By james art 
HENDERSON, Nev. — The relentless determination that drove 40-year-old Sam Brown through West Point, combat in Afghanistan and a difficult recovery from life-threatening burns on 30 percent of his body could lead the Reno-based entrepreneur to another impressive triumph in an entirely different field : ousting a Democratic senator.
The retired Army captain, whom Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) called “tougher than a three-hour steak,” enters Election Day buoyed by internal polls and a significant lead in early voting and GOP registrations — after months of polling showed greater differences with freshman Sen. Jackie Rosen.
National Republicans poured more money into Brown’s campaign in its waning days, and a top GOP leader — National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines — campaigned here with Brown twice in the final week of the race.
“It’s the energy, it’s the activity,” Brown told The Post. “We’re seeing the Republicans come out. We’re seeing really strong performance with our Hispanic community, our Asian American Pacific Islander community. Young voters are fired up and coming out.”
Among the “hot” was a crowd of nearly 6,000 people at a Trump campaign rally in this growing city near Las Vegas. Wearing a navy blue blazer as he spoke, Brown noted that he hasn’t always dressed like this when speaking in front of large audiences.
The candidate then removed the jacket and displayed a reflective vest like those worn by garbage collectors and warehouse workers. It was an apparent allusion to President Biden’s heated description last week of Trump supporters as “garbage,” a line that launched thousands of memes and the 45th president traveling to a rally in Wisconsin in the passenger seat of a garbage truck — wearing a work vest , which she wore during the rally.
The Henderson rally crowd cheered his approval.
Brown told The Post about his “day job” in an Amazon warehouse while starting a company that delivers critical medications to veterans. He sold that business in 2022.
“I was working at a fulfillment center while I was in the middle of chasing the American dream and starting a business,” he said. “You know, for many of us, we have to hurry. Nothing is given to us. So I had to have a roof over my head and food on the table, and that meant working 10-hour shifts. And look, I had a great team to work with. We were loading cartons all day.”
Brown promises a “historic” election cycle that will send a battle-scarred veteran to Washington to represent “Battle Born” Nevada, so named for its admission into the Union during the Civil War in 1864, when President Abe Lincoln received the votes of The Electoral College of the new state.
“Mark my words. This will be the cycle upset in the battleground Senate races,” he predicted.
It’s a strong claim, but not without merit: If Brown triumphs Tuesday, he will have displaced Rosen, a loyal soldier in the “Harry Reid Machine,” the colloquial name for the Democratic Party apparatus the late Senate Majority Leader built here.
A cantankerous former boxer who died in December 2021, Reid and his allies transformed a traditionally red state into one that is mostly blue: Of the six Nevadans in Congress, the House and the Senate, only one, Congressman Mark Amodei of 2 1st Congressional District, is a Republican.
Rosen, a one-term member of the House of Representatives who grabbed the Senate seat during a wave of Democratic elections during the midterms of Trump’s first term, made a very defensive bid for re-election. She rarely met with constituents on contingency. She was quickly ostracized from the media after her appearances before friendly groups like Culinary Union Local 226 — Rosen was a member decades ago — and the pro-Kamala Harris Reproductive Freedom rally.
The junior Democrat agreed to only one debate with Brown, and then on strict terms. Her team repeatedly declined The Post’s requests for an interview.
Instead, Rosen’s campaign has spent millions on advertising to paint Brown as a “MAGA extremist” who wants to impose a national abortion ban.
Brown said he would not support such a ban, and the candidate’s wife admitted she had an abortion during a relationship before meeting her current husband. He believes the issue should be left up to the states and upholds Nevada’s law that allows abortion up to 24 weeks.
A separate initiative in Nevada this year will begin the process of writing abortion rights into the state constitution. Critics say the measure is simply a move to encourage Democratic voters to go to the polls.
From “Burning Man” to Senate contender
Brown’s story has the makings of a classic war movie: Deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in May 2008, his life is shattered four months later by an improvised explosive device while on a mission to support another platoon that was ambushed.
As Brown recounted last month, “I literally got to a place where I gave up my will to live. God sent me a miracle in the form of one of my soldiers who shouted these important words, “Sir, I’ve got you.”
He told the Oct. 24 Turning Point USA rally for Trump here: “Those words gave me a spark of hope, but they weren’t the words that saved my life; it was the action of him and others who came to my rescue and extinguished those flames and gave me hope that I could keep fighting again.
This multi-year battle was hard and painful. GQ magazine said Brown was dubbed “Burning Man” for what he survived and for his experimental use of virtual reality technology to deal with pain during his recovery.
During the medical trip, an unexpected benefit happened: While in the hospital, he met Army Capt. Amy Larsen, a nutritionist who had also been deployed to the war zone and survived intense enemy fire unscathed. The couple married in 2009 and have three children.
Speaking to The Post on Saturday at a campaign event in North Las Vegas, Amy Brown said the couple had “talked at length” about how they would navigate their lives in Reno and the Washington area if he were elected. “It’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get there,” she said.
“I will say we love Nevada,” Amy Brown said. “We have an amazing community in Nevada and just fantastic resources that have really helped us in this campaign.”
When asked if she had thought about organizing life at the Capitol, she said, “We’re just taking it day by day right now; we’re focused on Tuesday.”
The Browns moved to Nevada after his unsuccessful 2014 bid in Texas for a seat in the state legislature. In 2021, he announced a campaign to challenge Nevada’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Katherine Cortez Masto, but former state attorney general Adam Laxalt won the primary.
Laxalt, scion of a prominent Republican family here, subsequently lost to Cortez Masto by 8,800 votes, or four per Nevada precinct.
This year, Brown — with Trump’s endorsement — defeated a field of 12 GOP challengers, including former ambassador to Iceland Jim Gunter and former state Rep. Jim Marchant. Along with the former Prez, Daines and Sen. Marcia Blackburn, R-Tenn., endorsed Brown.
A Brown victory — and a similar upset victory in any of the Democratic House seats here — would put the Reid machine on the ropes. And if former President Donald Trump, who is up 1.5 points in the Real Clear Politics Nevada polling average on Friday, wins Nevada’s six Electoral College votes, then Reid’s coalition could be on a ventilator, if not on full life support.
Some of those victories, if achieved, will come from strong GOP voter turnout in the state’s rural areas and swinging the state’s unaffiliated voters — “nonpartisan” is the official term — to the GOP side. Daines said Tuesday that such voters “will probably follow more where the jump happens than not.”
By Sunday evening, Republicans maintained their early voting advantage with just under 43,000 more ballots than were returned by Democrats in the state. While later mail-in ballots and in-person voting on Nov. 5 in Clark County — home to Las Vegas and 7 in 10 Nevada voters — are expected to reduce the GOP’s lead in the vote, the advantage Republicans now enjoy could to alarm the Democrats.
John Ralston, a longtime Silver State political observer and CEO/editor of The Nevada Independent, blogged that the GOP’s favorable numbers were impressive: “At the risk of stating the obvious, you’d rather be the party ahead” at early voting results. Ralston also pointed out that Republicans registered 10,000 more voters statewide in October than Democrats.
If elected, Brown said he expects to work harmoniously with Cortez Masto. He said they had a “cordial relationship. I don’t see her often, but when we do, we greet each other warmly.”
Cortez Masto’s office did not respond to The Post’s request for comment on how she would work with Brown if he wins the pageant. The Democrat endorsed Rosen’s re-election bid.
If he goes to the Senate, Brown says he’d like to work on Nevada’s water and land issues, freeing up more federal land for new housing development. He would also like to “push back California” on water conservation issues, where he says the state is “the leader in the West.”
However, the candidate acknowledges the time limit before a new Congress.
“One of my biggest challenges is that we never know what we’re going to have two years down the line after an election,” Brown said, referring to the 2026 midterms. “So coming into January, we know what we’ve got. You know who’s president, who controls the Senate, who controls the House, and you can start to prioritize what you’re doing.