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The Water Cooler Title: GOP Feud Bodes Well for Reid Given his political condition, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was always going to have to win ugly in his race for re-election this year, if he was to win at all. And thanks to a remarkable Republican brawl heading into Tuesday's primary in Nevada, the GOP just might be giving him a chance to do exactly that. It's hard to overstate the political perils facing the Senate's top Democrat as he seeks his fifth term. Polls show a majority of his state's citizens have an unfavorable view of Sen. Reid. Until recently, he lost hypothetical poll match-ups against his principal potential Republican foes. National Republicans have put a giant bull's eye on his back. In short, Harry Reid is the latest in a long line of prominent senators from center-right states—Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Wyche Fowler of Georgia, Jim Sasser of Tennessee—whose roles as leaders of the national Democratic party caused them big problems back home. As it happens, all those other gentlemen were eventually beaten by Republicans in Senate races. "I think Reid is just incredibly vulnerable, just amazingly vulnerable," says Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who recently conducted focus groups with Nevada voters. "The only question is whether Republicans nominate a strong challenger." Ah, there's the rub for the GOP. Like just about everything else this political cycle, Tuesday's primary election in Nevada isn't going as planned. It may end up crowning neither of the two candidates originally considered Reid's strongest general-election foes. Instead, the Republican nominee may well be a candidate most analysts once would have considered, at best, the third strongest person to face Harry Reid. The conventional wisdom about who's strongest could well be all wrong, of course, as so much conventional wisdom is this year. Still, the picture for now suggests Harry Reid is either very lucky or very good—or both. Heading into Tuesday's primary, polls suggest Nevada Republicans are most likely to nominate Sharron Angle, a tea-party favorite and former state legislator who couldn't win the Republican nomination for Nevada's Second Congressional District back in 2006. She started the year with a mere $146,000 in campaign cash on hand, and running well behind establishment favorite and former state party chairwoman Sue Lowden, as well as businessman Danny Tarkanian, thought to be the favorite of the tea-party crowd. Then things started to happen. Sen. Reid's camp, sensing that Ms. Lowden was the strongest potential challenger, started going after her. She played into the assault with an ill-advised comment suggesting that the health-care economy might deteriorate to the point where people might have to barter for health care in the way voters' grandparents might "bring a chicken to the doctor"—an innocent aside that took on mythical proportions. Meantime, anti-establishment fervor began to grow, making Ms. Lowden's status as former state party leader as much liability as asset. She's gone from a candidate who beat Sen. Reid by 13 points in a hypothetical match-up in February to one who was a point behind him in a new survey by Mason-Dixon and the Las Vegas Review-Journal released Sunday. Meantime, a big chunk of the tea-party movement decided to ride the candidacy of Ms. Angle rather than Mr. Tarkanian (the son of a legendary basketball coach), and ride it hard. The Tea Party Express, a group that backs conservative, small-government candidates, announced over the weekend that it has pumped $500,000 into the Angle campaign. Bottom line: In the new poll, Ms. Angle has an eight-point lead over Mr. Tarkanian, and a nine-point lead over Ms. Lowden. In the same poll she beats Mr. Reid by three percentage points. That's just fine for Reid partisans, for Ms. Angle is the most controversial of the three potential Republican nominees and the one easiest to portray as outside the mainstream. That's because she's suggested at various times abolishing the federal tax code, privatizing Social Security for younger Americans and eliminating the Education Department. In short, the very positions that make her most exciting to the tea-party movement make her easier to attack and caricature in a general election. At least that's the Democrats' suspicion. And Sen. Reid will have ample resources on hand to paint his kind of picture of the general-election race. As of mid-May, he'd raised $17.9 million for this campaign cycle, and had $9 million of that still on hand. "His only strategy is to make his opponent an unacceptable alternative," says veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who has endorsed Ms. Lowden. Imagine voters are shopping for a new car, he says, and "what Mr. Reid has to do is flatten the tires, put a few dents in the side and spill some coffee on the seat." Of course, maybe voters are so angry they will go for an unconventional, even dented option this year. Either way, a great political story is unfolding.
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
rotflmao. I love this spin. As if the GOP in Nevada isn't going to line up en masse to fire this punk.
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