By Dana Gentry, Nevada Current
Marty O’Donnell has taken the road less traveled to running for Congress. A Republican, O’Donnell has never held elected office. His website, which lists his many accomplishments as a composer of jingles and video game scores, details no civic involvement.
O’Donnell “is a composer with time on his hands. He’s looking to bring sanity back to Congress, stopping the government from being an impediment to our families and more of a champion for them,” says his website.
O’Donnell’s first foray into politics came in 2024 when he ran for Congressional District 3 just three years after moving to Southern Nevada to be closer to his grandchildren, he said on his podcast. He still owns a home in California near Montecito.
O’Donnell came in fourth in the 2024 Republican primary with 21% of the vote, following a campaign focused on border security and traditional family values. Rep. Susie Lee, a Democrat, went on to defeat Republican Drew Johnson by less than three percentage points. President Donald Trump won the district.
Congress, O’Donnell said on his podcast, is not on his bucket list.
“It’s not on anybody’s bucket list except bad people who just want power,” he said, recalling being approached by a political operative. “When they asked me to run, I’m like, ‘Why would I do that?’ And he goes, ‘You know, Marty, you have to understand how hard it is to find good people to run for Congress.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, there it is in a nutshell.’”
O’Donnell will go head to head against Lee, who is serving a fourth term, and who O’Donnell deemed “horrible” on his podcast. He has loaned his campaign $3 million, according to federal election records.
As of August 1, the Nevada Secretary of State reports CD3 has 176,605 registered Democrats, 155,094 Republicans, and 265,991 nonpartisan voters.
O’Donnell declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to questions in writing about the most pressing issues facing Nevada and the U.S.
At a campaign office opening last weekend, O’Donnell, in audio provided to the Current, said that if elected, he would “absolutely, in a heartbeat” vote to authorize President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, and said the president “needs to be able to do quick military action” because Congress is slow.
On his podcast, O’Donnell says he wants to be part of Trump’s team “so he has a four-year presidency rather than a two-year presidency.”
“The magic part of Donald Trump – former Democrat, not really a lifetime conservative — but someone who’s seen that the goose has been neglected, and he’s being nice to the goose again,” O’Donnell stated. “So he’s this great populist who is recognizing, you know, where wealth comes from, and he’s being nice to the people. That’s why he’s 80/20, 90/10 on all these issues because most of the people are like ‘yeah this is let’s get back to the common sense stuff.’”
Manly men
O’Donnell’s podcast, the Marty O’Donnell Show, features interviews with guests ranging from former Superman actor and Republican activist Dean Cain to O.J. Simpson’s house guest, Kato Kaelin. None of his 29 guests are women.
In an August 2025 interview, O’Donnell introduced Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, who he noted has been “accused of many weird — fascist, nationalist, white nationalist, misogynist, you name it — he’s been accused of everything. And of course I’m being accused of those things too, so I had to talk to him to find out what’s true and what’s not true.”
He called the interview “one of those sort of marriages made in heaven.”
On another episode last year, O’Donnell noted he has Swedish ancestry and attributes the good looks of some nationalities to Viking marauders, who he says were selective in their sexual assaults.
There’s “probably some truth,” he says, to the theory ”that the reason all the Swedes and the Norwegians are such good-looking people is that the Vikings came over, raided England, and only took the good-looking women back.”
“Yeah, they’re gonna take back the hottest broads they find. Yeah, that’s absolutely a thing,” responded his guest, Aaron Visconti.
O’Donnell went on to say the Vikings scored “double booty.”
“You realize this is why so many people hate men like us because we… people don’t understand that we’re telling the truth, but there’s some humor involved,” he observed.
O’Donnell is an adherent to the traditional family – a husband, wife, and children, as the American ideal. Other iterations of family, he suggests, are a threat to Western culture.
“Marriage defined as a union of one man and one woman isn’t just a Christian definition,” he said on social media in 2024.
This week, O’Donnell posted the rescission of his invitation to attend a Halo reunion in California next month because LGBTQ staff did not “feel comfortable” about his attendance, citing his statements on the campaign trail.
“If you thought we defeated Cancel Culture in 2024, guess again!” O’Donnell wrote.
“What they’re accusing me of, of course, came from my political opponent and her, you know, lackeys in the industry, political industry,” O’Donnell said on a podcast Wednesday morning. “So there are magazines and websites that will, you know, try to support the Democrats in this case and say things about me that I didn’t say, and write headlines that are completely misleading and false.”
In a recent interview, O’Donnell cited Marxism as an “existential threat.” He noted “a weird alliance of all these groups that are, you know, like to pretend like they’re oppressed. So the LGBTQ+ people, the Islamists, the Marxists, you know, they’re all together now, acting like they’re all together on the same side.”
On his podcast last year, O’Donnell warned “We can’t be apologetic about being men and doing manly things, and having you know womanly, and you know, having families. Like, it’s like, being apologetic about that is going to cause the downfall of society.”
He went on to say “that doesn’t mean you have to be, you know, you don’t have to be misogynistic and patriarchal and all the rest of it.”
In the same episode, the candidate asserted that families led by single parents can be “healed” but are not to be celebrated.
A traditional family, he asserted, “is the smallest, most fundamental building block of society, and for years it was like if you didn’t have that, you had what was known as a broken family.”
A broken family, he added, “is not the end of the world. You can heal that. You can help that. We can have systems to help families that are not intact, but that’s not the ideal. You don’t celebrate broken families. You help broken families because they’re broken, and I’m just surprised that we have to be explicit about that.”
He asserted “it’s shocking” that not everyone agrees.
About one-quarter of Nevada households with a child under the age of 18 are led by single parents.
“I don’t want a dentist who’s a weirdo in my community. I want a dentist who probably has a wife and a couple kids too, right? It’s like, or a husband and a couple kids,” he asserted. “Although I’ve never actually gone to a female dentist, That’s just me. I don’t know. I’m old-fashioned. I just haven’t seen one.”
O’Donnell argues diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have ruined some video games and prompted a backlash. The re-release of Halo “is in large part due to the woke-ification of the gaming industry,” he wrote on an anti-DEI website that has since been taken down. “After years of gamers fighting the infiltration of DEI in the industry, we are finally winning.”
He also complained that some games offer the option to choose transgender characters.
“It’s hard for gamers to immerse themselves in a game when they are required to choose a ‘body type’ instead of gender and provide pronouns for their character at the start,” he complained on the same website.
Boys’ club
In October 2017, when the #MeToo movement went viral and survivors of sexual harassment and assault emerged as a force in the political and corporate worlds, O’Donnell asked “Did Twitter do something to women that I missed? #soconfused”
O’Donnell’s former co-workers at Bungie have called him “the most right-leaning employee at the company.”
“Well, Bungie made better games when it was a ‘boys club’,” O’Donnell said on the Marty Army Discord platform in 2024 of the news that a former colleague had been fired for sexual harassment. “I still remember trying to erase the artists’ white boards before women came to visit. I’ll never understand how Lorraine tolerated it.”
‘Lorraine’ is O’Donnell’s former Bungie colleague, artist Lorraine McLees.
In social media posts from 2024 that have since been removed, but were preserved in screenshots on another account, McLees recalled an office Halloween party in 1999.
O’Donnell, disguised in a Telly Savalas mask , trench coat, and leather gloves, approached McLees who was cutting a piece of cake. McLees says when the unidentified figure got too close, she wielded the knife in his direction and told him to back off.
O’Donnell countered on social media that he “NEVER touched anyone. The Bungie Halloween party story is hilarious,” he said. “Yes, the women got really creeped out but I made sure to never touch anyone, just loom.”
According to McLees, the next day at work the women recalled their encounters with the masked O’Donnell, who, she noted, put roses on their desks and apologized.
“But that moment when I put up the knife was still a bad time. It wasn’t ok. I forgave Marty afterwards,” McLees wrote in 2024. “The ‘boys club’ mentality was laughable in how awful it was, because by this time I thought we were past that. But where are we now?”
Bungie employees, she added, “laughed about it what, 11 years ago? Same way we laugh about inappropriate pranks we did as kids—but it is no longer funny when we demonstrably do not grow tf up and learn from it.”
Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.
