State Senate District 19
Independent American Party candidate Janine Hansen will try to leverage her experience as a lobbyist for school choice in a long-shot bid to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Goicoechea in the expansive Nevada Senate District 19.
Hansen, state president of the nonprofit education lobby Nevada Families for Freedom and executive director of the Independent American Party of Nevada, said her priorities if she is elected are to protect the right to bear arms, provide education choice for all children and protect basic rights such as freedoms of speech and assembly.
“These things are all under attack by the government,” she said.
She said tax increases hurt the state’s economy and that public money should be used for education, improving infrastructure “and other things everyone benefits from.” 
She will need a strong showing to unseat Goicoechea, a self-described “constitutional conservative” who captured 57 percent of the vote in a three-way race in 2012 that also included Hansen, who garnered 19.5 percent.
Goicoechea said he doesn’t favor tax increases, either, and didn’t vote for them in the last session. The state needs to make better use of available money without tax hikes, he said.
“We need to do a better job of spending the money. There are some formulas in place on the collection side that need to be looked at,” he said, adding that he aims to ensure that the method is “more equitable.”
Hansen doesn’t support using public money to build a Las Vegas stadium for a National Football League team.
Goicoechea, however, said the state’s role is to be a conduit for enabling legislation when it comes to a proposal to use some hotel room tax revenue to build a stadium.
He said his priority, if re-elected, is to tackle state water concerns.
“We’ve kind of stumbled along the last three decades. We probably overappropriated our water resources to a great extent,” he said.
Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Follow him on Twitter: @KeithRogers2.
