“A Nevada conservative running for attorney general leans hard into her Israeliness”
Chattah’s brand: A tech-savvy immigrant from the Start-Up Nation, ready to fight for the rights of “all Nevadans,” as her website puts it.
Chattah is well-known in Nevada for her prominence as a lawyer in a range of actions against the state’s anti-COVID restrictions. Most notably, in the 9th Circuit, the most liberal federal court of appeals, she helped overturn the state’s ban on gatherings over 50 in houses of worship.
She is running virtually unopposed for the GOP nomination to unseat the incumbent Democratic attorney general, Aaron Ford, in November 2022. Nevada, which United States President Joe Biden won narrowly in the 2020 election, has become reliably purple, and there are no polls on the attorney general race.
Chattah also leans heavily into her Israeliness. She likes telling folks that she is the first Israeli American to run for a statewide office, in any state. … The ad, calling her “Israeli-born,” has gone viral.
It’s not just branding. An hour with Chattah in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel breakfast room is like an hour at a Tel Aviv cafe with an Israeli politician: easy transitions from policy to family and back again, peppered with unguarded revelations. This is not your standard-issue, wary-of-the-lamestream-media Republican candidate.
“The COVID cases are all constitutional cases,” she said. “I’m an Israeli immigrant. The whole point is to come to this country and everything is beautiful, and the Constitution is what protects us. If the Constitution doesn’t protect us, if America is no longer the land of opportunity, we might as well go back home.”
Chattah is all about alliances: She brought the Police Protective Association on board for an initiative against anti-Israel boycotts. Seeking to establish a museum on Holocaust and genocide, she allied with Armenian Americans. She also helped lead lobbying for passage this year of Nevada’s own state bill mandating Holocaust education.
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