Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Reid caught in middle of Strip-voting suit

2008 Caucus Coverage

At A Glance: Tonight's Debate

Tonight’s Democratic debate begins at 6 at the Cashman Center Theatre, 850 North Las Vegas Blvd. The two-hour event will air live on MSNBC and will be rebroadcast with a Spanish-language translation on Telemundo at midnight. Both networks are owned by NBC.

The moderator is “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams. Joining him will be Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Sunday morning talk show “Meet the Press.” The format includes questions submitted by viewers.

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More on Harry Reid

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday continued to stay out of the debate over the 11th-hour legal challenge to the Democratic presidential caucus in Nevada, frustrating some and raising questions about where he stands.

Reid, the person most responsible for bringing the early caucus to Nevada, has not stood up for the state party that arranged the voter precincts now being challenged as unfair days before the election.

If a federal court shuts down the nine casino caucus sites, the party’s nominating efforts in Nevada could end in turmoil.

The head of the union that represents the workers who would caucus at the Strip casinos, D. Taylor, said over the weekend that the campaigns and Democratic officials should condemn the effort to dismantle the “at-large” precincts.

“Anything short of that will clearly be a sign that they obviously think it’s OK to disenfranchise voters,” he said.

But that failed to lure Reid into the debate. He says it’s for the court to decide.

Billy Vassiliadis, a state Democratic strategist and adviser to the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, said Reid “is obviously feeling like he’s caught in the middle.”

In Nevada and Washington, many see the suit as little more than a power grab by the supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton to disrupt the voting system that might favor Obama in the tiebreaking Nevada contest. Obama won the Iowa caucus and Clinton won the New Hampshire primary.

Clinton’s campaign has denied any role in the suit, even as former President Bill Clinton was stumping in Nevada on Monday on some of the same issues as in the suit.

The action, filed by state party activists and the state teachers union, argues that caucus sites at casinos on the Strip, set up for workers who don’t have time to caucus in their neighborhood precincts, will give an unfair advantage to Strip workers and by extension the Culinary Union over employees elsewhere in the state who must work Saturday.

Although the Strip caucus sites were established last year, the lawsuit challenging them was filed just three days after the Culinary Union endorsed Obama.

Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report in Washington, said much could be at stake for Reid.

A last-minute glitch in Nevada is not what the Democratic National Committee bargained for when it chose the state from among several others for the early calendar spot.

“The Nevada caucus is Harry Reid’s baby,” Rothenberg said. “There’s a real chance here that at the end of the day people will look back on Nevada and see it as an embarrassment as much as a success.”

But Rothenberg said Reid has little choice but to sit on the sidelines, lest he be seen as picking sides. “This might be one of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’”

Reid has remained neutral in the nominating process because several of his senators are in the race. But his son, County Commission Chairman Rory Reid, was an early supporter of Clinton’s campaign, and one of the younger Reid’s unpaid political consultants is Dan Hart, who has been involved in the suit.

Jennifer Duffy of The Cook Political Report in Washington said the question isn’t whether Reid should condemn the suit, but how the legal challenge got as far as it did under his watch.

“I’m from the school that questions how it got to be a lawsuit,” she said.

Duffy thinks Reid can emerge unscathed if the court declines to take up the suit, which some experts say is likely. By late Monday, a hearing date had not been set on the suit.

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