Reid machine

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remains wildly unpopular in Nevada, meaning he probably won’t be doing much public campaigning on behalf of his old friend, Rep. Shelley Berkley, who is seeking the state’s other Senate seat.

But when it comes to nitty-gritty politics, Reid is showing he’s not afraid to engage on the congresswoman’s behalf.

Knowing that the Nevada race could tip the Senate’s balance of power, Reid is beefing up an already aggressive campaign machine that played a major role in his stunning reelection victory last November. Already, Reid’s team is enlisting top staff, pollsters and fundraisers on behalf of Berkley, fine-tuning its voter registration and identification programs, recruiting an army of volunteers to reach out to voters, sending fundraising solicitations to 70,000 email addresses acquired through the last campaign and drafting new plans to target the state’s rapidly growing Hispanic population.

On fundraising, many well-heeled donors in Nevada and Washington fear backlash from the powerful Democratic leader if they donate to Berkley’s primary challenger, Byron Georgiou, or to Sen. Dean Heller, the Republican incumbent. And Reid has already become a surrogate attack dog, engaging in a mud-slinging match against Georgiou that could marginalize the Democratic challenger — while allowing Berkley to stay above the fray.
Reid may not be on the ballot next year, but Republicans know that Berkley won’t be the only Democrat they’ll have to worry about in the hotly contested Senate race.
“I don’t think you can underestimate Sen. Reid,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told POLITICO. “He did a formidable job in his reelection, so I don’t underestimate him. So we’ll be ready.”
For Democrats, the majority leader’s role in the campaign certainly comes with a political price: The GOP is eager to paint Berkley as a Reid clone who carries the water for the Obama White House.
With the election of a new GOP governor, Brian Sandoval, Republicans are optimistic they’ll be able to turn around their disorganized state party and possibly chip away at Reid’s machine. Some in the GOP even downplay Reid’s 2010 voter-turnout operation, saying his victory was largely the result of Republican Sharron Angle’s flawed candidacy and pointing out that Heller received 18,000 more votes in his House reelection bid than Angle did in the northern part of the state.
Heller, who was appointed in May to the seat vacated by scandal-tarred Republican John Ensign, may reap the advantages of being an incumbent, allowing him to raise his statewide profile over the next 17 months and set up Senate offices in the southern part of the state, where he’s not well known.