Heller won’t challenge Reid

Kirsten Searer

Friday, Feb. 27, 2004 | 11:30 a.m.

Secretary of State Dean Heller has decided not to run for the U.S. Senate, meaning that Richard Ziser could be the last major Republican figure planning a run against Sen. Harry Reid.

Heller said consultants told him he would have had to run a negative campaign to pose any viable challenge to Reid, who plans to raise $10 million for the November election.

"If you can't match the dollars that an incumbent has, you need free media," Heller said. "And the way to get free media is you have to go very negative and very extreme. Those aren't the kinds of campaigns I want to run."

People from both sides of the aisle also told Heller that they didn't want to elect a freshman senator and lose the seniority that Reid holds in the Senate, Heller said.

Still, Republican Party chairwoman Lia Roberts said there may yet be additional people who want to be the GOP candidate for the race. She pointed out that the deadline for filing for the office is May 14, Another strong candidate might join the race in the next month, she said. She would not say who the Republican Party is wooing.

"Of course we are still looking and encouraging other people to take a look at it," she said.

"I'm sorry that Dean (Heller) is not going to make this step, but I'm sure he has very good reasons of his own," Roberts said.

Steve Wark, a campaign consultant for Ziser, said his candidate already is operating like the presumptive Republican nominee and has received about $500,000 in commitments from donors in the past three weeks.

Ziser, who ran the initiative drive to ban gay marriage in Nevada, attended a meeting in Los Angeles last Saturday with major Republican donors who are looking to throw money into his race and into the effort by Republican John Phung to challenge Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D.

Donors see similarities in the political climates in Nevada and South Dakota and would love to beat Reid and Daschle, who are the top two Democrats in the Senate, Wark said.

Ziser's campaign, Wark said, "is going very well, in spite of rumors of other people getting in."