Nevada news outlets ignore Jim Marchant’s latest comments pledging to steal the 2024 election for Trump
Written by Zachary Pleat
Published
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.”
JIM MARCHANT: Last year, I established a MAGA America First coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country, and I'm speaking mainly now for the people that are watching livestream and on TV. We're going to elect Mark Finchem of Arizona and Kari Lake in Arizona. They are MAGA. We're going to elect Kristina Karamo in Michigan — she's one of our coalition members; Audrey Trujillo in New Mexico; Chuck Gray in Wyoming; Diego Morales in Indiana. If we get all of it — and Kayla [Rayla] Campbell in Massachusetts, believe it or not. If we get all of our secretaries of state elected around the country like this, we take our country back.
Later during the rally, Marchant more explicitly pledged to steal the 2024 election for Trump:
MARCHANT: Is this the greatest president in American history or not? So, we have something in common. President Trump and I lost an election in 2020 because of a rigged election. I've been working since November 4, 2020, to expose what happened. And what I found out is horrifying. And when I'm secretary of state of Nevada, we're going to fix it. And when my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we're going to fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.
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.