Part 2 of 2
Wielding the legislative trifecta
While it paved the way for progressive policy wins, the trifecta did not secure a Democratic caucus in lockstep with the party’s activists.
On the issue of the minimum wage, for instance — for a decade locked at just $7.25 per hour for employers offering health insurance — Democrats abandoned a 2017 bill raising the minimum wage to $15, backed by activists, for a diluted version that would raise it to $12 over the course of five years, instead.
Separately, Sisolak made good on one of his earliest tentpole promises — a push to secure collective bargaining rights for state workers, who were long locked out of unionization efforts by state law.
AFSCME Local 4041 President Harry Schiffman said that he was happy with the relationship the union had with Sisolak during his time in office, looking back on the work done for bargaining agreements for state employees and Sisolak’s efforts to reduce furloughs during the pandemic.
“He valued or saw a positive working with our union,” Schiffman said. “He was supportive of many issues that were important to us as state workers.”
But few unions flex political muscle like the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, the hospitality workers union in Las Vegas and long one of the state’s most powerful political forces. To that end, Sisolak was a key Culinary ally in 2021, backing a “Right to Return” bill allowing hospitality workers the right to return to jobs they lost during the pandemic.
The union later praised Sisolak for the move during the 2022 midterms, and in an interview last month, union Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge — who directly credited Sisolak for the Right to Return bill on the campaign trail — called Sisolak’s exit “a tremendous loss.”
“He was a true champion of the working class families in Nevada, we believe, and that’s a big loss,” Pappageorge said.
And on the issue of criminal justice reform, Sisolak signed a host of Democrat-backed reforms in 2019, a 2020 special session and 2021 — though several key policy goals for Democratic activists were also quashed under Sisolak’s term.
Just as the Democrat-led Legislature and Sisolak signed bills that decriminalized traffic tickets, banned arrest quotas, narrowed justifications for the use of force by police and expanded the attorney general’s ability to conduct pattern and practice investigations, measures that would have ended cash bail floundered in 2019 (though a separate state Supreme Court ruling did later lead to significant changes to the cash bail system). And a bill abolishing the death penalty died before making it to the governor’s desk in 2021.
Sisolak also presided over a change to the state’s electoral system that has not only created a new election paradigm for the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections, but has promised to reshape the way campaigns are waged in cycles to come.
Passed initially as an emergency measure to prevent COVID transmission in 2020, and later codified permanently in 2021, the changes created universal mail-in voting that would send a mail ballot to every active voter on county rolls.
Combined with a separate, voter-led initiative to create a system of automatic voter registration at the state DMV — an initiative that has rapidly swelled voter rolls, including a large number of registered nonpartisan voters — the move to mostly mail has fundamentally reshaped Nevada elections.
In 2020, for instance, the state saw a “red mirage,” as Republican-leaning ballots cast and reported on Election Day were swallowed up by late-arriving, Democrat-leaning mail ballots counted in the days that followed — votes that ultimately proved critical to Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump.
Similarly, history repeated itself in 2022. Even as they lost ground in the traditional “blue wall” of Clark County, Democrats saw gains in late-counted mail ballots relative to ruby-red Republican Election Day turnout — enough to save Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in the race for U.S. Senate, but not nearly enough to rescue Sisolak.
So too did Sisolak and the Democrats tackle climate issues, in large part by raising the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), a baseline requirement for statewide renewable energy development, to 50 percent by 2030. The move to gradually raise the state’s use of renewable energy came just two years after Sisolak’s Republican predecessor vetoed a measure to raise the RPS to 40 percent in the same time period.
“Sisolak was an environmental champion from the very beginning,” Nevada Conservation League’s Deputy Director Christi Cabrera-Georgeson told The Nevada Independent.
Cabrera-Georgeson praised the move to increase the RPS, as well as a state climate strategy published by the Sisolak administration in 2020 aimed at creating a roadmap to zero-out carbon emissions by 2050.
Still, Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, described Sisolak’s environmental legacy as “complicated.”
“Instead of energy democratization — instead of focusing on rooftop and community solar and solutions that will empower people — we’ve seen solutions that will enrich Warren Buffett and his shareholders at NV Energy,” Donnelly said.
He also said Sisolak favored extractive industries when it came to managing public lands.
“[Sisolak’s staff] were engaged with the conservation community. They were willing to listen. I think they tended to prioritize extractive industry over conservation,” Donnelly said. “Whether it’s mining, whether it’s even oil and gas production that they failed to stop or rein in.”
Even as Democrats lost vote share in 2020 relative to the 2018 wave, they still maintained their control of a legislative trifecta. More than that, better-than-expected revenue projections and a sudden windfall of more than $2.7 billion in federal COVID aid through the American Rescue Plan mitigated large chunks of planned budget cuts.
Much of that money has allowed Sisolak additional latitude to accomplish goals from the 2018 campaign, in part by getting certain spending programs approved by the legislative Interim Finance Committee outside of regular legislative sessions. That includes massive spending programs for infrastructure, including $250 million for affordable housing projects and another $204 million for expanding broadband internet access.
Sisolak also signed a bill in 2021 making Nevada only the second state nationwide to adopt a public health insurance option, a measure that will set price ceilings for premiums listed under “public option” plans certain insurers will be required to offer.
However, specifics of that public option remain in flux as the process continues through study and planning phases, and it won’t be available for purchase until 2026.
Still, other moves by Sisolak to brand Nevada as a trailblazing policy state floundered.
His relationships with business drew scrutiny amid the rapid rise and fall of the “Innovation Zones” concept. A proposal backed by the cryptocurrency company Blockchains — owned by Jeffrey Berns, a major Sisolak campaign donor — would have created autonomous “zones” effectively allowing Blockchains to operate a city within Storey County with its own separate municipal government. Sisolak touted the idea in his 2021 State of the State address, and later backed the initial proposal when draft legislation emerged during the session.
But amid increasing public skepticism and a lack of legislative support, the plan — and Sisolak’s support of it — was scrapped by April, and abandoned by Blockchains later that year.
One last election
In the 2022 election, the issues that came to dominate the national discourse came to dominate Nevada’s campaigns, too. The economy and abortion rights set against each other in dueling campaign advertisements flooding the airwaves day and night. Crime and COVID ate up whatever space was left.
Sisolak sought to rely on his record, touting the state’s economic recovery following the pandemic in a bid to mitigate the electoral pressure of rising housing costs and punishing surges in food and gas prices.
He also promised no new taxes. In one campaign ad, he even touted not raising taxes “on Nevada families” during his tenure — eliding the increase in the mining tax, the approval of county-level sales tax increases, and the preservation of a state payroll tax that the Sandoval administration had designed to sunset.
He also sought to downplay his opponent’s record as Clark County sheriff amid mixed crime statistics, attack Lombardo’s policy plans on education privatization and corner him on hot-button issues, such as abortion.
But economic headwinds remained. All the while, Sisolak faced institutional crises his administration had not solved, including a deepening staffing crisis at state agencies such as the Nevada Department of Corrections.
So too was Sisolak bogged by the finer decisions of his administration on COVID more broadly, including regarding Northshore Labs. A COVID testing company with links to a major campaign donor, Northshore was among the companies fast-tracked in the early days of the pandemic to provide COVID testing services in Nevada but was later found to have missed 96 percent of positive tests in a sample from UNR.
Sisolak defended his administration’s actions on Northshore on the campaign trail, arguing in a debate that the early pandemic required the fast-tracking process, and that the contract was axed when state officials were alerted to the issues. But the story opened an avenue for Lombardo and Republican outside groups, who hammered Sisolak for months over the story as they kept COVID — and the governor’s response to it — on the airwaves.
In the end, Sisolak’s defense wasn’t enough. He lost to Lombardo by a little more than a percentage point in the statewide vote, even as those same voters elevated fellow Democrat Cortez Masto to another term in the Senate. In a statement three days after Election Day, Sisolak said he conceded to Lombardo because he believed in the election system and honoring the will of voters.
During his final days in office, Sisolak’s office sent out a long laundry list of his accomplishments, and described the highlights of a budget his administration helped design but that another administration would be able to change. It included hopes for more education funding than he was ever able to provide, and state employee raises larger than he accomplished in office.
Sisolak’s staff has not said exactly what the governor plans to do after he leaves office this week. But in his concession statement, he described his time as the state’s chief executive as the apex.
“For this single dad and son of a blue collar factory worker, the opportunities this state has given me are more than I could have ever asked for,” he said. “It has been the honor of my life to be your governor.”
