LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Danielle Ford has one thing in common with the last few governors of Nevada.
She says she wants to be "the education governor."
From there, however, the similarities end.
Ford, a former Clark County School District trustee and current state Board of Education member, is running for governor, as a non-partisan candidate.
Unlike Republican incumbent Gov. Joe Lombardo and his Democratic challenger, Aaron Ford, Danielle Ford had to gather 250 valid signatures to get on the ballot.
Ford says she considered running for the Legislature, and running for one of the two major party nominations, but ultimately decided it wasn't for her.
"I thought, 'should I run with a party?' And at my core, I was like, I can't, because I truly don't think the two-party system in Nevada is successful at the moment," she said. "And I decided to take the leap and run as an independent, which is a lot of work and a lot of loopholes to jump through."
WATCH | Danielle Ford runs as a nonpartisan for governor
Although nonpartisans now outnumber both Republicans and Democrats in Nevada, a nonpartisan has never won statewide office. In part, that's due to automatic voter registration at the DMV, which has created thousands of "zombie voters" who are registered, but who will not participate in elections.
Still, the trend of rising nonpartisan registration and falling major-party affiliation predates automatic registration, and Danielle Ford says the political moment allows for a change.
"It just shows that there is an appetite for third-party choices and for an open, fair election, and that paired with the fact that I think the community knows me," she says. "I think that I have earned the community's trust, and they know that I'm electable and they have seen me twice win against establishment candidates being outfunded by sometimes 100 times my budget."
This time around, it's millions of times. Danielle Ford's campaign reports show no money raised or spent in the governor's race, while Aaron Ford and Lombardo's campaigns and outside groups are dropping millions into the contest.
It's also not lost on Ford that she'd be the first woman elected governor, as well as one of the youngest. "I do think a lot of younger people see the people running the state and go, 'I don't know that they know what's going on,' and I agree with them," Danielle Ford says. "I feel the same way. You know, I'm 40 and I am not too young and not too old."
Education agenda
Danielle Ford's campaign is centered on education, but she connects that issue to many others. Poor test scores, she says, can be linked to other problems, such as a lack of housing, hunger, illness, want of transportation and other problems in the community.
So instead of focusing only on schools, teachers and tests, she says, we should tackle all of the problems systematically, at once.
And the first part of that problem? Spending on outside contractors, which she says could lead to a takeover of local schools by the state.
"So the first thing I'm going to do is work on giving people the power back, and that looks like not letting corporations come in and place people in all our education boards and committees that are from different states," she says. "We are sending so much money out to different states."
"That's an easy, easy, easy way to to have an additional $2 billion a year, if we're not paying these out-of-state textbook, curriculum, software remediation, professional development companies that contract year after year with us, increasing their prices that we are not dependent on this system, this business system that only works if our kids are failing," she added.
That money, she said, should instead go to hire good teachers and aides to help in classrooms. Danielle Ford says we should get rid of standardized tests, and rely on teachers to work with parents to keep them informed about student progress, she said.
"There is not a single parent that goes, 'how are my student outcomes doing?' Or 'how is the eighth grade math coming along?' They don't care," she said. "They would take a teacher's recommendation, and if a teacher says 'hey, your kid is thriving in this, this and that, but they're not having the progress I would love to see in this area, but I'm not worried about it, let's give it this much time, and if it still hasn't improved, let's take a look at it,' like you would a doctor, like you would any other professional in whose experience you trust,"
Data centers, housing and contracts reform
Danielle Ford said Las Vegas doesn't need more data centers at this point, especially since the state lacks an overall strategy for artificial intelligence.
"So what we've done wrong in all aspects and all these systems that we've talked about, from public safety to health to housing, education, technology and environment, is let people come in with one idea and one solution and tell us what we need, without anybody knowing what the vision is for Nevada," she said. "We need a vision and a plan, and then we find out [if] we need that thing."
That requires deciding how A.I. would be used in places like the state's schools, she says. And while A.I. could help improve, say, research in health care, it could also go rogue and cause problems.
When it comes to housing, Danielle Ford says she wants to work with the housing we have, and make it easier for people to move in with money to help with appliances or utility deposits. She says she opposes new housing developments that are built by developers solely to rent, not to sell.
"So we need to make attainable housing with what we have," she says. "I'm a big fan of just let's work with what we have right now."
If she had to narrow her agenda to just one thing, however, she says it would reforming education spending.
"[It] would be to strengthen our procurement laws around spending, but specifically education spending," she said. "I truly believe that if we only put a dent positively in one system, and it was the education system, and it was around getting parasites, literally companies who benefit from our money, and schools, that come in with the purpose of taking our money, getting that either out or scrutinized with real legislation, the byproduct of that is needing more humans in schools and they can figure it out."
But first, Danielle Ford will have to overcome one of the oldest prejudices in politics.
"They're going to tell everybody, and they are going to continue to tell everybody, that it's throwing away a vote. I do not think so," she says. "I think that right now, we have a real opportunity to elect a nonpartisan who isn't bought by anybody, who deeply understands the system and who cares. And we cannot throw our vote away on the failed two-party system that's broken anymore."
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