HENDERSON, Nev. – The ruthless determination that drove 40-year-old Sam Brown through West Point, combat in Afghanistan and a difficult recovery from life-threatening burns on 30% of his body could make the Reno-based entrepreneur another impressive triumphs in a completely different area: dethroning a Democratic senator.

Called “tougher than a three-hour steak” by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), the retired Army captain is walking into Election Day cheering thanks to internal investigations and a significant lead in early voting and Republican Party registrations – after months of Public polls showed wider gaps with freshman Sen. Jacky Rosen.

National Republicans invested more money in the Brown campaign in its final days, and a top Republican Party leader — National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines — campaigned here twice with Brown in the final week of the race.

“It’s the energy, it’s the turnout,” Brown told The Post. “We see Republicans rising. We’re seeing very strong performance among our Latino community, our Asian American Pacific Islander community. Young voters are enthusiastic and come out.”

Among those “on fire” was a crowd of nearly 6,000 people at a Trump campaign rally in this growing city bordering Las Vegas. Wearing a navy blue blazer as he spoke, Brown noted that he had not always dressed like that and spoken to large audiences.

The candidate then took off the jacket to reveal a reflective vest, such as waste pickers and warehouse workers wear. It was an apparent allusion to President Biden’s pointed description last week of Trump supporters as “trash,” a phrase that launched a thousand memes and saw the 45th president drive to a rally in Wisconsin in the passenger seat of a garbage truck — with a work clothes. vest that he kept on during the rally.

The Henderson rally crowd cheered its approval.

Brown told The Post about his “day job” at an Amazon warehouse when he founded a company that provided essential medicine to veterans. He sold that company in 2022.

“I was working in a fulfillment center while pursuing the American dream and starting a business,” he said. “You know, for many of us, we have to hurry. We didn’t get anything as a gift. So I had to have a roof over my head and food on the table, and that meant working ten-hour shifts. And look, I had a great crew that I worked with. We have been loading boxes 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 to the Union in the Civil War in 1864, with President Abe Lincoln capturing the Electoral votes Council of the new state received .

‘Mark my words. This will disrupt the cycle in battleground Senate races,” he predicted.

That’s a strong claim, but not without merit: Should Brown prevail on Tuesday, he will have ousted Rosen, a loyal soldier in the “Harry Reid Machine,” the colloquial name for the Democratic Party apparatus that ousted the late majority leader. Senate built here.

Reid, a embattled ex-boxer who died in December 2021, along with his allies turned a traditionally red state into one that is largely blue: of the six Nevadans in Congress, the House and the Senate, only one, Rep. Mark Amodei of the 2nd Congressional District, is a Republican.

Rosen, a one-term member of the House of Representatives who won the Senate seat in a Democratic wave election during the midterms of Trump’s first presidency, has made a highly sheltered re-election bid. She has rarely met voters in unscripted situations. She is quickly being pushed out of the media spotlight after her appearances for friendly groups like the Culinary Union Local 226 — Rosen was a member decades ago — and a pro-Kamala Harris “Reproductive Freedom” rally.

The junior Democrat agreed to just one debate with Brown and under strict conditions. Her team has repeatedly declined The Post’s requests for an interview.

Instead, Rosen’s campaign has spent millions on advertising to portray Brown as a “MAGA extremist” who wants to impose a national abortion ban.

Brown has said he would not support such a ban, and the candidate’s wife admitted that she had an abortion during a relationship before meeting her current husband. He believes the question should be left to the states and respects Nevada law, which allows abortion up to 24 weeks.

A separate initiative from Nevada would start the process this year to write abortion rights into the state constitution. Critics have said the measure is just a move to lure Democratic voters to the polls.

From ‘Burning Man’ to Senate candidate

Brown’s story has the elements of a classic war movie: In May 2008, he was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and four months later his life was blown apart by an improvised explosive device while on a mission to support another platoon that was ambushed.

As Brown said last month, “It literally got to a point where I gave up the will to live. God sent me a miracle in the form of one of my soldiers shouting out these important words: ‘Sir, I have you.’

He said here at the Oct. 24 Turning Point USA rally for Trump: “Those words gave me a glimmer of hope, but they weren’t the words that saved my life; it was the action of him and others who came to my aid that extinguished those flames and gave me the hope to continue fighting again.

That multi-year struggle was difficult and painful. GQ magazine said Brown was nicknamed “Burning Man” because of what he survived and because of his experimental use of virtual reality technology to manage pain during his recovery.

During the healing journey, an unexpected benefit occurred: While in the hospital, he met Army Captain Amy Larsen, a dietitian who had also been deployed to the war zone and survived intense enemy fire without injury. The couple married in 2009 and had three children.

Speaking to The Post on Saturday at a campaign event in North Las Vegas, Amy Brown said the couple has “talked at length” about how they will live in Reno and the Washington, D.C., area if he is elected. “That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get there,” she said.

“I will say we love Nevada,” Amy Brown said. “We have a great community in Nevada and fantastic resources that really helped us through this campaign.”

When asked if she had thought about organizing life in the Capitol, she replied, “We’re taking it one day at a time now; we are focused on Tuesday.”

The Browns moved to Nevada after his unsuccessful 2014 run in Texas for a seat in the state Legislature. In 2021, he announced a campaign to oppose Nevada’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, but former Attorney General Adam Laxalt won that primary.

Laxalt, the scion of a prominent Republican family here, went on to lose to Cortez Masto by 8,800 votes, or four per Nevada precinct.

This year, Brown — with Trump’s support — defeated a field of 12 Republican rivals, including former Ambassador to Iceland Jim Gunter and former state Rep. Jim Marchant. Along with the ex-Prez, Daines and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., endorsed Brown.

A Brown victory — and a similar victory in any of the Democratic-held seats in the House of Representatives here — would spell trouble for the Reid machine. And should former President Donald Trump, up 1.5 points in the Real Clear Politics Nevada polling average on Friday, win Nevada’s six Electoral College votes, the Reid coalition could be on life support, if not full life support .

Some of these victories, if achieved, would come from the Republican Party’s large turnout in the state’s rural counties and a shift of the state’s unaffiliated voters — “nonpartisan” is the official term — to the side of the Republican Party. Daines said Tuesday that such voters are “more likely to follow where the surge is happening than not.”

On Sunday evening, Republicans maintained their early voting advantage with just under 43,000 more ballots than Democrats had returned in the state. While later ballots and in-person voting on Nov. 5 in Clark County — home to Las Vegas and seven of 10 Nevada voters — are expected to narrow Republicans’ lead, the advantage Republicans now enjoy could worry Democrats .

Jon Ralston, longtime Silver State political observer and CEO/editor of The Nevada Independent, blogged that the Republican Party’s favorable numbers are impressive: “At the risk of stating the obvious, you’d rather be the party who is leading” in the first elections. Ralston also pointed out that Republicans registered 10,000 more new voters than Democrats statewide in October.

If elected, Brown expects to work harmoniously with Cortez Masto. He said they “have 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 it would work with Brown if he were to win the contest. The Democrat has supported Rosen’s re-election bid.

Should he run for the Senate, Brown says he would like to work on water and land issues in Nevada, freeing up more federal land for new home construction. He would also like to “push back against California” on water conservation, where he says the state is “the leader in the West.”

However, the candidate recognizes the time pressure facing a new Congress.

“One of my biggest challenges is that we never know what we’re going to have two years later after the election,” Brown said, referring to the 2026 midterm elections. “So come January, we know what we have. You know who the president is, who controls the Senate, who controls the House, and you can start to prioritize what you do.”