Marty O'Donnell (R) almost didn't run for Congress again.
After placing a disappointing fourth in the 2024 primary in Nevada's 3rd Congressional District despite hiring top-level consultants and spending more than $1 million of his own money, O'Donnell got a call from Sam Brown (R), who lost the Senate race in November, asking him if he planned to go to the president's second inauguration. In Washington that January, people with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and the National Republican Congressional Committee pulled him aside and told him they wanted him to run again.
"I couldn't even believe I was being put on that spot again," he recalls from his home in Lone Mountain.
One of the D.C. operatives later flew to Nevada and had lunch with him. He told her he had some money and would be interested in funding whomever they chose and that President Donald Trump needed to back that person immediately.
"She says, 'Marty, you're looking for a unicorn — you are the unicorn,'" he recalls. "And I'm like, 'That's insane.' I still feel like it's insane. I feel demographically I'm, like, wrong on many levels."
Why?
"Because I'm an old white guy," says the 71-year-old, who promised to drop out if Trump endorsed someone else. "Can't we find, you know, a Hispanic young woman? Because I just feel like I'll be too easily attacked for being an old white guy, an old rich white guy. That seems horrible to me, honestly. Like, I don't want to back that guy."
Republicans have made a bet the voters will give him a second life.
In what's increasingly expected to be a brutal midterm election year for the GOP, O'Donnell's candidacy is indeed a rare find. His unique professional background as the composer behind genre-defining Halo and Destiny video game franchises has been key to the campaign and holds particular appeal to a segment of the electorate that has gotten outsized attention: young men.
In October, one of his biggest events was a LAN party — a "local area network" party familiar to gamers who bring their own tech. About 100 guys (and a tenth as many women) showed up.
In 2024, young men helped deliver Trump the presidency, driving Democrats to embrace masculinity and eschew scoldy talking points. But as young people have continued to struggle with high costs under a Republican government, these voters are now swinging back.
Nevada's 3rd Congressional District likely represents a microcosm of what's happening across the country. On paper, the seat held by Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV) should be the state's most competitive.
Democrats have an 18,000 voter registration edge, but a large plurality of the voters are nonpartisan. The southwestern Clark County district has the highest household income of any in the state, and is historically swingy — Trump won the seat in 2024. But recent signs — including a Trump-affiliated super PAC pulling back ad money and a race rating change — suggest it again may be out of reach for Republicans.
In that challenging environment, the GOP still believes young men are among the most persuadable voters.
In Nevada, O'Donnell would be just the guy to do it.
In early September, O'Donnell answers questions from The Nevada Independent in his home studio, sitting in front of an electric keyboard. Though there's a copy of Run Right: A Complete Election Playbook to Win on the table, some of the populist things O'Donnell says could be spoken by a member of either major party.
Illegal immigration, for instance, is a problem that has crossed both parties and benefits corporations at the expense of regular people, O'Donnell says.
"I'm not a big believer that the big corporations are on the side of the rest of us," he says. "And I don't think the big unions are on our side, and I don't think big government is on our side, so I tend to be suspicious of all the large entities that are sort of leaving the people behind."
According to his latest financial disclosure, O'Donnell has done very well for himself. His net worth is between $26 million and $98 million, which has allowed him to invest $3 million in this congressional bid. So why does he count himself among "the rest of us"?
"For the vast majority of the decades I was living, I was doing — I wasn't doing well," he says.
O'Donnell says his upbringing was middle class. His dad was a filmmaker, and in one lean period, couldn't find work for 18 months. His mom, a piano teacher, had to scramble to find extra students.
"I've spent my whole life working," he says. "I painted houses. I started businesses. Some were successful. Some weren't. I worked hard, and yeah, in the last few years, I've been able to see the fruits of my labor come through. … I don't act like I have a lot of money. I got lucky, I guess. I mean, I worked hard at it and I have it, but it's like, it hasn't changed the way I live."
O'Donnell's interest in becoming both a musician and a conservative started as a kid, when he saw The Beatles and Ronald Reagan on TV. His sister was a hippie. He was suspicious.
"I know that seems hard to believe for an eight-year-old, but it just clicked," he says.
After a youth enamored with rock 'n' roll, O'Donnell went to Wheaton College to study piano, then switched to composition. He met his wife, Marcie, and got married right after graduation. He grew up non-denominational Christian but followed his wife in converting to Catholicism four years ago, saying the decision was driven by the church's "commitment to historical Christian doctrine."
While in grad school, O'Donnell recognized William F. Buckley Jr. at an airport. He had subscribed to National Review, the conservative magazine Buckley founded, since he was 18 and began gushing about it.
"He's like, 'Well, young man, what do you do?'" O'Donnell says, affecting a whispery voice for his old idol. "And I'm like, 'I'm getting my master's in music composition.' 'Oh, what do you feel about J.S. Bach?' 'Well, I love Bach!' For a half hour, we talked about Bach. And then he was done. Then he had to leave. I'm like, 'Oh, OK. I guess politics isn't everything.'"
O'Donnell began working on music for commercials — he wrote the famous Flintstones vitamins jingle and worked on ads for Mr. Clean. Unlike many of the artistic types he worked with, he was a proud conservative. He wore a Rush Limbaugh tie to the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
He is best known for composing the soundtrack for Halo, a 2001 sci-fi first-person shooter that's become one of the best-selling media franchises, not just video games, of all time. His thought to include Gregorian chant made the score iconic. Later, he collaborated with Paul McCartney to write Music of the Spheres, the lush orchestral suite for 2014's Destiny. His first general election ad nods to that piece. He moved to Las Vegas five years ago, following his daughter Ali Caliendo, and owns a home in Santa Barbara County, California.
Caliendo says O'Donnell has been the way he is as long as she can remember.
"We would have, like, American history nights at the dinner table," she says, in which her dad would ask about what they'd learned in school that day and add additional context. "Sometimes it went quite a while."
Caliendo, 44, is nonpartisan. She and her dad "disagree in quite a lot."
"It's been challenging to grow up with someone like my dad who is so outspoken in public," she says. "But I know it's also made me stronger."
O'Donnell's politics haven't stopped him from getting things done.
"I've worked with all sorts of people who have different creative views, different technical views, different political views — you name it," he says. "That's something that seems to be missing in government. And I probably sound like a Pollyanna because it's probably not going to happen. But I think if people who believe that don't step forward and do their civic duty, then all we are left with is people who are doing it out of greed."
After nearly three years running for office, however, he's met people who he doesn't think are in it just to advance their careers or make money.
All Republicans?
"Oh yeah."
When O'Donnell started composing for video games, it was mostly men who were involved. But, he clarifies "not because we're like, 'This is a boys' club, let's keep the girls out.'"
If anything, they wished more girls would join.
O'Donnell played video games from their earliest days, starting with titles such as Zork, a text-based adventure game. A character he played in 1986's Dark Castle who looked to him like Lancelot inspired him to use the gamer tag "Lance" to this day.
His house is a trove of gaming memorabilia. He has an original 2001 Xbox signed by Bill Gates. In a little bathroom, there's a letter from McCartney discussing early-stage compositions hanging on the wall — it ends, "Keep on rocking on!" Through a second door is a closet full of figurines, scores, awards and other knickknacks.
He did not see gaming culture as political. The first Halo games included female main characters, "but it wasn't for the sake of diversity." When he hired Keith David to voice the Arbiter, he says, "I didn't hire him because he was a Black actor. I hired him because he was Keith David."
"Nobody was making games that had an agenda or preached anything," O'Donnell says. "It was just like, 'Is this game fun? Is this game cool? Is this a good story? Are these characters interesting?' And I think that started changing in the mid-teens. You know, 2014, 15, somewhere in there, some of the game companies started becoming more politically correct and the game companies got bigger. HR departments got more intrusive."
Those years also marked GamerGate, which The Washington Post has called "an online backlash against progressive influence in gaming which cannot be described neutrally in one sentence" and birthed the pejorative "social justice warrior." O'Donnell, in a follow-up email, called the core issue the "wokification" of video games and wrote that "GamerGate brought that movement to the forefront."
O'Donnell has expressed support for traditional gender roles and criticized societal changes aimed at boosting diversity, equity and inclusion.
"Star Wars got changed, and so many of these different cultural iconic things started getting changed in ways that made people mad," he says. "So fast forward 'til now, I think there's a huge swath of people, especially on the internet, that have gotten together and just like, 'Hey, we're sort of tired of this.' … They're a force to be reckoned with now. I think a lot of them are tired of walking on eggshells and making sure they don't trip over any intersectionality."
O'Donnell tripped over some intersectionality himself just a few months ago. An anime convention in Sacramento, California, rescinded his invitation to a Halo 25th anniversary reunion panel, citing discomfort among LGBTQ volunteer staff. The same day, he says, HyperX Arena at the Luxor declined to host his LAN party for political reasons.
In an email to The Nevada Independent, Shawn Williams, Director of Operations and IT at HyperX Arena, wrote that the proposed event was never canceled because it was never booked, and the venue's "booking guidelines don't allow events for any political candidate, campaign, or party."
Those incidents followed an interview in which O'Donnell called Marxism "an existential threat" to America, adding there was "a weird alliance of all these groups that like to pretend like they're oppressed," including "the LGBTQ+ people." He says his words were twisted.
"When it comes to adults' choices of who they want to love and everything else, I'm fine," he says. "I have people in my family. I have friends. I've worked with so many people. But then there's this sort of group that has gotten together, and the way they talk about it is the alphabet mafia."
O'Donnell's post about his cancellation drew attention in a popular online community that bills itself as "The almost-official GamerGate subreddit." "They need to grow the [f—k] up," one commenter wrote of the people who got O'Donnell disinvited. "Acting like you can't be around someone with an opposing view is childish and pathetic," wrote another.
IRL, "Gamers for Marty" is just the name of the campaign's call list targeting young men. In his "battle station," the title national operatives have given the strip mall campaign offices they pay for, half a dozen young people (again mostly men) are dialing voters and gaming, handing off ringing phones and Xbox controllers. O'Donnell joins them on the couch.
Among them is first-time volunteer Joey Webber, a 24-year-old who grew up playing Halo 3 and spent more than 1,000 hours playing Destiny. He even did some work for Bungie.
"I wasn't really into politics as much, or in a part of my life where I was ready for that, but I always thought it was cool that, 'Oh the Halo guy's doing politics," he tells The Nevada Independent.
Webber walked into the office simply looking to help "a guy who played a part in some of my favorite games growing up." He described himself as an independent with views on both sides.
"More recently, I think I began to drift more into the right wing, and I do believe in smaller government, smaller scope of government," he says of his political views. "But overall, I just hate what the government kind of — hate's a strong word. I just feel as though it doesn't represent the interests of most working people."
O'Donnell agrees. Much of his campaign centers on how, when he was growing up, "one good job" was enough to support a family. What changed?
"I think the government has gotten way too big and out of control, and that's what's caused the inflation," he says.
Inflation has numerous causes and experts disagree about which contribute the most, though the federal government's actions certainly play a major role. Rapidly rising prices this decade can be traced in large part to COVID-era spending, while inflation this year is linked to the Iran war and tariffs.
To O'Donnell, calling Washington "The Swamp" is "an insult to swamps. There's an environmental function to swamps." If he could make some tiny change to divert power to the state or trim the federal bureaucracy, he would feel like he accomplished something in Congress.
What could be cut?
"'What couldn't be cut?' That's really the question."
The social safety net?
"Of course not," he says. "I mean, you can't — it's the third rail if you say anything about cutting. But I can say, if we could have a rational conversation about every part of the federal government and say, 'Do you really believe that there's no waste, that there's no fat, there's no fraud?'"
He cited fraud at a childcare center in Minnesota that received federal funding, which a 24-year-old influencer spotlighted in a viral video late last year. O'Donnell theorizes that the same problem exists in cities across the country and must be excised.
Caliendo, an assistant professor of public policy at UNLV and the founder of the nonprofit Foster Kinship, says she has been able to move her dad on policies supporting children and families, such as the child tax credit.
O'Donnell's support for small government at times conflicts with other goals. He's very interested in how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing society. His website promises protections for workers as automation and AI disrupt the labor force. But a specific fix is hard to see.
"I don't have the solution," he says. "I don't like when government tries to control free markets."
O'Donnell has postulated that the midterms "could be the revenge of the normies." But it's unclear which party can best brand itself for "the normies."
His personal life, at least, embodies prototypical family values. Next year, he and his wife will celebrate their 50th anniversary. Every Saturday, O'Donnell goes to Mass. Every Sunday, the family hangs out. He grills hot dogs or plays Zelda or watches documentaries with his two daughters and three grandsons. Recent topics have included dinosaurs and Steve Jobs. They watched Severance together and discussed theories of personhood around the firepit.
"I feel like most people are living conservative lives," O'Donnell says. "They get up in the morning, they go to work, they fall in love, they have kids, they get married, they want to provide for their family, they want to be able to take vacations, they want to do just the regular stuff, but they're not trying to exclude anybody."
Even now, when Trump's record-low approval rating could sink O'Donnell in an otherwise winnable district, the Republican nominee has stood with the president.
That's an about-face from a decade ago, when he made critical comments about Trump that future Republican primary opponents weaponized against him. Though he voted for the president three times, getting Trump's endorsement this spring wasn't simple.
"There was some work," he says.
Since then, he's spoken at Trump's midterm convention in Dallas and at his recent rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, near the Nevada border.
"He's amazingly personable and funny and disarming and charming, believe it or not," O'Donnell says of the president. "But from a distance, my first impression was, 'Oh, OK, Donald Trump, the, you know, gazillionaire builder, 'you're fired' TV guy. He's doing this as a lark. … I thought, 'Oh, this is — he's not being serious.' Which now I understand. A lot of people don't think I'm serious, but I am."
Ten years later, O'Donnell will attempt a similar upset. He says in early September that Lee is underwater, and internal polling shows the nominees running neck and neck. This week, his campaign declined to provide internal polls. There is no public polling of the race. Trading volume on the prediction markets is small, but shows Lee as a heavy favorite.
"The standard operating way of thinking about what's happening this year might be completely wrong," O'Donnell says. "I'm certainly hoping it is."
