In November of 2021, millionaire and former private equity executive Glenn Youngkin – who had never held public office before – won the Virginia gubernatorial election and provided a blueprint for Republicans looking to win statewide office in a Democratic-leaning state. Youngkin attended Rice and Harvard, became CEO of the Carlyle Group, and used his millions to sponsor his own gubernatorial ambitions. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how Guy Nohra, a Stanford and University of Chicago-educated venture capitalist, could make a similar leap.

Nohra, who moved from California to Nevada in 2014 and now resides in Reno, came to America in the 1970s when his family fled the Lebanese Civil War. As a teenager, he took up arms against the Palestine Liberation Organization, an experience he now highlights to emphasize his passion for gun rights. After business school, he took a job selling medical equipment before eventually entering the venture capital realm. In 1996, he co-founded a firm called Alta Partners, a life sciences-focused VC outfit. After years with Alta, he’d launch an adjacent fund in Spain before finally moving to the Silver State in the mid-2010s. In a 2021 interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nohra said that the move was motivated by how he felt in the Bay Area – “with regard to my values, my morals, and, of course, my political views, California in general and the Bay Area in particular were just becoming so different for me,” something he compared to fleeing Lebanon, adding “some people just had to hide, you don’t want to hide when you’re in your country.” 

So, like many Californians before him,1Only 25% of Nevadans were born in Nevada itself, and it has long held the lowest share of native-borns compared to current residents of any state. Meanwhile, nearly 20% of Nevada residents were born in California. Guy absconded across the Sierra Nevada and set up home in Reno, Nevada. Now, he’s channeling his energy into a longshot gubernatorial run in the state, hoping to challenge Democratic incumbent Governor Steve Sisolak in November. 

That Nohra appears affable and pragmatic in the primary field is less a reflection of his own political acumen than it is the absurd assortment of other candidates seeking the Republican nomination. There is Joey Gilbert, a boxer-turned-attorney who has “not a single regret” regarding his presence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. There’s Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore, who attempted to co-host a Blue Lives Matter march on the Strip three weeks after the murder of George Floyd, which ultimately compelled the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police to put out a statement explaining they were not in any way affiliated with the event (she also once sent out one of those tacky gun-toting Christmas cards). There’s North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee – who switched parties in 2021 due to the “socialist takeover of the Nevada Democratic Party” — and who, over the course of a very strange week of his mayorship, enlisted the help of local police in “debugging a phone” and then removing child pornography from his iPad (something police now say he was insufficiently investigated for). There’s Fred Simon, a trauma surgeon who’s accused Sisolak of practicing medicine without a license (for his COVID-19 response) and who sued the Washoe County School District for “interrupting” him during his public comment, as well as real estate investor Barak Zilberberg, who advocated for taxing panhandlers, saying “they should have a QR code and I will have homeless patrols out there, looking out and making sure everyone pays their fair share of taxes.” At the other end of the spectrum are former Senator Dean Heller (who lost reelection to Jacky Rosen in 2018) and Clark County (home to the Las Vegas metropolitan area) Sheriff Joe Lombardo. 

That Guy Nohra is probably the third most mainstream candidate does not mean he has a serious chance – he doesn’t. Polls of the race so far have put Nohra at 1% or lower and Lombardo has raised more money than every other candidate in the race combined. At the end of the day, Nohra will be overshadowed by the more newsworthy Fiore and Gilbert, and be considered less credible compared to Heller or Lombardo. In a Republican primary debate at the beginning of January, Nohra ended his opening statement bragging that “I’ve seen hundreds of budgets by the way… just so you know, because states have budgets” before he was quickly drowned out by applause for Gilbert.

But what makes Nohra emblematic of this wave of Republican candidates is not that he can win, nor even that he will have much impact on this race. It is his behavior, his message, and his overreliance on the necessary buzz words that his marketing team feel make him accessible to Republican primary voters. He’s said that he will “expose the election fraud we all know is there” (Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske – the only Republican statewide officeholder in Nevada – found no evidence of widespread voter fraud).2It’s also worth noting that one Las Vegas man who worked as chief financial officer for a company that hosted a Trump rally and a QAnon conference claimed that someone had cast a vote on behalf of his deceased wife, which the Nevada GOP quickly took to (in fact, their tweet from November 10, 2020 is still up). It was later discovered to actually have been him, for which he was charged and pleaded guilty. He’s the quietest person in the room chanting that anti-vaccine mandate drum. His line promising to teach children “how great America is while keeping critical race theory out,” could be written by someone who first tuned into politics a week ago. His tweet saying “we must defend our police, not defund them,” is so awkwardly retro and mainstream that the president is running around saying the same thing. And Nohra claims he got into the race due to Sisolak’s pandemic response, because he felt the shutdown had gone on long enough, and mask mandates needed to go away. 

In an uncomfortable aside in one interview, Nohra said “it’s all cost benefit” regarding coronavirus deaths, noting how many were out of work or school to save lives. “Hopefully I’m explaining to you with data why I think it was wrong,” he added, as only a venture capitalist-turned-politician would. He thinks Sisolak banned certain drugs (which the FDA also issued guidance against) for political reasons because then-President Trump supported them and unfavorably compared Nevada’s response to that of Florida and Arizona, states he believes had death rates that weren’t much worse than Nevada’s. As of January 20, Florida averaged 295 deaths per 100,000, Arizona had 349 (the second-worst in the nation) – Nevada had 282. 

This also ignores the economic realities of the state he’s hoping to govern. Compared to other states, Nevada has a much higher share of employees in personal care and services-related occupations, such as dealers, ticket takers, theater workers, concierges, and other positions that require direct interaction with tourists from all over the world who could be unwitting spreaders of the virus themselves. Tourism is responsible for 16% of Nevada’s GDP, higher than any other state. The only other state for which tourism constitutes more than 10% of GDP is Hawaii, who has also maintained its mask mandate and imposed far stricter travel rules than Nevada. The nature of Nevada’s economy makes it particularly vulnerable to pandemic-related shocks, as a significant portion of it rests on entertainment, travel, and face-to-face interaction. For these reasons, Nevada received the second-worst score in terms of how it has fared against the pandemic in Politico’s analysis. That Nohra finds it politically expedient to compare Nevada to Arizona in terms of outcomes is divorced from the realities in its economy and its health outcomes and obtuse to what makes the state he seeks to govern unique.

Nonetheless, Nohra plugs onward, pledging all manner of modern Republican orthodoxies and inviting as many Youngkin comparisons as he can – avoiding even the broadest generalizations that separate Nevada from Virginia and him from Youngkin. He has shamelessly plugged himself as a Youngkin-like figure, congratulating Youngkin on the day he was sworn in, declaring “We’re going to do it [sic] Nevada in November.” He has called the comparison to Youngkin “uncanny,” noting “you couldn’t write it better as far as a script for us.” But Nevada is not Virginia – Virginia is bluer, wealthier, more educated, and has more people. Courting the DC suburbs means avoiding any mention of Donald Trump, and Youngkin won his party’s nomination because of the state’s ranked-choice election of delegates, a system conducive to an expertly-selected compromise candidate who could do exactly that. Nohra, on the other hand, will face a closed winner-take-all primary, which will assist the most conservative and most well-known candidates. Nohra’s lack of name recognition and banality within the Republican field will not get him far. 

But that won’t stop him from campaigning like he’s a Beltway-manufactured button-down clone of Youngkin. His strategy for most of the campaign has been leaning into his high-quality collateral and collegiate scrappiness, and he clearly has spent a lot more on his personal marketing than some of the other underdogs in the race. But even this has begun to err towards trolling journalists and other candidates as time runs out for his struggling campaign.

What makes Nohra interesting is exactly how mainstream candidates like him have become. He can hardly claim to be an outsider; he can’t claim to be the most conservative, the most electable, or the most experienced. The judgment call he and so many like him have made in campaign strategy – to repeat talking points months after they’ve faded away, to hire an expensive political consultancy to brand a relative unknown, and to be exactly middling in a field of far more interesting characters – ignores the truth about Republican politics in 2022. Despite promises to make America great again, Republican voters aren’t actually clamoring for the same thing – they’re calling out for the real deal. They want a savior, a redeemer, a messiah. They want a crusade for deliverance. 

Youngkin won in Virginia because he understood this: that he could be different and eschew the ruling Republican philosophy of fealty to Trump and his ideology in order to deliver a blue state. Nohra and his contemporaries are emblematic of the modern, post-Trump Republican candidates not because they are like Youngkin, but because of this fealty; fealty not to a particular agenda, nor to Mar-a-Lago, but to what they see as the prevailing winds of conservatism. You can’t win in Republican politics by copying a candidate two-thousand miles away, but you can win by presenting a new vision for the movement and showing how you, and only you, can deliver salvation unlike any other candidate.

We reached out to Guy Nohra’s campaign multiple times for comment. We did not hear back.