Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Reid juggles eight-state strategy to protect Democratic majority

Harry Reid may not be up for re-election this year, but next to President Barack Obama, there’s no politician in the country with more to lose in 2012.

The Nevada senator’s majority leadership is anything but a sure thing as Democrats and Republicans dig in to battle over the longest roster of truly competitive seats up for grabs since 2006, when the body made a sharp shift from red to blue.

That was the tide that initially brought Reid to the Senate’s top spot, a position of outsized power for a small state like Nevada.

Now, Reid’s retention of his post depends on Democrats winning a host of races that are as geographically and demographically dissimilar as the most distant ends of the party spectrum.

On and off the Senate floor, Reid has to protect the farmer from Montana while promoting the professor from Massachusetts. Meanwhile, his party minions must discern what messages can sell in swing states Virginia and Nevada without souring voters’ tastes in very blue Hawaii and very red North Dakota (where the seats in question haven’t switched hands for at least 20 years).

And you thought the balancing act between Las Vegas and Reno was tricky.

Ask Reid what states he’s paying attention to, and the usually reserved statesman begins to rattle off a jumble of polling data like a regular Rain Man.

“Montana, we’re 5 percent ahead. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown, he’s ahead by more than 10 points. In Missouri, we have McCaskill, she’s within the margin of error,” Reid said earlier this month.

Those are three of the 10 seats currently held by Democrats that the Cook Political report lists as either a toss-up or in the danger zone, where polls show voters only slightly leaning to the left or right. By comparison, Republicans have only four of their current seats similarly ranked.

A little quick subtraction indicates why things are so close: Right now, Democrats have a six-seat advantage — the exact difference between the two parties’ toss-ups.

Click to enlarge photo

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 28, 2012, after the Supreme Court's ruling on President Barack Obama's health care law.

“We feel pretty good about where we are. If you told me this time last year we’d be where we are ...” Reid said, leaving short the nicety to state flatly: “It’s not a surprise.”

How much of this campaign cycle Reid could have predicted or orchestrated depends on one’s point of reference.

At the start of the 112th Congress, the 2012 outlook for Democrats was not nearly so tenuous as it is today.

But last year, a deluge of retirement announcements (seven Democratic senators versus four Republicans) pitched several sure-thing Democratic Senate races into toss-up columns. A well-financed Republican offense also helped to move the seemingly safe Democratic seats in Michigan and Montana into the realm of uncertainty.

But from his own side of the aisle, there’s little Reid has left to chance.

In his capacity as majority leader, Reid rarely, if ever, lets a major policy battle pass without exercising his scheduling authority to highlight the differences between the parties.

The votes forced by Reid — be they on student loans, payroll taxes, budget proposals or the president’s jobs bill — are not so much intended to aid the passage of bills as to allow Democrats to chide Republicans for being obstructionists.

They also provide Democratic candidates handy campaign points against Republican incumbents, such as, “[Dean] Heller voted twice to end Medicare as we know it,” a favorite of the Shelley Berkley campaign.

But with only two Republican incumbents in competitive races, the reach of this tactic is limited. Of far wider-reaching consequence is Reid’s network of surrogates, working across the campaign spectrum to preserve his Senate majority.

The first, and most visible, is Sen. Patty Murray, a longtime Reid ally and trusted executor of his policy objectives in the Senate, and now head of the Democrats’ official campaign arm.

Reid worked closely with Murray — who took the job in 2011 when seemingly no one else wanted it — to recruit competitive candidates such as Elizabeth Warren, the architect of parts of the financial reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank, in Massachusetts.

Since then, Reid has either appeared in person or sent out emails to solicit funding and support for every one of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s competitive candidates.

This week, Reid is staging a sweepstakes, in which one lucky embattled Senate candidate will win a personal Reid appeal. Potential supporters get to vote for their choice from the following roster of Senate battleground states: Arizona, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia.

Democratic party strategists characterize Reid’s efforts as “a tremendous help” and credit him with helping to spearhead the party’s Senate strategy.

Thus far, the DSCC has outraised its Republican counterpart, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, by about a million dollars.

The power of outside spending, however, has been the theme of the 2012 cycle, the first presidential election year in which political action committees no longer have to abide by stringent fundraising limitations.

Republicans, armed with the bank accounts of deep-pocketed party faithful like Sheldon Adelson, have benefited from that change far more than Democrats.

Reid publicly eschews outside spending. Nonetheless, some of his most loyal, long-term aides are running the primary outside organizations dedicated to keeping the Senate Democratic, and Reid has lent his star power to help their cause. (Neither his office nor the groups will say just how many private fundraising events he’s headlined).

Reid’s former chief of staff, Susan McCue, and Rebecca Lambe, a longtime Reid campaign adviser, run Majority PAC — the leading political action committee working Senate races. They were both instrumental in Reid’s 2010 re-election and continue to have a close relationship with the senator. Reid’s own PAC, the Searchlight Majority fund, pays McCue’s firm, Message Global, LLC, $5,000 bimonthly for communications consulting services.

Majority PAC is working with another familiar name in Reid circles: Craig Varoga, whose group Patriot Majority USA was another key player in Reid’s 2010 Senate victory.

Together, the groups have ads running in Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia. Massachusetts is not on the list because the candidates signed a pact to reject outside spending. In Montana, a state Supreme Court decision to uphold a ban on corporate election finances also kept PAC spending in check up until a few weeks ago, when the Supreme Court overturned it.

“Our effort could be the only thing preventing a full Republican-controlled White House, Senate and House,” said Majority PAC spokesman Zach Gorin. “It’s the firewall and last line of defense.”

On his own, Reid has distributed almost a half million dollars this cycle to Democratic candidates and state parties through his Searchlight Majority Fund, including $10,000 — the maximum allowable amount over a two-year cycle — to every Democrat in a competitive Senate race.

Despite the close ties between the campaigns and Reid’s majority leadership, most Democrats believe belaboring that connection is bad politics and could play into Republicans’ hands. In fact, Republicans are already playing on that theme.

“Senator Reid is the symbol of everything that’s been wrong with Congress,” said Brian Walsh, communications director for the NRSC, which has made Reid a focal point in their campaign literature and messaging in many of the toss-up states. “It’s Harry Reid and President Obama that have been in charge in Washington.”

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