Retired Army Colonel Mark Robertson, restauranteur Flemming Larsen are frontrunners in June 11 contest to run for Las Vegas-area Congressional District 1 seat.
Five party rivals are vying for the Republican nomination to take on six-term incumbent Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) in Nevada’s First Congressional District (CD1), one of three Las Vegas-area House seats Republicans believe they can wrest from Democrats in November 2024.
Mark Robertson, a retired U.S. Army colonel and certified financial planner who won the 2022 CD1 Republican primary, is again running to unseat Ms. Titus, who won their midterm race in 2022 by 6 percent.
But if Mr. Robertson is to be on the November ballot, he’ll have to emerge atop a June 11 primary field that includes restaurateur Flemming Larsen, appliance repair company owner and radio/stand-up comedian Michael Boris, Save Education-Save America founder/CEO Jim Blockey, and former pornographic film actor Evan Stone.
Ms. Titus, with nearly $1.1 million in her campaign war chest as of May 22, doesn’t have a primary challenger and is on November’s ballot. Four independents and Libertarian David Havlicek have also qualified.
Nevada has four congressional districts. Three of the districts—1, 3, 4—are in south Nevada and occupied by Democrats. Northern Nevada’s sprawling CD2 is a Republican stronghold, where Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) is expected to easily win his primary to secure an eighth term without a Democrat challenger in the fall.
The three Las Vegas-area districts have been dominated by Democrats, primarily with support from hospitality industry labor unions. During post-2020 Census redistricting, Nevada’s Democrat-run legislature plugged voters from CD1 into CDs3 and 4 to help party candidates in those purple districts.
All three Southern Nevada House races are projected to be competitive but CD1 is the only one not classified as a tossup by elections forecasters. The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, and Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rate the CD1 race as “Likely Democratic.”
Similar to Republican candidates across the country, Nevada CD1 GOP hopefuls cite the border and immigration, inflation, and tossing the Biden administration’s green energy agenda as top priorities.
Robertson, Larsen Are Frontrunners
There’s been little polling on Nevada’s House races despite numerous surveys in the battleground state on the presidential election—former President Donald Trump consistently sits 3 percentage points ahead of President Joe Biden—but Mr. Robertson and Mr. Larsen are regarded as the frontrunners.
Both cite debt spending, water, federal public lands management, and education as top issues.
“We’ve got to stop printing and spending money we don’t have,” Mr. Robertson told The Epoch Times. “Social Security is heading for a cliff, and we’re $35 trillion in debt. We’ve got to get it together” and slow spending.
“We have to get back to 2018-19 discretionary spending levels,” Mr. Larsen said, vowing to spearhead a tort-reform effort, along with regulatory rollbacks, to ensure the nation’s litigious environment doesn’t drive industries and jobs overseas.
The border and federal spending are among the reasons Mr. Boris, who describes himself as “a very popular radio host in five states” with “a very big air game,” began his underdog campaign.
“We’ve got to do all we can to stop the flow of guns, gangs, drugs, and terrorists into our country,“ he told The Epoch Times. The country also must stop printing, borrowing money, and spending money ”we don’t have,” he said.
Mr. Robertson, who served 30 years in the Army and led combat commands in Afghanistan and Iraq before starting a career in Henderson as a financial planner, said among his top concerns is enhancing water infrastructure and sources, especially for southern Nevada.
“Las Vegas’ population has tripled in the last 20 years, but we use less water today than we did 20 years ago,” he said, noting the state, counties, and utilities do a “remarkable job” conserving, recycling, and reclaiming water from the Colorado River.
Meanwhile, “in California, every drop of water that goes down a drain, they treat it and dump it into the Pacific Ocean—the same ocean they say is rising,” Mr. Robertson said.
Congress needs to “take a close look” at California’s water consumption, he said, which is mostly for agricultural uses that could be more efficient if Nevada conservation standards were adopted there.
Mr. Larsen, the son of Danish immigrants and a “California refugee” who moved to Nevada more than a decade ago, owns the Larsen’s Restaurant chain, steakhouses that reflect his family heritage as butchers. His approach is different.
“Nobody’s ever talking about trying to fix the water issue. All the talk is about ‘saving,’ ‘saving,’ ‘saving,’” he told The Epoch Times.
He supports building a pipeline-aqueduct system to deliver water from the Columbia River in Idaho and eastern Washington south into the deserts, including Nevada. That isn’t a new idea.
“Seven states and Mexico pull 16.5 million acre-feet [of water] from the Colorado River,” Mr. Larsen said. “The Columbia River dumps 192 million acre-feet a year of freshwater into the ocean.
“The left keeps saying the oceans are rising,” he added, “so I want to help them out and pull some of that water from the Columbia River so that way the ocean doesn’t keep rising.”
Who Can Beat Titus?
Mr. Boris cited education as his top priority.
Nevada’s K-12 public schools “rank 48th out of 50” in education, he told The Epoch Times. The education system is “overloaded with tax money” but not geared to put children first.
He and all other GOP CD1 hopefuls support school choice.
Mr. Flemming would do away with the U.S. Department of Education and tie whatever federal money goes to states to students, not school districts.
“If any state takes any federal money for schools, they would have to allow, at least, school choice, where that money follows the child,” he said.
Mr. Boris, whose campaign reported no money in the bank in its May 22 Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing, acknowledged that he is a dark horse.
But don’t count him out.
“We need more people who are actual people, who have been through and live through inflation, rather than just talk about it” running for office, he said. “I think all the politicians that are in there, for the most part, have been bought and sold.”
Mr. Larsen said the country needs more “bold businessmen, like myself” and President Trump.
“I’ve got ideas. If I can get Donald Trump as president, we can come up with solutions,” he said, noting he has the best chance of defeating Ms. Titus.
Money won’t be a problem. Mr. Larsen’s May 22 FEC filing showed his campaign has raised $1.8 million and had $1.37 million in cash. Much is self-funded.
Republicans are gaining voters in CD 1, he said, noting Democrats’ 45,000 voter advantage in 2022 has been whittled to about 37,000.
“By November, we could see that drop down to 30,000, which is a huge difference,” Mr. Larsen added.
“I have the best shot of beating Dina Titus. I have the drive, the determination, the resources but, you know, most importantly, I have that fire in my belly,” Mr. Larsen said. “I’ll go where Republicans traditionally don’t go. I’ve knocked on thousands and thousands of doors.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Robertson said he offers something voters are looking for—accountability.
“Eliminating the consequences of people’s actions, that I’m going to fight against,” he said, adding, “I would like to contribute to a sense of order” in the fractious House.
His May 22 FEC filing showed $70,300 in the bank—a pittance to Mr. Larsen’s well-funded campaign.
No matter, Mr. Robertson said, recalling he was also heavily outspent in 2022 when he won the CD1 primary.
After his 2022 defeat, “Lots of people came out and said, I just got to do it again. They reminded me Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan both lost the first time they ran for office, too.”