Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat, announced Monday that he is running for governor against incumbent Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo.
The swing state is expected to host one of the more competitive gubernatorial races of the 2026 cycle.
Ford hopes voters will support his bid to unseat Lombardo due to cuts to Medicaid and food stamps.
“It was Medicaid that enabled my son and me to have the healthcare we needed in order to be able to survive. It was food stamps that kept us fed,” Ford said in an interview with Politico, adding that he and his son used these programs for over a year.
“It hits me … particularly hard to know that people are about to be hit in those areas,” he added.
Ford has been the state’s top prosecutor since 2019 and was in the Nevada Senate for several years, both as the chamber’s majority and minority leader at different points in his career. Ford won the attorney general spot in 2018 by less than a percentage point before taking the position by a much more decisive margin of about 7 points in 2022 against Republican Sigal Chattah.
To face Lombardo in the general election, he’ll have to make it through a Democratic primary field that remains thin for now. The only confirmed competitor Ford has is Washoe County Commissioner Alexis Hill. His path to becoming the Democratic nominee would become considerably cloudier if former Gov. Steve Sisolak decides to run again in 2026 after Lombardo narrowly unseated him in the 2022 election.
But Ford has the backing of Democratic Nevada Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV), signaling that the Democratic establishment in the state could be firmly behind him.
“At a time when the chaos in D.C. is making life harder for so many Nevadans, we need a leader in Carson City who understands what hardworking families are going through and isn’t afraid to take on tough fights for our state,” Rosen said in her endorsement of Ford on Sunday.
Ford’s decision to run against Republican Medicaid cuts aligns with common Democratic criticism of the Trump administration. Republicans say their Medicaid cuts in the recent budget bill are simply “waste, fraud, and abuse” being drawn out of the program, while Democrats have countered by saying that it’s taking benefits away from people anyway.
A June poll showed more than 70% of the public is “worried that a significant reduction in federal funding for Medicaid would lead to an increase in the share of uninsured children and adults in the U.S.”
Lombardo asked the White House in February not to cut Medicaid, but also touted the budget bill’s advantages. “While my administration continues to assess this bill as it moves to get signed into law, Nevadans should be excited about the potential impacts of tax cuts, investments in small businesses and American manufacturing, and efforts to help secure our border,” Lombardo said in a statement provided to the Las Vegas Review-Journal after the bill’s passage.
Ford countered last week, saying no one should be “excited about the fact that over 100,000 people in Nevada are about to lose their health insurance.”
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The attorney general said he believes he has a decent shot at winning if he makes it to the general election in a state that elected Democratic governors for decades before electing three straight Republican governors at the start of the millennium.
“One of the fascinating parts about Nevada is that it is notoriously purple,” Ford said. “And it is not at all adverse to jettisoning an incumbent that’s not doing his job.”