The Daily Rundown: August 18, 2026
🗳️ It may not feel like it yet, but fall is right around the corner. That means we are in the final stretch of campaigning ahead of the 2026 midterm election. Early voting in Nevada is less than 10 weeks away.
That means candidates are pulling out all the stops to reach voters as they approach the end of the election cycle. And for some Republicans, that included standing on stage with President Trump at his rally at Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas on Aug. 5.
While over the weekend, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined Democratic Northern Nevada congressional candidate Teresa Benitez-Thompson and about 100 supporters at a Reno bar.
However, those appearances may not matter much for most voters in Nevada.
Ken Miller is an associate professor of political science at UNLV and says those events are about shoring up the base.
"National politics is not affecting [the election here] very much, and the reason is that we don't have competitive federal races this year,” Miller said. “If we had a Senate race in Nevada this year, that would nationalize the conversation much more. But we don't have that this time … So you're not seeing much national money coming in."
In that vein, a trio of GOP-commissioned polls conducted this summer show Nevada’s Republican incumbent, Gov. Joe Lombardo, has sizable leads over Democratic challenger Attorney General Aaron Ford in the race for governor. According to the reporting, those surveys bucked a trend that showed a neck-and-neck race for governor. Hear the full story by KNPR's Paul Boger here.
📚 160 longtime Clark County School District employees who were contracted through the district’s critical labor shortage list did not receive pensions last month (July).
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Clark County School Board voted in May to remove the employees from the critical labor shortage list because declining enrollment created a surplus of workers within the district. A critical labor shortage designation allows the school district to rehire retired employees in specific positions where the district has significant vacancies.
With the vote, the district removed the designation for those 160 employees effective June 30. Teaching contracts, however, ended on July 31. Thus, while the district had to pay employees for the work completed during the 2025-26 school year, it did not pay them their monthly benefits. A Nevada Retirement System official stated that the affected employees have no legal recourse to recover the withheld July funds.
🍏 The Cirque du Soleil variety show Mad Apple will close on Labor Day weekend. The production replaced Cirque’s former show, Zumanity, at the New York-New York hotel-casino in May 2022.
It featured live comedy acts as well as the physical performances and modern circus acts for which Cirque is famous. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on Saturday that the closure is based on soft ticket sales among most production shows on the Strip.
💉 Nearly 9% of Nevada’s kindergartners are now exempted from school vaccine requirements. That’s according to new CDC data. KNPR’s Anne Davis reports that the current 8.7% exemption rate is the highest it’s been in a decade and more than double the national average. It’s also twice as much as what Nevada reported from 2016 to 2020.
Over the 2025-26 academic year, exemptions for at least one vaccine rose by 1.5 percentage points as compared to the previous school year.
Notably, nonmedical exemptions rose nearly 2 points, while the number of medical exemptions fell slightly. Nevada allows two types of vaccine exemptions for children entering school: medical and religious.
🤖 The music industry is becoming a test case for an economy transformed by generative AI. For most of the last century, the music business operated under a surprisingly simple idea: If you want to use someone else's work, you ask permission and pay them money.
Want to sample a song? There's a licensing process. Want to use a song in a movie, advertisement or television show? The people who own the song get paid.
The industry built a massive economy around identifying who owns a piece of music, who contributed to it, and who deserves compensation when it creates value. Now, generative AI is challenging that entire system.
AI music platforms like Suno and Udio let anyone generate complete songs, including vocals, lyrics and instrumentation, from a simple text prompt. Used by everyone from hobbyists and content creators to independent musicians and Grammy Award-winning producers, they've become the public face of AI-generated music.
Suno and Udio can generate songs in a few clicks, but the bigger disruption may not be the songs themselves. A question now stands: When an AI model learns from millions of songs, who gets paid for that use?
This puzzle is now at the center of a growing legal and financial battle in the music industry as AI music is already stealing income from human musicians. Read the full story by NPR's Charlotte Isidore here.
Part of these stories are taken from KNPR's daily newscast segment. To hear more daily updates like these, tune in to 88.9 KNPR FM.
