Underdog Democrat makes her case for Nevada’s top job

Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

Washoe County Commission Chair Alexis Hill, an underdog in the Democratic primary for Nevada governor, sat with a group of older women at a southwest Las Vegas coffee shop during a campaign stop.

She hooked them by critiquing Nevada’s 2014 Tesla Gigafactory deal — $1.3 billion in tax breaks to Elon Musk, now a pariah on the right. She then pivoted to her Sparks upbringing and early frustration with local government before returning home as an urban planner in the prerecession years.

One woman stopped her: “Where’s Sparks?” she asked, referencing the Northern Nevada city with about 110,000 residents.

Hill faces steep odds against Attorney General Aaron Ford, who enjoys firm support from party leaders and whose campaign kickoff in late July featured state party Chair Daniele Monroe-Moreno and U.S. Reps. Dina Titus and Steven Horsford. By September, Ford’s campaign had secured endorsements from over half of the Democrats in the Nevada Legislature and raised over $1 million. A recent poll showed Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo leading Ford within the margin of error, according to KTNV. Hill wasn’t included in the poll.

But, Hill told those at the coffee shop, she’s beaten long odds in the past.

Hill largely shrugged off the support Ford has lined up, saying that the party leadership’s backing of him “rarely comes up unless I’m talking to political insiders.” Ford’s previous life in the Legislature made elected officials more comfortable with him, she said.

“There’s a lot of people who want to see a change but are worried to come out and do an endorsement … because you just want to make sure that you’re not offending anyone,” Hill said.

While she has spent time in local government, Hill still considers herself an “outsider” when it comes to Carson City. In 2025, that may be an advantage.

The Democrats’ brand is struggling. In August, the party’s favorability was 32 points underwater, according to CNBC, “the lowest rating for either party going back to at least 1996.”

Hill said Democrats needed to be clear about what they’re going to deliver for their constituents. While acknowledging her disagreements with President Donald Trump, she said he had a platform that was understandable.

Hill told voters at the coffee shop that her own frustrations pushed her to seek office. As she tells it, Hill spoke with Ford after he announced he would be running for governor, expressing her concerns about housing, the state’s finances and its ability to hire teachers.

It bothered her that she couldn’t get a clear answer on how he would fix those problems, Hill said.

“It’s really important for us to not just run on being pro-choice, which I am, and being against Trump, which I am. You have to have more for people to show up for you,” she told the Sun. “We have seen Democrats who are running right now and getting people excited, and they are actually turning out more people.”

She was referring to Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City. Hill made it clear that she’s not a socialist, but that she understood Mamdani’s message focusing on transportation, child care and making “sure that your lives are easier.”

“That is a clear message,” Hill said. “I’m saying I want to fix your streets, I want to fund your schools and I want to support your families.”

She has embraced similar language around the ultrawealthy.

The first political statement she makes in her kick-off advertisement is that “Elon Musk swindled Nevada.” She then says the state needs to “end billionaire welfare, force giant corporations to pay their fair share in taxes and start putting working families first.”

Eric Brown, the former Washoe County manager who stepped down in June, had Hill as one of his five bosses. He wasn’t surprised to see Hill strike that tone for the campaign, saying “she’s very aspirational.”

“She can be very aggressive in making policy arguments that she feels need to be addressed or (are) being ignored,” Brown said.

Mariluz Garcia, a fellow commissioner in Washoe, wrote in a text to the Sun that Hill had been effective in her role as chair. With her own race, however, Garcia’s compliments stopped short of an endorsement.

“From the moment I met her, it was clear that public service is in her DNA,” she said. “She’s a working mom who cares deeply about improving the quality of life for Nevadans.”

Hill’s trying to take her message to the public in any way she can, whether that be texting voters directly or writing in the Reno Gazette-Journal about her frustration with the tax credit plan to create a movie studio complex in Summerlin.

She launched a petition against the proposal, a $1.4 billion tax credit over 15 years. A May report from Applied Analysis found that state and local governments would get 52 cents back for every dollar in tax credits.

“What I see with these deals is that they are a sugar high. They get you the jobs in the short term, but in the long term, you don’t get the investments that you need on your roads and your child care,” Hill said. “Housing only becomes more expensive, so you can’t invest in that, and then your growth is something that you can’t keep up with.”

For workforce development, Hill notes that Nevada doesn’t match federal funding for adult education. So while the state may have successful programs, she said, they’re not serving enough people.

“We also don’t have enough capacity … to ensure that we can get those incredible companies coming into our communities,” Hill said. “I don’t think that, at this point, we need to be doing the tax giveaways when we are in such trouble with investing in our local communities.”

‘Simple fixes’ and tough sells

Hill looks back at her time working for Sparks in 2008 — when the Reno metro area’s unemployment rate jumped from 6.5% in January to 8.9% in December — and worries what Nevada’s future brings.

Las Vegas’ economic health has become a national story this year as visitation consistently falls behind last year’s totals, though gaming revenues have been steadier.

“We need to have these really frank conversations about the simple fixes that we can do to invest in Nevada,” she said.

The first of many policies she listed was resetting a home’s property tax valuation when it’s sold. In Nevada, property tax increases for homes are capped at 3% each year, meaning that what’s paid can lag behind the property’s real value.

That also means less money going into Nevada schools.

Hill said corporations were taking advantage of the state’s current system to buy up housing, making it harder for locals to afford it. She called the problem a “pure fairness issue.”

Hill proposed that the state could curb corporate home-buying by raising taxes on properties once an owner holds a certain number of them, but she emphasized that it’s just “one of many ways” to treat corporate-owned homes more like businesses when it comes to taxation. She also said she would support a cap on the number of properties an investor can buy, though she clarified the same could be done through taxation.

But in a state with one of the lowest property tax rates in the country and no personal income tax, how does Hill navigate the knee-jerk reaction voters may have to those proposals?

“Voters are very smart, and I talk to them every day. I talked to a big group of voters last night, and I explained what this is. I explained these loopholes,” Hill said. She added that, even by embracing her proposals, Nevada would still be a low-tax state.

Hill said she wasn’t proposing an income tax or raising the cap on property tax increases.

Brown agrees that Hill is an effective communicator, but that taxes can be a hard sell in Nevada. He pointed to Washoe County’s ballot measure on renewing a 30-year allocation of property taxes for local libraries last year. It would not have raised taxes and lost by three points.

“That’s still a tough one to do,” Brown said.

Along with the Legislature, Hill may have to deal with a federal government unhappy to see Lombardo replaced by a Democrat. She tied her platform to fighting the current president’s policies, saying that investing in residents will make Nevada less reliant on Washington, D.C.

“Las Vegas deserves more resources. This is a world economy, and I don’t understand why we’re not seeing light rail in Las Vegas and other investments … but that takes leadership,” Hill said. “That takes a convener.”