A new Angle in Reid’s political obituary

By Jon Ralston

Sunday, April 18, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Harry Reid is dead, one in an occasional series:

As the Las Vegas Review-Journal considers daily polling to confirm the aforementioned, the real story in the U.S. Senate race less than five weeks before early voting begins is how alive Sharron Angle might be.

The question is whether the tea Angle has been offered is caffeinated — that is, does the Tea Party Express endorsement come with a jolt? It’s one thing to bask in the national glory of the Tea Partyers’ embrace. It’s quite another to translate that spotlight into money; cash begets television ads, which beget name recognition, which begets poll movement, which might beget a stunning upset June 8.

This all seems somehow vaguely familiar: Angle running a poor third in a race to two other candidates — one a man, the other a woman. Then, suddenly, a third-party group injects a fortune into the race, putting Angle in a dead heat for the lead.

Ah, yes, 2006. The woman was Dawn Gibbons; the man was Dean Heller. The race was for Jim Gibbons’ congressional seat, which he vacated to run for governor.

In May, a poll found Gibbons with 32 percent, Heller with 27 percent and Angle an also-ran at 15 percent. Enter the Club for Growth. The conservative group poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for ads portraying Angle — see if this doesn’t ring a bell from this year’s Senate contest — as the “real conservative.” A survey taken shortly before the election showed Angle tied with Heller, who won the race by 421 votes.

Here we are again, four years later, with Angle considered a long shot behind a woman, Sue Lowden, and a man, Danny Tarkanian. Now, enter the Tea Party Express, with promises to level the playing field and do for Angle in 2010 what the Club for Growth did in 2006.

Sharron Angle is the Energizer Bunny of Nevada politics — she just keeps running and running and running. She never seems drained by losses, whether it was her agonizing 2006 congressional defeat or her failures to qualify property-tax-limiting initiatives. Her energy has always seemed limitless, beating the drum for lower taxes and constitutional fealty.

Angle has been marginalized for most of her career by the media and her colleagues. She is not a team player, preferring to push the red button during her legislative career rather than compromise on issues. She has been tarred as anything from an inflexible ideologue to a right-wing kook.

But she’s still standing. And while 2006 is not 2010, the race to unseat Reid is not an open congressional seat, and while the Tea Party Express is not the Club for Growth, Angle should not be so easily dismissed. Here’s why:

A slight majority of likely GOP voters live in the 2nd Congressional District, where Angle just missed winning the Republican congressional nomination four years ago. She actually defeated Heller in Washoe County by 6.5 percentage points. With a little help, she could rack up a sizable margin in CD2.

So is that help coming? The Tea Party Express folks are talking a good game — they like to remind everyone of the $350,000 independent expenditure for Scott Brown in that Massachusetts Senate race this year and the $250,000 campaign they claim intimidated Rep. Bart Stupak into retirement. And, of course, there is their ongoing showdown with the Senate majority leader, which they claim is a seven-figure campaign.

The Tea Party Express has a national network to tap into, and Angle has said her phones are lighting up. An announcement is expected a week from Monday on a radio and TV ad buy on behalf of Angle — that’s nearly a month before early voting starts and plenty of time to have an effect when Lowden and Tarkanian don’t have much left in the bank and don’t have the kind of hardened supporters Angle does.

The most provocative question is this: Will the Tea Party Express be willing to go negative on Lowden and Tarkanian the way the Club for Growth did on Gibbons and Heller? If it won’t, it’s much tougher for Angle to break though, but that also could help Reid later.

Reid prefers anyone but Lowden, a conclusion inescapable from his daily news releases attacking her. But Angle has shown in some polls she can defeat the majority leader, although she has not purchased Lowden’s name recognition. Yet.

In 2006, Angle kept going and going and going even after she lost. She filed an election challenge and only conceded after the war was lost.

In 2010, for the new darling of the Tea Party Express, the war is just beginning.