Late brothel owner Hof will win Nevada vote: campaign manager

[October 18, 2018]  (Reuters) - A brothel-owning Republican candidate for the Nevada state legislature who died this week will remain on the ballot and win his election in November, his campaign manager predicted on Wednesday.

Dennis Hof, 72, who died on Tuesday, styled himself as America's best-known pimp and a strip-club owner who ran multiple brothels. He had nicknamed himself the "Trump from Pahrump," after the town where he lived in Nevada.

"I feel very comfortable predicting that he is still going to win the election on November 6," campaign manager Chuck Muth said in an interview, adding Republicans had a 2-to-1 advantage over Democrats in the state Assembly district in terms of voter registration.

Hof was running for a seat in a heavily Republican district and had been favored to win.

If he is elected, the Reno Gazette Journal reported, the vacancy that spans constituencies in multiple counties will be filled via a joint meeting process headed by county commissioners.

The Democratic candidate for the seat, Lesia Romanov, was not immediately available for comment.

"There are a lot of Republicans who were uncomfortable voting for Dennis because of the nature of his business and they now know that he is not the one who will be serving," Muth said.

"They will feel much more comfortable casting the ballot for him knowing there will be another Republican to replace him," he added.

In a June interview from one of his brothels, Hof said his political fortunes had parallels with those of U.S. President Donald Trump.

"This really is the Trump movement," Hof said in the interview at Moonlite BunnyRanch, his brothel near his home in Pahrump. "People will set aside for a moment their moral beliefs, their religious beliefs, to get somebody that is honest in office."

Dennis Hof, who owned the Moonlite BunnyRanch legal brothel and was a Republican candidate for Nevada State Assembly District 36, poses outside the brothel in Mound House, Nevada, U.S. June 16, 2018. REUTERS/Steve Marcus/File Photo

After Hof won the June nominating contest for the state Assembly seat, some evangelicals in his district said they had voted for him because they believed he would clean up politics and not be beholden to special-interest groups and their money.

The thrice-divorced author of "The Art of the Pimp," who appeared on HBO's "Cathouse," owned a strip club and five legal brothels in Nevada, the only U.S. state with legalized prostitution.

(Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas and Tim Reid in San Antonio; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Peter Cooney)

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