RENO, Nev. — Mark Amodei has represented Nevada’s Second District since 2011, has never lost an election, and is leaving in January with one message for his party, delivered with the calm of a man who has already packed the good lamp: button up your chin strap.
The seat is, by any reasonable measure, won. President Trump carried it by fourteen points. It has never elected a Democrat. And Amodei, retiring and unbothered, says the seat is at risk — not because of the Democrats, whom he does not appear to fear, but because of the Republican running to replace him.
“I think the seat’s at risk,” Amodei told POLITICO, in the most Nevada sentence of the year.
The successor is David Flippo, a businessman, endorsed by the President. Amodei was asked whether he would vote for him. He said “absolutely not,” which is a phrase that does not survive contact with a primary.
The chin strap, for the uninitiated, belongs to the old-school football helmet: the strap under the jaw that keeps the helmet on when you hit someone. Amodei is not a man who explains his metaphors. He is a man who expects you to have a helmet.
The record he is objecting to is long. Flippo has faced a string of stolen valor accusations — the kind of claims that, in a normal year, end a campaign in a single news cycle. He was, by public record, listed as a debtor to a home-improvement financing company, with the loan collateralized by the flooring of his own house. The flooring. Not the house. The floor.
This is the part the narrator wants to be fair about, because fairness is the whole point. A man can borrow against his floor. Millions of Americans have financed a laminate. The question Amodei is asking — the question a fourteen-point seat is asking — is whether a candidate who financed his flooring, was fired four times, declined to file his personal financial disclosures, and is being compared nationally to George Santos is the man to carry the banner in a district that has never, not once, voted blue.
Amodei’s answer is the chin strap. The President’s answer is the endorsement. The district gets to pick, in five weeks, between a retiring man who has stopped pretending and an incoming man who has not started.
The office is scheduled to be emptied on Friday. The good lamp is already boxed.