Nevada Republican nominee for secretary of state Jim Marchant pledged during a rally with defeated former President Donald Trump that a coalition of secretary of state candidates he created will steal the next presidential election for Trump if they’re elected. Yet news organizations in the state ignored these alarming comments.
Marchant leads the America First Secretary of State Coalition, which consists of Republicans who are running for offices that oversee voting in their respective states. They support the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; the coalition also collaborates with QAnon conspiracy theorists, and Marchant himself has ties to the QAnon community.
During an October 8, 2022, rally with Trump in Minden, Nevada, Marchant virtually admitted his coalition’s goal is to seize control of enough electoral votes to throw presidential elections to their chosen candidates. Or, in his words, if they win, “we will take our country back.”
On MSNBC’s The Katie Phang Show, former Republican strategist Matthew Dowd commented that Marchant’s comments revealed that “they have a national plan to basically put people in power, and to ensure that whoever doesn’t win the election will win the election in their mind in these key states around the country.” Dowd framed this as a threat to democracy.
Yet local news coverage ignored these alarming comments. Several Nevada newspapers and news sites did cover the rally, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Record-Courier, but they completely ignored Marchant’s comments, mentioning him only to note that he was one of the speakers. The Reno Gazette Journal covered comments from Trump and multiple candidates for Nevada offices – but failed to mention Marchant, even though a photo of him speaking is presented at the top of the article. And the Las Vegas Sun, aside from carrying an Associated Press story about Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) comments, didn’t cover the rally.
As of publication, there were no mentions of Marchant outside of paid political ads on the Las Vegas TV stations KTNV, KSNV, KLAS, and KVVU, or the Reno TV stations KOLO, KRNV, KTVN, and KRXI since the rally, according to a transcript search of the Kinetiq video database.
