Joe Lombardo, the Only Challenger to Unseat a Governor in 2022, Has Now Seen It From Both Sides

CARSON CITY, Nev. — Democrat Aaron Ford unseated Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo early Wednesday. The Associated Press called the race at 4:46 a.m. Eastern time, the Washington Examiner reported, and NBC News projected Ford the winner as well. With about 87 percent of the expected vote in, Ford led 51.7 percent to 44.2 percent, according to NBC News.

Four years ago, Lombardo stood on the other side of this exact story. In 2022, the then-Clark County sheriff beat Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak by about a point and a half. Sisolak was the only incumbent governor in the country to lose that year.

That made Lombardo the only challenger in America to take a governor’s job from the person holding it. On Wednesday he became the person holding it.

The model weighs in

This reporter’s model has studied every challenger who unseated a sitting governor in 2022. There was one. The model has followed his career closely ever since, partly out of interest and partly because the spreadsheet only has one row.

The findings are conclusive. Of all the challengers who unseated a governor in 2022, 100 percent were themselves unseated in 2026. The model rates this pattern as statistically perfect. The margin of error is one governor.

The model has applied its finding to Ford. It projects that a challenger will unseat him in 2030, and that the challenger will be unseated in 2034. The chart for this forecast goes up to the year 2090 and is mostly arrows.

The candidates

Ford, 54, has been Nevada’s attorney general since 2019 and was the state’s first Black attorney general, KTNV reported. He will be Nevada’s first Black governor, NBC News and KTNV reported.

“Tonight’s victory belongs to the housekeepers, nurses, teachers, rideshare drivers, electricians, and all working Nevadans who will no longer have to settle for working harder than ever yet struggling more and more to afford to live,” Ford’s campaign said in a statement, according to KTNV.

Ford’s campaign ran against what it called “the Lombardo-Trump economy,” NBC News reported, with a focus on tax cuts and tariffs in a state that runs on tourism.

At a watch party in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, Lombardo said he expected the early count to favor Ford but still anticipated victory, KTNV reported. The model anticipated his victory too. It also anticipated Ford’s. The model anticipates everything, which this desk considers a feature.

By the numbers

NBC News described Lombardo as the nation’s lone Republican candidate to topple a Democratic incumbent governor in 2022. In 2026 he did not get to be the lone anything. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also lost his bid for reelection on Tuesday, to Democrat Gina Hinojosa, CBS News reported.

This reporter has drawn a chart of the two of them. It is a bar chart with two bars of identical height, labeled “Governors, Formerly.” The poll of governors who saw this coming has a response rate of zero.

The model, for its part, has learned one thing about Nevada. The state remembers how a governor got the job, and on Tuesday it used the same method.