from our editorial board and listening to what they had to say, we believe this dystopia is at our doorsteps. Fortunately, so too is the opportunity for goodness, wisdom and progress.

In June’s closed primary, our criteria for endorsement essentially boiled down to 1. not promoting claims of election fraud or other unfounded vast conspiracies; 2. providing at least some specific policy proposals for addressing issues important to Nevadans; and 3. having a track record of effective leadership or civic involvement.

Despite this extremely low bar, we were still only able to endorse 11 Republican candidates in the primary election. While the Republican voters of Nevada chose our endorsed candidates in all but one of the state legislative races, our endorsed candidates for statewide executive office were shut out in exchange for extremists and election deniers.

Since then, the Republican party has only gotten more extreme and more committed to dismantling laws, rights and institutions that safeguard American citizens and American democracy.

Despite compelling evidence from the committee investigating the deadly January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republican lawmakers nationally refused to engage in the process and even publicly mocked it. The few Republicans who attempted to uphold their sworn duty to the Constitution were quickly ousted by members of their own party.

As the January 6 hearings were getting under way, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, turning back the clock on 50 years of settled law and civil rights for women. Our highest court is now so politicized that many Americans view it as an arm of the Republican Party. In fact, Republicans are betting on it for conservative attacks on everything from same-sex marriage to birth control pills and even book bans in public libraries that are sure to find their way to the high court docket.

While these extreme policies are disturbing, what’s more disturbing is that Republican candidates across the country have yet to convey a policy platform that does anything other than destroy institutions that currently exist.

Their policies on health care: eliminate a woman’s right to choose, even in cases of rape and incest, and repeal the affordable care act. What will they replace it with? They don’t seem to know.

Their policies on education: gut public schools by sending public money to private institutions and eliminate the Department of Education. They don’t know what they’re replacing that with, either.

Their policies on voting: massively suppress votes by eliminating early voting, mail-in voting and polling places that serve low-income communities without any plan for how to ensure swing shift workers and those working multiple jobs can still exercise their right to vote. Meanwhile, they lie and claim there’s massive voter fraud (there isn’t) and, worst of all, threaten to use their offices to literally throw out votes of people they disagree with.

The list goes on and on:

• On the environment: eliminate the EPA and replace it with … nothing; gut the clean air act and water acts and end renewable energy efforts.

• On labor: destroy unions and return all power to corporate overlords.

• On infrastructure: oppose the inflation reduction act and kick the can of the U.S.’ aging roads, bridges and power distribution systems down the road.

• On law enforcement: defund the FBI and federal prosecutor’s offices, replace them with nothing and let local and state elected officials police themselves. Your civil rights will be determined entirely by where you live, and voter suppression will ensure you can’t change the local laws.

• On guns: repeal common sense regulations and replace them with thoughts and prayers for the victims of gun massacres.

You get the picture.

Here in Nevada, Republican candidates aren’t much better.

Silver State Republicans include a candidate for Secretary of State—the state’s chief election official—who publicly declared that he would refuse to turn over for certification election results in which he didn’t believe his party should have lost. If you ever needed a reason to run to the polls, this is it: There is a man running for office who is promising to ignore votes he disagrees with.

A candidate for Attorney General—the state’s top law enforcement advisor—who suggests that women who seek an abortion should face criminal charges akin to murder, even though Nevadans codified the right to an abortion more than 30 years ago.

A candidate for Treasurer who called for an ethics probe into the Democratic incumbent, for secretly operating the Nevada Capital Investment Corporation out of his capitol office. She failed to recognize that the Nevada Capital Investment Corp. is a public, government-operated entity that, according to the Nevada constitution, is chaired by the state treasurer. In other words, the GOP candidate for treasurer doesn’t even know what the treasurer’s job is.

A candidate for Governor who regularly and repeatedly hosts events at a school that teaches that gay people caused AIDS and that thinking independently and questioning church teachings is grounds for expulsion. This same candidate flip-flops on any issue to advance his career, actively engages in lies and brown-noses for the support of our disgraced ex-president Donald Trump.

A candidate for Senate who claims to represent Nevadans but invited a proponent of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository to come to Nevada and stump on his behalf. The same candidate tried to have votes of Nevadans tossed out in the last election and traded heavily in election lies.

Compare that to the Democrats both nationwide and here in Nevada.

After two years of battling the floodwaters of COVID, Nevada’s mostly Democratic Congressional and Senate delegation has found its footing under President Joe Biden. In the past two years, it has passed historic legislation to help middle-class Americans recover from the pandemic, bring high-paying manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. and Nevada, and make long-overdue investment in modernizing our economy and infrastructure while meeting the challenges of climate change. Those are not small accomplishments, and our Nevada delegation played a key role in every one of them.

Locally, Nevada’s incumbent Democrats have built strong relationships and worked together to make difficult decisions that saved 30,000 lives in the COVID pandemic. Now they’re overseeing one of the strongest statewide economic recoveries in the entire country, and they’ve got solid plans for what comes next.

In our endorsement interviews, each of the Democratic candidates for statewide executive office was able to describe, in detail, the challenges they see on the horizon and how they would rise to those challenges and make Nevada a better place. Moreover, they each understood how they fit into a larger puzzle that would enable them to work together to implement solutions to fix our K-12 and higher-education systems, diversify and strengthen Nevada’s economy and face the looming water crisis in the Southwest.

Many of their detailed descriptions were dry and didn’t make for good television one-liners. But across the board, each of them described concrete policy and a path toward greater prosperity for all Nevadans.

We heard none of that detail, understanding of coordination or shared vision from Republicans.

In other words, the 2022 general election is a tale of two futures. We are excited to offer our endorsement to one of those futures. And we are equally disappointed that for the first time in this magazine’s long history, we were unable to seriously consider endorsing any Republican candidates for federal legislative or statewide executive office.

As always, we believe that incumbent candidates, including Republicans, who served the state well and demonstrated effective leadership, deserve the opportunity to continue to serve, unless a compelling reason exists to oust them. Some such reasons are asserting verifiably false information, failing to provide specific policy proposals or failing to meet even basic electoral standards. Under all circumstances, promoting election denialism renders a candidate simply unqualified for office and untrustworthy in civic life.

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