All bets are off in Nevada

— There are many close races for the U.S. Senate this year, and many strange ones, but the bitter contest between two unlovable candidates in Nevada is, for my money, the closest, strangest race of all.

The Democratic candidate, Senator Harry Reid, is one of the most powerful men in Washington, a master at steering billion-dollar federal projects to his economically busted state-not someone you’d expect to find locked in a desperate fight for his political life. His Republican challenger, Sharron Angle, is a gaffe-prone Tea Party firebrand who canceled most of her public appearances in the last week of the campaign to avoid more missteps. Yet she may well topple the Senate majority leader.

Why is Reid in such deep trouble? The most obvious reason is that Nevada’s economy, which rests on real estate, construction and tourism, is snakebit. Both its unemployment rate (14.4 percent) and its mortgage foreclosure rate are the highest in the nation; and Reid’s power as majority leader has availed little against these problems.

But there’s a second, more local reason. Reid made his name as a moderate Mormon Democrat; in his earlier Senate terms, he voted to ban late-term abortions and to kill most gun control measures. Now, he has climbed to the top of the Senate heap, serving as majority leader. And that, ironically, hasn’t played well with the folks back home.

His position in the Senate hierarchy has made Reid the legislative manager of President Obama’s agenda, and his biggest accomplishments in that role-the $787-billion stimulus bill and the Obama healthcare bill-have put him at odds with many of his constituents. Call it thecurse of the majority leader: Like his predecessor, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Reid could lose his Senate seat because his leadership job pulled him to the left. It may be awhile before another conservative-state Democrat lusts after that post.

Because of the high stakes, millions of dollars have poured into Nevada to pay for ceaseless television commercials, mailings and phone calls on both sides. Almost all the messages are negative, of course. The result? Nevada voters don’t much like either candidate. Rarely in American politics has so much money been spent to win so few votes with so little joy.

Still, many voters feel they have to choose, and roughly half have gone to the polls already, thanks to Nevada’s user-friendly early voting law that opened polling places in malls and grocery stores almost two weeks ago.

I went to the state’s biggest early voting site, in a mall in the upscale Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, one of the state’s key political battlegrounds. My conversations with voters confirmed what the polls show. Most Nevadans aren’t voting for a senator they want; they’re voting against the candidate they dislike more.

“Harry Reid isn’t perfect, but Sharron Angle is an embarrassment,” said CleAnne Gilman, 66, a retired interior designer who said she voted Democratic. “I voted for Sharron Angle,” said Dave Slider, 32, an air-conditioning sales representative. “I think she’s crazy, but she’s the lesser of two evils. Harry Reid doesn’t seem to listen to people from Nevada anymore.”

After almost a year of relentless bombardment with campaign messages, few Nevadans are undecided anymore (fewer than 4 percent in most polls). The battle now comes down to which side can persuade more of its supporters to vote.

Editorial, Pages 86 on 10/31/2010

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