New reporting from HuffPost details MAGA extremist Sam Brown’s desperate efforts to “rewrite” his decade-long anti-abortion record, and how he will be held accountable for his radical views in pro-choice Nevada.
Read more about Brown’s attempt to cover up his anti-abortion record below:
Daniel Marans
April 2, 2024
- Sam Brown, the likely Nevada Republican nominee to take on Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), is hoping that a splashy interview alongside his wife is enough to cancel out his anti-abortion record. Control of the Senate this November could hang on the success — or failure — of such a public relations gambit.
- Pressed by NBC News to explain his past support for a 20-week ban in Texas, while running for the state legislature there in 2014, Brown characterized it as an extension of the same states’ rights approach that drives his respect for Nevada law.
- Left unaddressed: Brown’s recent tenure as volunteer head of the anti-abortion Nevada Faith and Freedom Coalition; his refusal to articulate his stance on federal abortion restrictions as recently as July; his attendance of an anti-abortion rights gala in October; and perhaps most importantly, the kinds of judges he would vote to confirm to the federal bench.
- The disjunction between Brown’s interview and his remarks up to that point is a microcosm of the broader challenge facing Republicans as they seek to retake the Senate on a map that favors their candidates. To win, they must move past their unpopular support for the overturning of the nationwide abortion rights granted by the Roe v. Wade decision. That task is made more difficult by Democrats’ determination to hang these GOP candidates’ anti-abortion records around their necks and portray them as threats to abortion rights, in vitro fertilization, and even contraception.
- Democrats remain confident though that the substance of a candidate’s abortion rights message — and the credibility of the messenger — are more important than the timing of an announcement or the decision to speak about the topic in itself.
- “These people can’t walk away from stuff they’ve said before,” said Joe Calvello, a senior adviser on Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s (D) successful 2022 race. “Voters aren’t that stupid. Check the tape!”
- Indeed, that’s what Rosen is counting on in Nevada.
- “Nevada is an overwhelmingly pro-choice state, and voters will see right through Brown’s desperate attempt to cover up his anti-abortion record during an election year,” Rosen campaign spokesperson Johanna Warshaw said in a statement. “The truth is Sam Brown would be a direct threat to Nevadans’ reproductive freedom in the Senate.”
- Democrats are betting that voters will see the multitude of ways GOP senators would help restrict access to abortion, even if they now insist they wouldn’t support abortion bans. HuffPost reached out to the leading GOP candidates for Senate in four major swing states — Brown, Kari Lake in Arizona, Mike Rogers in Michigan and Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania — for more details on their stances on abortion rights. All four were silent on the Supreme Court case heard last week aiming to ban mifepristone, a pill now used in over 60% of American abortions. All would be expected to back the same type of conservative judges who overturned Roe v. Wade in the first place.
- In his previous public remarks about the mifepristone case at the Supreme Court, Brown offered no insight into his personal views on the matter. “The court will hear their arguments and make their case and that’s something that we’ll wait and see what the courts do,” Brown told KTVN News, a Reno TV station, in March.
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