Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford confirmed he plans to challenge Gov. Joe Lombardo (R-NV) in the state’s 2026 gubernatorial race.
This week’s announcement made him the first Nevada Democrat to publicly state his intentions and the highest-profile member of his party to consider a bid to oust Lombardo.
“I do intend to seek higher office, and I have been having informal conversations with people across the state to better understand what they believe Nevada needs in its next governor,” Ford said in a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, confirming months of speculation about his candidacy. “These discussions are an important part of determining how I can best serve our state.”
Ford was first elected as Nevada’s attorney general in 2018 and decisively won a second term four years later.
He previously represented Nevada’s 11th district in the state senate, subsequently rising to top leadership positions in the chamber.
Lombardo has already declared his intention to run for a second term next election cycle “because it’s a huge challenge, and I thrive off the challenge.”
“And there’s a lot of broken pieces that need to get fixed,” he told the Nevada Independent in April.
Ford will face a likely grueling battle in a bid to defeat Lombardo.
The incumbent Republican has built a “getting s**t done” brand that has propelled his rise to become one of the most popular governors in the country.
Since he assumed office in 2022, with a victory that made him the only Republican in the country that year to flip a Democratic gubernatorial seat, Lombardo has signed more executive orders than any other Nevada governor. His hardball approach seems to have garnered favor with voters, who handed him a 58% approval rating, per January polling from Morning Consult.
Often the lone GOP voice in a state where Democrats hold majorities in both legislative chambers, Lombardo helped lead Republicans to key victories in Nevada this election cycle. After Nov. 5, Democrats lost their supermajority in the assembly and failed to gain a supermajority in the state senate. The election results scored a tactical victory for Lombardo, as without coveted two-thirds supermajorities in both legislative chambers, Democrats can’t override his vetoes.
As Ford prepares for his campaign against Lombardo, he attracted attention this week for breathing life into controversial charges against six Nevada Republicans labeled as “fake electors.” While the GOP efforts to name President-elect Donald Trump as the winner in the state during the 2020 presidential election were prosecuted, a state judge dismissed the case earlier this year.
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In a new complaint in a Carson City court filed Thursday, Ford asserted that “the actions the fake electors undertook in 2020 violated Nevada criminal law and were direct attempts to both sow doubt in our democracy and undermine the results of a free and fair election.”
“Justice requires that these actions not go unpunished,” the attorney general said.
