Retired U.S. Army captain, Purple Heart recipient, and businessman Sam Brown ran away with the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Nevada on Tuesday evening, marking yet another huge political victory for Senate GOP campaign chief Senator Steve Daines, who endorsed him early on in the race as his preferred candidate to take on Democratic senator Jacky Rosen in November. The Associated Press called the race at 8:11 p.m. Pacific time, a few minutes after official vote totals started coming in.
Brown’s win comes on the heels of a late endorsement from presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump during his Sunday rally in Las Vegas. Though Brown was seen as the favorite in the GOP contest, the former president’s eleventh-hour endorsement — buoyed by a pre-primary encouragement from Daines — likely helped him pad margins over a host of Republican rivals, including Dr. Jeff Gunter, Trump’s former ambassador to Iceland, and Jim Marchant, a former state assemblyman who ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2022.
Beating Rosen is tough but doable in this transient, hospitality-worker-heavy state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 2012. Like every other Republican Senate nominee, Brown is expected to hammer his Democratic opponent on immigration, inflation, and public safety. Nevada Republicans’ new nominee is also expected to spend his general-election campaign leaning in on his military service and tying Rosen to President Joe Biden, who is currently trailing Trump in polls there as he struggles to gin up enthusiasm among his base. (Trump lost this state in 2016 and 2020.)
To stave off abortion-related attacks in the general election, Brown carved out a centrist position on abortion early on in the primary. He calls himself “personally pro-life” but also opposes a national abortion ban or stripping Nevadans of state laws that protect the procedure up to 24 weeks. His positions were shaped by the experience of his future wife, Amy, getting an abortion at five and a half weeks pregnant, which she now says she regrets. The couple spoke about their personal experiences in a February interview with NBC News, in which Amy Brown described returning the Monday after the procedure to her work at a medical center in San Antonio, where she would meet her future husband — then intubated for severe burns following a roadside-bomb explosion that nearly killed him during his deployment in Afghanistan.