A Democratic Socialist promised to fight for healthcare, education, and affordability when he announced his candidacy for Nevada’s state legislature Saturday.
Tyler Cavey is an educator in the Clark County School District and has been a member of the Las Vegas chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2022.
On Saturday, August 23, he announced his candidacy for District 35 of Nevada’s State Assembly, which is located in the Mountain’s Edge area of the southern Las Vegas Valley.
Cavey joined the DSA in 2022. He worked to support Democratic candidates that year and in 2024, but now is running on a Democratic ticket himself.
He said that the Democratic establishment is not very different economically from the Republican establishment.
The Democrats push some positive social policies, which is why he votes for them, but Cavey said that the party establishment does not care about the workers.
“They kill any concession in reform for the working class, because at the end of the day they have the same donors as the Republicans,” Cavey said. “They’re in the same friend groups. They go to the same golf courses.”
Cavey plans to stand out by funding his campaign exclusively through small donors and union endorsements.
“I’m not taking money from corporations,” Cavey said. “I don’t want to even look like I’m being bribed by these guys.”
Core Platform
The only large donations that Cavey hopes to receive for his campaign would be from workers’ unions, which he aligns with politically in his support for removing right-to-work laws and allowing the teachers union to strike.
Alongside his support for workers’ unions, Cavey said that his main focus issues if elected would be education, healthcare, and everyday affordability for Nevadans.
‘I don’t think private schools or charter schools should exist’
Cavey’s stance on education is that our public school system needs funding, and private schools should not take it from them.
“I don’t think private schools or charter schools should exist, period,” Cavey said. “I think all that money should be funneled into public education.”
Cavey argued that too much of Nevada’s resources are geared toward private and charter schools, at the expense of public schools and students who cannot afford anything else.
He said that using money from private and charter schools programs or taxing major corporations involved in Nevada’s mining industry could pay for more public school funding.
‘Our people will live longer because of it’
Cavey wants Nevada to provide single-payer healthcare for all in the state.
The candidate said that the state should reform into solely government-based, universal healthcare. He said if Nevada were to adopt a two-tiered system, then private actors would work to sabotage the public option, like with the Affordable Care Act.
He said the state would be able to pay for universal healthcare under this model for two reasons:
Preventative care for all reduces costs across the board because poor people are able to get treatment before their conditions worsen and get more costly.
Companies would be forced to pay into the state-run healthcare system in Nevada instead of private insurance.
“I think we could pay for it,” Cavey said, “it’ll be cheap and hopefully free for the people in Nevada, and our people will live longer because of it.”
Affordability for Nevadans
The last major point of Cavey’s platform is to make Nevada affordable for the working people that live there.
He said multiple issues he advocates for, including rent control, public transit, home ownership, and groceries all fall under that topic.
‘It’s not a bad thing to be a socialist’
Cavey said the biggest obstacle is not funding or his political platform, his biggest challenge is overcoming the stigma around the worst “socialist”.
“I think the biggest issue that any leftist, socialist, progressive candidate is going to have is the decades and decades of propaganda against the word socialist,” Cavey said.
The candidate said that working people, especially older folks who were educated during the Cold War, do not disagree with leftist policies based on merit.
According to Cavey, hate against leftist policies happens because those people were told to hate anything socialist.
But he thinks that today’s political climate and social issues are an opportunity for people to come around on socialist policies.
“I believe especially now, with the economy in freefall and fascism literally on our doorsteps here at home,” Cavey said. “I think that now is the time, more than ever, to flip the script and show people who have had these decades of propaganda brainwashing, to show them that it’s not a bad thing to be a socialist.”
Mark Credico is an independent journalist working in Southern Nevada. He covers subjects including government accountability, homelessness, workers' unions and the environment.
