HENDERSON, Nev. — The relentless determination that powered 40-year-old Sam Brown through West Point, combat in Afghanistan and an arduous recovery from life-threatening burns on 30% of his body could see the Reno-based entrepreneur achieve another impressive triumph in a completely different field: unseating a Democratic senator.
The retired Army captain, who Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) dubs “tougher than a three-hour steak,” walks into Election Day cheered thanks to internal surveys and a substantial lead in early GOP balloting and registrations — after months of public polling showed larger gaps with freshman Sen. Jacky Rosen.
National Republicans invested more money in the Brown campaign in its waning days, and a top GOP leader — National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines — campaigned here with Brown twice in the race’s final week.
“It’s the energy, it’s the turnout,” Brown told The Post. “We’re seeing Republicans turn out. We’re seeing really strong performance with our Latino community, our Asian-American, Pacific Islander community. Young voters are fired up and turning out.”
Among those “fired up” was a crowd of nearly 6,000 at a Trump campaign rally in this growing city adjacent to Las Vegas. Wearing a navy blazer as he spoke, Brown noted he hadn’t always dressed like that and spoken before large audiences.
The candidate then removed the jacket and exposed a reflective vest like that trash collectors and warehouse workers wear. It was an obvious allusion to President Biden’s hot-button description last week of Trump supporters as “garbage,” a line that launched a thousand memes and the 45th president riding to a Wisconsin rally in the passenger seat of a trash truck — wearing a work vest he kept on during the rally.
The Henderson rally audience cheered its approval.
Brown told The Post about his “day job” at an Amazon warehouse while starting a firm that supplied critical medications to veterans. He sold that business in 2022.
“I worked at a fulfillment center while I was in the middle of pursuing the American dream and starting a business,” he said. “You know, for a lot of us, we have to hustle. We’re not gifted anything. So I had to put a roof over my head and food on the table, and that meant working 10-hour shifts. And look, I had a great crew that I worked with. We loaded boxes all day long.”
Brown promises “a historic” election cycle that will send a battle-scarred veteran to Washington to represent “Battle Born” Nevada, so named for its 1864 Civil War admission to the Union, which saw President Abe Lincoln receive the new state’s Electoral College votes.
“Mark my words. This will be the upset of the cycle in the battleground Senate races,” he predicted.
That’s a strong claim but not without merit: Should Brown triumph Tuesday, he will have dislodged Rosen, a loyal soldier in the “Harry Reid Machine,” the colloquial name for the Democratic Party apparatus the late Senate majority leader built here.
A pugnacious ex-boxer who died in December 2021, Reid, with his allies, shifted a traditionally red state to one that’s largely blue: Of the six Nevadans in Congress, House and Senate, only one, Rep. Mark Amodei of the 2nd Congressional District, is a Republican.
Rosen, a one-term House member who grabbed the Senate seat during a Democrat wave election in the first Trump presidency’s midterms, has run a highly sheltered re-election bid. She has rarely met voters in unscripted situations. She is quickly hustled away from the media following her appearances before friendly groups such as the Culinary Union Local 226 — Rosen was a member decades ago — and a pro-Kamala Harris “Reproductive Freedom” rally.
The junior Democrat agreed to only one debate with Brown and that on strict terms. Her team has repeatedly refused The Post’s requests for an interview.
Instead, Rosen’s campaign has spent millions in advertising to paint Brown as a “MAGA extremist” who wants to impose a national abortion ban.
Brown has said he would not support such a ban, and the candidate’s wife admitted she’d had an abortion during a relationship before she met her now-husband. He believes the question should be left to the states and respects Nevada’s law, which allows abortion up to 24 weeks.
A separate Nevada initiative this year would start the process to put abortion rights into the state constitution. Critics have said the measure is just a move to spur Democrat voters to the polls.
From ‘Burning Man’ to Senate contender
Brown’s story has the elements of a classic war movie: Sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in May 2008, his life was blown apart four months later by an improvised explosive device while on a mission to support another platoon that was ambushed.
As Brown recounted last month, “It literally came to a place where I gave up the will to live. God sent me a miracle at the form of one of my soldiers who screamed out these important words, ‘Sir, I’ve got you.’”
He told the Oct. 24 Turning Point USA rally for Trump here, “Those words gave me a spark of hope, but it wasn’t the words that saved my life; it was the action of him and others who came to my rescue and smothered those flames and gave me the hope to be able to continue to fight again.”
That multi-year fight was arduous and painful. GQ magazine said Brown was dubbed “Burning Man” for what he survived and for his experimental use of virtual reality technology to manage pain during his recovery.
An unexpected benefit occurred during the healing journey: while hospitalized, he met Army Capt. Amy Larsen, a dietitian who was also deployed to the war zone and survived intense enemy fire without injury. The couple married in 2009 and have three children.
Speaking with The Post on Saturday at a campaign event in North Las Vegas, Amy Brown said that the couple has “talked about at length” how they’ll navigate living in Reno and the Washington, D.C. area should he get elected. “That’s a bridge that we’ll cross when we get there,” she said.
“I will say that we love Nevada,” Amy Brown said. “We’ve got an amazing community in Nevada and just fantastic resources that have really helped us through this campaign.”
When asked whether she’d given any thought to organizing life at the Capitol, she replied, “We’re just taking it one day at a time right now; we’re focused on Tuesday.”
The Browns relocated to Nevada after his unsuccessful 2014 run in Texas for a state legislature seat. In 2021, he announced a campaign to oppose Nevada’s senior U.S. Senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, but former state attorney general Adam Laxalt won that primary.
Laxalt, the scion of a prominent GOP family here, subsequently lost to Cortez Masto by 8,800 votes or four per Nevada voting precinct.
This year, Brown — with Trump’s endorsement — defeated a field of 12 GOP rivals including former ambassador to Iceland Jim Gunter and former state representative Jim Marchant. Along with the ex-Prez, Daines and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., endorsed Brown.
A Brown win — and a similar upset victory in any of the Democrat-held House seats here — would put the Reid machine on the ropes. And should former President Donald Trump, up by 1.5 points in the Real Clear Politics Nevada poll average Friday, wins Nevada’s six Electoral College votes, then that Reid coalition might be on a ventilator if not full life support.
Part of those victories, if accomplished, would come from the heavy GOP turnout in the state’s rural counties and a shift of the state’s unaffiliated voters — “nonpartisan” is the official term — towards the GOP side. Daines said Tuesday such voters “probably will follow more of where the surge is occurring than not.”
By Sunday evening, Republicans maintained their early voting advantage by slightly less than 43,000 more ballots than had been returned by Democrats in the state. While later mail-in ballots and in-person voting on Nov. 5 in Clark County—home to Las Vegas and 7 out of 10 Nevada voters—are expected to cut into the GOP balloting lead, the advantage Republicans enjoy now might worry Democrats.
Jon Ralston, longtime Silver State political observer and CEO/Editor of The Nevada Independent, blogged that the GOP’s favorable numbers are impressive: “At the risk of stating the obvious, you would rather be the party ahead” in early ballot returns. Ralston also pointed out Republicans registered 10,000 more new voters statewide in October than the Democrats.
If elected, Brown said he expects to work harmoniously with Cortez Masto. He said they have “a cordial relationship. I don’t see her often, but when we do see each other, we greet each other warmly.”
Cortez Masto’s office did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on how she would work with Brown should he win the contest. The Democrat has endorsed Rosen’s re-election bid.
Should he go to the Senate, Brown says he would like to work on water and land issues in Nevada, freeing up more federal land for new home construction. He would also like to “push back against California” on water conservation issues, where he says the state is “the leader in the West.”
However, the candidate acknowledges the time constraint facing a new Congress.
“One of my greatest challenges is that we never know what we’re going to have two years later after an election,” Brown said, referring to the 2026 midterms. “So come January, we know what we’ve got. You know who’s president, who’s controlling the Senate, who’s controlling the House, and you can begin to prioritize what you’re doing.”
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