Sen. Dallas Harris is a martial arts master who co-founded Nevada’s LGBTQ+ caucus

Nevada State Sen. Dallas Harris (D), 38, represents District 11 in Clark County and parts of Las Vegas.

She serves as chief majority whip in the Nevada State Senate and is one of only four out LGBTQ+ lawmakers in the legislature. She was appointed to the seat in 2018 and won a four-year term in 2020. She’s running for reelection in 2024.

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Harris is a Las Vegas native and earned her JD at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. in 2005. As an attorney with Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission for several years, Harris gained experience under the hood with state government. As well, she’s a pro-bono attorney with the Adult Guardianship Project at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada. 

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Harris spoke with me from her district office in Las Vegas, in a mall southwest of the Strip. She was dressed casually in a grey crew neck sweater, where long dreads — new for Harris after years of short hair — rested around her shoulders.

LGBTQ Nation: Last May, you and another lawmaker founded the Nevada Legislature LGBTQ+ Caucus. What are three bills that you want to either see get passed or make sure they never see the light of day?

Dallas Harris: Yes. Okay, let’s start with “never see the light of day” because I think there are too many to count across the country right now in that category. So in Douglas County, that’s a county here in Nevada that’s a bit more conservative than, let’s say, some of our more populous counties, we’ve seen some attempts to limit the sports that children can play, as little as elementary school. Those are things that I want to make sure we do not see here in Nevada on a statewide level. Let’s just be like the anti-Florida. That would be great.

As far as things that I want to see get done, one thing we did last year that was awesome — but the governor, for some reason, vetoed it — was we had a bill that would take away the gun rights of folks who had committed violent hate crimes. So, you were already convicted of a violent crime, demonstrating some bias against someone, and we’re saying, we’re going to take your guns away. We’d have a cooling off period. And the governor vetoed it, so we’re gonna bring that back.

That’s Republican governor Joe Lombardo. What was his reasoning?

We can speculate. Politics, virtue signaling to his base. I think that he cares more about that than us.

What is a biennium, and had you ever heard that word before you joined the Nevada legislature?

(laughing) It is the two-year period of the Nevada legislative session, and no, why would anybody use that term?

One of your legislative priorities is education, and you’ve been instrumental in increasing funding for K-12 students in Nevada. Who has been the more formidable opponent, Republican lawmakers or parents’ rights groups?

Ooooh. Republican lawmakers, for sure. They’re the gatekeepers, right? They are the ones that have the right to vote up or down, any way they want, regardless of what I or a parents’ rights group pushes them to do. They’re the ultimate hurdle. At the end of the day, the buck stops with them for sure.

Do you think groups like Moms for Liberty or Libs of TikTok have had any influence on them?

I think they’ve done immeasurable amounts of damage to children across the country who are just discovering themselves and are now growing up in environments that could have been welcoming and open but instead are now very much closed and dark and look just like that metaphorical closet that we talked about coming out of.

You’ve talked about your interest in tech policy. The Consumer Electronics Show happens every year in Vegas in January. Did you attend this year and what’s one technology or product you were impressed by or a trend we should look out for?

I could not make time for it this year. But I’m continually impressed with the innovation that’s happening. Technology grows at an exponential rate, right? Not at a linear one. And so, next year, we’re gonna see things that we couldn’t even envision, and it just keeps getting better.

What do you think about AI?

It’s great. I mean, that’s moving, like I said, exponentially quickly. Let’s see where it settles. I think there’s good uses for it and bad uses for it, but that’s the case with just about everything. But it has the potential to do a lot.

How did you meet your wife, who is she, and who proposed to whom?

Okay, so we met at a, like a barbecue party of mutual friends of ours. I was 19 at the time, so we’ve known each other forever. She knew me when I had zero degrees, I like to say. I’ve got four now. I was like a punk kid, I’d just started college. And so, around 2017, we decided to actually date and give that a shot. We got married in 2019.

Who proposed to whom?

Technically, she proposed to me first with a ring pop in our kitchen, because she refused to wait for me to do it. But then I did a proper proposal at the HRC gala in 2019. And then we were married in August.

Cheering on the Rebels at the UNLV football game tonight!