In Nevada’s Senate Race, Adam Laxalt Sheds His Political Inheritance

LAS VEGAS — With his Georgetown law degree, connections to Republican luminaries in Washington and a grandfather once known as Ronald Reagan’s “first friend,” Adam Laxalt could easily be mistaken as a legacy candidate.

But as he runs in perhaps the most competitive Senate race in the country, he has shed much of his political inheritance. Mr. Laxalt, 44, has positioned himself as a child of the Trump era, embracing culture clashes over “wokeness” and election conspiracy theories.

If there’s a mantle he picks up from his grandfather, Paul Laxalt, a former Nevada governor and senator and early Reagan ally, it is a desire to push forward the party’s next iteration — the one ushered in by former President Donald J. Trump.

“Not only has our country moved in the wrong direction, but unfortunately our Republican Party and a lot of its leaders have failed to stand up for our values,” he said at a rally in April.

He hoped to join the Senate, he added, “so we can hold these leftists accountable.”

With just under one week to go before Election Day, polling shows Mr. Laxalt virtually tied with his Democratic opponent, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto. Should he win, he would join a growing number of young men — yes, they are mostly men, and, yes, they are young by the Senate’s standards — who represent the party’s Trumpian future.

Some are Senate veterans, such as Josh Hawley of Missouri and Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Others, like J.D. Vance in Ohio and Ted Budd of North Carolina, are in races similarly close to the one in Nevada. And beyond the Senate, there are rising Republican stars including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who years ago roomed with Mr. Laxalt when they were training to be Navy officers.

A former Nevada attorney general, Mr. Laxalt lacks the national name recognition of his former roommate. But he, too, has built a political career on the conservative edge of the party, dividing the state’s political landscape along the way.

His bosses at a law firm once described him as a “train wreck” at work. When Mr. Laxalt later ran for governor, he was repudiated by some fellow Republicans who considered him too conservative and denounced by some relatives as a carpetbagger cynically trying to capitalize on his grandfather’s good name.

And all of that took place before the 2020 election, when he served as co-chairman of the Trump campaign in Nevada and emerged as one of the most vocal proponents of the former president’s stolen-election conspiracy theories.

Mr. Laxalt declined to be interviewed for this article.

Where critics see a dangerous and lawless radical, the conservative faithful see a fighter willing to stand up to censorious, bullying liberals and push back on a Nevada political establishment that they believe is deeply out of touch. To them, Mr. Laxalt’s talk of rigged elections and corrupt elites destroying America is simply a reflection of where the party moved under Mr. Trump.

“Trump relates to people who work with their hands. He doesn’t appeal to the college-educated, the country club Republicans,” said Patricia Cafferata, 81, a family friend who served as a district attorney in Nevada and once ran for governor. “It’s a different kind of Republican Party than when I was growing up.”

Trump-style Republicanism hasn’t been an easy fit in Nevada, where voters often prefer moderates and the titans of the gambling and tourism industry have typically favored predictability over ideology. But pandemic job losses have diminished the strength of the Las Vegas culinary workers’ union, a crucial part of the state’s Democratic machine, and skyrocketing rents and gas prices have fueled dissatisfaction with President Biden.

Enter Mr. Laxalt. In style and manner he is far closer to those old country club Republicans than to Mr. Trump. He is clean-cut and talks earnestly about legislation during public appearances. He has made a point of reaching out to Latino voters. He introduced himself in his first campaign advertisement as a devoutly religious father whose children love Star Wars.

Yet Mr. Laxalt’s first message had an unmistakable edge: “The radical left, rich elites, woke corporations, academia, Hollywood and the media — they’re taking over America,” he said.

Family Business

Questions about family legacy have been complicated for Mr. Laxalt. He grew up not knowing who his father was, and only found out in 2013 when his mother, Michelle Laxalt, revealed that she had gotten pregnant during an affair with a longtime Republican senator from New Mexico, Pete Domenici.

His grandfather, however, was a dominant presence in the Laxalt family and in Nevada’s Republican Party for decades. Paul Laxalt also became a leading player in the national party on the strength of his close friendship with President Reagan.

The two first met in the 1960s when Mr. Reagan was the governor of California and Mr. Laxalt was governor of Nevada. After Mr. Laxalt won a Senate seat, he served as chairman of all three of Mr. Reagan’s presidential campaigns. By the 1980s, he was known as the “first friend.”

Mr. Laxalt’s politics reflected the relative moderation of the day. He supported a tax increase as governor, and led the state Republican Party to purge members of the John Birch Society, a far-right, anti-communist organization often viewed as a predecessor to the conspiracy-minded wing of the right today.

To Republican critics and even some members of his family, the younger Mr. Laxalt’s embrace of Mr. Trump and those conspiracy theories is a profound betrayal of the legacy left by his grandfather, who died in 2018. Last month, 14 of his relatives endorsed Ms. Cortez Masto.

Mr. Laxalt responded in a tweet, accurately noting that many who had signed the letter were Democrats.

It was not the first time family members have sought to hobble Mr. Laxalt’s political ambitions. In 2018, when he ran for governor, a dozen relatives published an op-ed piece in The Reno Gazette-Journal, denouncing what they described as his “servitude to donors and out-of-state interests.”

Though he was born in Reno, Mr. Laxalt was raised by his mother in Washington, D.C.

“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.

The letter sharply divided the family. Twenty-two other relatives stood up to defend Mr. Laxalt, as did others close to the family. To them, Mr. Laxalt’s push to change his party was very much in the tradition of his grandfather.

“Remember, Ronald Reagan was a transformational figure, too,” Ms. Cafferata said in a recent interview.

A Next Generation

While Mr. Laxalt’s opponents have tried to paint him as a child of privilege, the story he tells is about overcoming demons. There was growing up without a father, and there was drinking, which he said started in high school.

The gravity of his situation finally hit him when he landed in the hospital, drunk, after nearly flunking out of college. “Through the haze of alcohol, pain and shame, I began to realize I could not continue down this path,” he said in an advertisement made during his failed run for governor in 2018.

He sobered up, graduated from college and while at Georgetown Law worked for John Bolton, an under secretary of state who would later serve as one of Mr. Trump’s national security advisers, and a Republican senator from Virginia, John Warner.

Then came a stint in the Navy, where Mr. Laxalt served in Iraq as a military lawyer in the task force that oversaw the thousands of people detained by American forces. His calm demeanor impressed peers and superiors, who briefly put him in charge of one of the task force’s units, despite other more senior officers being available for the role, said Chris Jeter, who served with Mr. Laxalt and is now a state representative in Indiana.

Mr. Laxalt’s move to Nevada in 2011, though, did not go as smoothly. He was hired by the law firm Lewis & Roca, where the following year partners would describe him as lacking “the basic skill set” for his job. The performance evaluation was leaked to Jon Ralston, a political commentator, in 2014, as Mr. Laxalt was running for attorney general.

Mr. Laxalt won his race by fewer than 5,000 votes. Among his top accomplishments in office was his push to process thousands of rape kits that had been sitting in evidence rooms for years.

But overall, Mr. Laxalt’s tenure was defined by his determination not to be another moderate from Nevada. He filed numerous lawsuits and legal briefs in support of conservative causes, including one opposing the Obama administration’s attempt to protect the immigrants known as Dreamers who came to the United States illegally as children.

The filings brought him into open conflict with Nevada’s popular Republican governor at the time, Brian Sandoval. The men also clashed when Mr. Sandoval backed a tax increase, as Mr. Laxalt’s grandfather once did, that funded education. When Mr. Laxalt ran for governor in 2018, Mr. Sandoval, who could not run again because of term limits, refused to endorse him.

Trump’s Man in Nevada

The votes were still being counted the day after the presidential election in 2020 when Mr. Laxalt went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

“The Democrats have absolutely stacked the decks against us in this election,” Mr. Laxalt said, objecting to voting rules that had been changed during the pandemic. He also suggested that something more nefarious was afoot.

Votes, he said, had been “dumped” at 3 a.m., fueling baseless suspicions about mail ballots that were counted through the early night.

For Mr. Laxalt, it was just the beginning. A day later, he announced that the Trump campaign was filing a lawsuit to “stop the counting of improper votes.” It was one of dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits that the campaign would file across the country.

Mr. Laxalt did not drop the issue after Mr. Trump left office. As recently as January, he said that election integrity was the “hottest topic we have” during an appearance on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room.”

He has also claimed that election irregularities occur only in counties that typically vote for Democrats. In rural counties where Republicans dominate, ballots always were and will be “legitimate,” he reassured the crowd at a rally in October 2021.

Mr. Trump was quick to endorse Mr. Laxalt, and he and his allies have made the trip to Nevada to back the Republican. It was the least they could do to reward Mr. Laxalt, Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, told supporters at a rally this spring.

Mr. Laxalt came “every time we called him for four years,” the younger Mr. Trump said, one heir speaking to the loyalty of another. “Adam Laxalt got on the plane. He helped. And in politics, that’s a big deal.”