There’s a strange magic in the word “can.” In everyday life, it’s a simple statement of ability: I can carry that box, I can meet you at noon, I can learn to play the piano. But the word also has a slippery, future-leaning quality. It can describe something that exists only in the imagination, a capability waiting for the right conditions to arrive. That was exactly the argument Elizabeth Holmes made in You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s surreal documentary about the founder of Theranos. Holmes, who is now in federal prison, insisted that when she promised a machine that could run any test from a single drop of blood, she meant “can” in the future tense. The technology wasn’t ready, she seemed to say, but it would be, once chemistry research caught up with the ambition. It’s a lovely idea, in its way. And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon. That old saying is a folksy reminder that wishing for something isn’t the same as having it. A potential is not a promise, and a hypothetical is not a product. We all stretch “can” now and then—when we tell ourselves we can start a diet tomorrow, or that we can finish a project if only the world would stop interrupting. But Holmes stretched it so far that the word snapped. The documentary may have been vague about what she really believed, but the facts of her story are not vague. People trusted her. People invested in her. People’s health was put at risk. And a jury eventually decided that saying “can” in the future tense is not a defense when you know full well that the present tense is a lie.
Theranos was a company built on a word, and the word was “can.” In reality, the company’s devices didn’t work. Holmes and her team told customers and investors that Theranos was running blood tests with its revolutionary technology, but behind the scenes, the company was using conventional machines manufactured by established competitors. She forged documents to make it look as though pharmaceutical giants had validated her technology. She told employees that the company had successfully developed hundreds of tests, even though most of those tests never even completed the initial research phase. Whistleblowers who tried to expose the deception were shunned, or, in one heartbreaking case, driven to suicide. The company eventually collapsed under the weight of the lies. Investors, including former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, lost enormous sums of money. Holmes was charged with wire fraud, convicted on four counts, and sent to prison. It’s the kind of story that should make people wary of smooth talkers who promise extraordinary things with no evidence. But the lesson doesn’t always take. On X, a long-shot nonpartisan candidate for governor of Nevada named Danielle Ford announced that she is “probably going to win the election.” She is, in one narrow sense, correct. She is on the ballot, and elections are unpredictable. If voters chose their governor at random, she would have exactly as good a chance as anyone else. She can win in the same way Theranos’s blood-testing equipment could run any test from a single drop of blood—only if you rewrite the meaning of “can” into something so elastic it no longer means anything at all.
The difference, of course, is that elections have evidence, and the evidence is not kind to Danielle Ford. She is running against Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo and Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford, two familiar names with real campaign operations and real followings. A September poll from Emerson College Polling/KLAS-TV found only 2.4 percent of Nevada voters supporting Danielle Ford. Another poll from Noble Predictive Insights earlier this month pegged her support at up to 7 percent. Both polls had a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points, so the truth probably sits somewhere in between. Either way, she is far from a plurality, and in a race with multiple candidates, “probably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Nevada history is just as unforgiving. The last governor who was neither a Republican nor a Democrat was Reinhold Sadler, who took office in 1898. His successor, John Sparks—the namesake of the city east of Reno—ran as a Silver-Democrat after the Silver Party merged with the Democrats at the turn of the century. In modern times, third-party and independent candidates have barely registered. Since 1994, only one minor-party or nonpartisan gubernatorial candidate has managed to outpoll “none of the above,” the nonbinding ballot option that itself rarely exceeds 5 percent. That was Brandon Davis, the Libertarian candidate in 2022, who beat “none of the above” by 53 votes while earning just 1.46 percent of the vote. Christopher Hansen, an Independent American candidate in 2006, earned 20,019 votes—which was good for about 3.4 percent. Both of those men share something with Danielle Ford: neither came anywhere close to winning. History does not just suggest that her path is narrow. It suggests that her path barely exists.
Danielle Ford is not a political neophyte, and that makes her claim harder to forgive. She has won two elections and currently sits on the State Board of Education. That means she knows how campaigns work, how ballots are counted, and how hard it is to introduce yourself to hundreds of thousands of voters. She also knows what her campaign finances look like, and they tell a devastating story. According to public filings, she did not receive a single campaign contribution until August. Her earlier reports listed no donations and no campaign expenditures. Since August, she has raised a grand total of $2,200, and two of her three largest contributions came from out-of-state donors. Running for governor is expensive, and while money isn’t everything, it’s hard to persuade voters if you can’t even afford a modest amount of outreach. A candidate seeking the approval of hundreds of thousands of people is going to need to spend more than a penny per voter. A candidate who hasn’t raised enough to mail a postcard to every precinct isn’t trying to win; she’s trying to make a point, or maybe trying to be taken seriously without doing the work. The only mailers voters might receive that mention her are being sent by Republican political operatives trying to convince credulous Democrats that she is “the AOC of Nevada.” That is not a sign of a viable campaign. That is a sign that other people are using her name as a tool. She knows better. Like Elizabeth Holmes, she knows the gap between what she is saying and what is true. And like Holmes, she seems to believe that if she repeats the word “can” often enough, the universe will eventually rearrange itself to fit.
I have some sympathy for Danielle Ford, or at least for the version of her that might actually believe what she is saying. I have run for public office twice, including a campaign for state senate as a Libertarian in 2016. It was an earnest, hopeless, wonderful, awful experience. I remember the frustration of meeting people who said they had been waiting their whole lives for a candidate like me, someone who held exactly the right positions and said exactly the right things. They would volunteer, they said. They would give money. They would knock on doors. They just needed to be sure I could win. Nobody was ever sure, and so almost nobody helped. It is tempting to think that Ford is merely trying to keep her team motivated, to project confidence because confidence is what campaigns run on. Who doesn’t want to be the person who was right before everyone else? Who doesn’t want to be liked, followed, quoted, shared? Please like, follow, subscribe, and share this column, and so on. There is a reason “fake it till you make it” is a Silicon Valley motto. Even the judge in Elizabeth Holmes’s case acknowledged that puffery and exaggerated optimism are common in the startup world. The argument goes like this: Holmes didn’t have the technology, but she believed she could build it, and if investors gave her enough time, maybe she would have. Maybe her “can” was a vision, not a lie. That argument did not work before a jury of her peers. She was convicted because she didn’t just say “can.” She lied to employees, investors, customers, and the public. She forged documents and hid evidence. At a certain point, “can” stops being aspiration and becomes a weapon.
The jury is still out on Danielle Ford—at least until the election. Voters will soon deliver their verdict, and it will almost certainly be a decisive no. Maybe that seems harsh. Maybe she is running for reasons that have nothing to do with winning, such as raising awareness, changing the conversation, or giving voice to people who feel ignored. Those can be legitimate goals, and every long-shot candidate deserves credit for putting their name on the ballot and being willing to stand in front of strangers. But there is an important difference between running because you want to make a point and claiming you are probably going to win. The first is honest. The second is not. “Can” should mean a real possibility, backed by a plan, by resources, by evidence, and by a track record. Danielle Ford can win in the same way Theranos can run any test in the future tense. That isn’t courage. It’s a refusal to look at the world as it is. Elizabeth Holmes is serving a long prison sentence because she traded in that kind of refusal, and the cost was enormous. The cost of Danielle Ford’s fantasy will be much smaller, but it is still a fantasy, and it is worth saying so clearly. She can run. She can speak. She can ask for votes. But winning a statewide election in Nevada is not something she can do—not yet, not this time, and not with this campaign. The polls will close, the votes will be counted, and the word “can” will finally mean what it always should have meant: the truth.