Reid winning moderate vote, Ensign cutting into women’s vote in tight Senate race

Tim Dahlberg

Tuesday, Nov. 3, 1998 | 7:28 a.m.

LAS VEGAS - Locked in a tight race for his U.S. Senate seat, Harry Reid was helped Tuesday by Nevadans who described themselves as moderates. John Ensign, meanwhile, found support among women who had voted for Reid in the past.

Early exit polls showed the race a near toss-up, with Reid benefiting from strong support among the half of Nevada voters who considered themselves in the middle of the political spectrum.

Ensign, though, was splitting the female vote with the Democratic incumbent, who campaigned heavily among women's groups and had won six of every 10 female votes when he last ran in 1992.

Exit polling also showed a tight race for governor, where Republican businessman Kenny Guinn and Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones were vying to succeed retiring Gov. Bob Miller.

Guinn was running nearly even with Jones in the Las Vegas area and the race was also close in the Reno-Sparks area. But Guinn was holding a lead in rural Nevada, where voters tend to be conservative.

Guinn and Jones were splitting the female vote, while Guinn led among male voters, according to voters surveyed after voting Tuesday.

The survey of 563 voters as they left 30 randomly selected polling places around Nevada was conducted by Voter News Service, a partnership of The Associated Press and television networks. The margin of sampling error for each result was plus or minus 5 percentage points for all voters, higher for subgroups.

In the Senate race, Ensign was winning three out of every four votes from voters who considered themselves conservative, while Reid got similar numbers from voters who said they viewed themselves as liberal.

But Reid was ahead among the moderate voters - and they made up slightly more than half of all voters surveyed.

"I just think he's done a good job so far. He's voted the way I would," said Paul Michel, a retired businessman in Sparks who voted for Reid.

Kenneth Destefanie, a grocery clerk in Sparks, said he went the other way.

"I can't say I had anything personally against Reid. I'm just conservative in my thinking," he said.

Nevadans also had another option - voting for none of the above - and a few voters said they were so turned off by negative campaigning that they did just that.

"They're not telling me what they're going to do for me. They're just telling bad things about each other," said Kate Mahone of Las Vegas. "It was just pretty sad this time."

While Ensign was taking some of the female vote from Reid, the incumbent was doing well on the issue that voters said mattered to them the most - Social Security.

Three of 10 voters said Social Security was the biggest issue in the Senate race, and Reid was picking up the votes of a majority of those who made the issue their priority.

Only one out of 10 voters thought nuclear waste was the main issue.

Nevadans leaving the voting booth were generally a satisfied lot, at least financially.

Four in 10 of those surveyed said their financial situation was better than it was two years ago, while 45 percent said it was the same. Only 15 percent said they were worse off than two years ago.

Voters in the Senate race generally ignored the Clinton-Lewinsky issue, with only one in 20 voters saying it was a factor in their vote.