Damn, that one burns:
Fourteen members of Republican Senate candidate and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s family announced Wednesday that they would collectively endorse his Democratic opponent, incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, in the heated race for Nevada’s U.S. Senate seat.
The three-page letter, obtained by The Nevada Independent, does not mention Laxalt by name or his Senate campaign, focusing instead on praising Cortez Masto. That includes her positions on women’s issues, opposition to a proposed federal mining tax, public land preservation and her record as the state’s attorney general from 2007 to 2015.
“We believe that Catherine possesses a set of qualities that clearly speak of what we like to call ‘Nevada grit,’” the letter said, adding that “no further comments will be made, as we believe this letter speaks for itself.”
Here’s some more context:
The hard-right politics of Mr. Laxalt, 44, a former state attorney general, stand in sharp contrast to the relative moderation of his Republican grandfather, Paul Laxalt, who died in 2018, and Wednesday was not the first time family members have sought to hobble his political ambitions.
Back in 2018, when he ran for governor, a dozen members of Adam Laxalt’s family decided they could no longer quietly stand by what they saw as his abuse of the family patriarch’s good name. Writing in the Reno Gazette Journal in October 2018, they decried Mr. Laxalt as a carpetbagger, denouncing what they described as his “ethical shortcomings” and “servitude to donors and out-of-state interests that puts their concerns ahead of real Nevadans.”
“For those of us who were actually raised in Nevada, it’s difficult to hear him continue to falsely claim that he was raised in Nevada or has any true connections to Nevadans,” they wrote.
Though he was born in Reno, Mr. Laxalt was raised by his mother in Washington, D.C., where he attended private schools and earned undergraduate and law degrees from Georgetown University.
He returned a few years before his successful campaign for attorney general in 2014. Once in office, he proved eager to pick fights with more moderate Nevada Republicans on issues like immigration and abortion, and he was caught on tape pressuring state gambling officials on behalf of one of his biggest donors, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
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