Comment LAS VEGAS — After a disastrous 1994 midterm election for Nevada Democrats, Sen. Harry M. Reid called his closest allies with a message: Learn how to win in the conservative state. “I remember that meeting very well,” said D. Taylor, who worked with the Culinary Workers Union for 25 years in Las Vegas. “It was about what we needed to do to change the political equation in Nevada.” But the new effort faltered and hit a nadir in 2002, when state Democrats suffered devastating ballot losses, including in the newly formed 3rd Congressional District in southern Nevada. Reed, Taylor said, called another meeting. This time, Reid, the bland giant of Nevada politics, attended the rally and introduced his new party director, Rebecca Lambe. He demanded that they rebuild, take advantage of the state’s rapid population growth and start earning. It worked. From that point on, Nevada Democrats performed strongly in competitive races each cycle. Two decades later, facing its toughest test yet, the “Reid Machine” endures in the Silver State, nearly a year after its namesake died after a battle with cancer. To get scoops, sharp political analysis and accountability in your inbox every morning, subscribe to The Early 202. Reid’s protégé, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), narrowly won re-election in a race that, when it was called Saturday, kept the Senate majority in Democratic hands. Three Democratic incumbents won in closely contested House races. Francisco “Cisco” Aguilar, a former Reid aide, won the Secretary of State race, and while Republicans won the governor’s mansion and lieutenant governor’s race, the state legislature remains in Democratic control. “We take pride in winning here,” said JB Poersch, chairman of the Senate Majority PAC. And now Lambe is leading the push for Nevada to be the first state in the nation to go Democratic, which would see the national party invest even more in the state’s political operations and provide further resources to Silver State Democrats. for decades to come. “There’s no doubt that every Democrat in Nevada wishes he was still here,” Lambe said of Reid, but added that the organization is “firing on all cylinders.” In addition, the victories this year gave a morale boost to the alumni of the former Nevada Senate Majority Leader in a race that played out like a political soap opera. The candidates served as proxies for old enemies, many of whom have been dead for years but whose influence remains.
Reid vs. McConnell once again Early last year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who spent a decade clashing with his Democratic counterpart until Reid retired six years ago, made Nevada a cornerstone of the effort of reclaiming the majority. Win Nevada, McConnell figured, and he was on his way to becoming majority leader. His top political advisers helped recruit and then campaign Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general. He is the grandson of the late Paul Laxalt, who defeated Reid for that Senate seat by less than 700 votes in 1974. Reid, who first won the Senate seat in 1986 after Laxalt retired, only learned who Adam Laxalt’s father was in 2013: His old friend, the late Senator Pete V. Domenici (RN.M.), who had an extramarital affair with Paul Laxalt’s daughter. So “Team Mitch,” as McConnell’s own political operation calls it, took on the “Reid Machine,” facing questions about its power with Reid dead, in an effort to put the Senate seat back in family hands Laxalt and reclaim the GOP majority. Laxalt and McConnell’s teams believed that everything that favored Republicans nationally—inflation at 40-year highs, a pandemic recovery that is uneven, the rightward shift of Latino voters and President Biden’s declining approval ratings—resonated deeper. here. In an economy dependent on tourists, Nevadans are feeling the economic strain faster and more. Gas prices are still over $5 a gallon in Las Vegas. The unemployment rate, which reached nearly 30% at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, remains the second highest in the country. Cortez Masto’s low-key style translated into low name recognition in the passing state. It’s a stark contrast to the take-no-prisoners Reid, but polarizing style. In Nevada, a Democratic senator is trying to fend off the GOP’s momentum on the economy Republicans smelled weakness. That’s when the relationship between Laxalt and Josh Holmes, McConnell’s top political adviser, grew stronger. In early 2021, Holmes spoke with his boss and they agreed that the former state attorney general, with two statewide races under his belt, seemed like their best candidate. Soon after, another top McConnell adviser, John Ashbrook, began serving as a strategist for Laxalt’s campaign. It helped that Laxalt, who co-chaired Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign in Nevada, could thread that needle between the GOP leader and the former president, who have clashed openly over Senate races this year. Laxalt even once teamed with Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis (R) as naval officers, giving him entry into three competitive races in today’s GOP. The only question was whether Laxalt wanted to run for governor, the office his grandfather won before moving to the Senate, but Team Mitch made a strong case that Nevada’s biggest problems were in Washington, not Carson City, and the McConnell’s team was saying about Laxalt. what would the majority be like. “He always thought this would be the 51st seat,” Robert Uithoven, Laxalt’s longtime top adviser, said in an interview on Election Day. “That would be the battleground for the Senate, that seat.” From the beginning, Laxalt’s team focused on what his advisers called three “mini-campaigns” that they believed would win him the race: One, win a little more of the Latino vote, which has been key to Democratic victories in previous races. two, a “Ladies for Laxalt” effort to reduce the gender gap. and three, the battle to win Washoe County, the pivotal swing district anchored by his hometown of Reno. For Democrats, the question was whether a machine without Reid could deliver in its first test since his death in December. But the machine, which focuses on registering voters and then getting them to the polls, continued to hum. “My friend Harry M. Reed, he may be gone but he is still with us. His legacy in Nevada continues to shine [as] bright as the lights on the Vegas strip,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (DN.Y.) said Saturday night at a hastily arranged press conference after Cortez Masto’s victory was announced. Reid’s business first started in 2003, at a time when Nevada was the fastest growing state in years. Lambe, Reid and other close confidants decided that success would be achieved through voter registration. They relied on labor unions, Hispanic groups, Asian Pacific Islander organizers, and liberal groups to conduct massive voter registration drives. Many were combined with citizenship incentives for the growing immigrant population. In 2006, Reid saw a way to quickly boost voter registration. He argued that Nevada should be an early presidential candidate state. New Hampshire and Iowa are not representative of the country, he said. The Democratic Party had no choice but to agree with then-Senate leader. Reid instituted a caucus system for the 2008 Democratic primary as a way to boost Democratic participation, but mostly registration, registration tens of thousands of Democratic voters and far outnumbering registered Republican voters. In Nevada, a last-ditch effort to make sure every vote counts Because the state is so transient, the organization is well aware of the introduction of the party and candidates in each election cycle. (That’s something he had to do this cycle with Cortez Masto, too, even though he was running for re-election.) Voter registration translated into a massive get-out-the-vote drive that led to the most successful Democratic election in Nevada history, winning two Democratic House seats and breaking the Republican presidential streak when Barack Obama won the state. The strong ground game continued. The Culinary Workers Union, for example, said it knocked on a record 1 million doors across the state this election. But the Reid machine is more than just the ground game. It’s about the money and it’s set up to run like a campaign instead of a state party. Reed not only had the support of the union workers, the people who cleaned and built the hotels, but also the casino executives. Reid had the support of mining executives and also environmental groups – two groups that rarely agree. It is an entity that collects and redirects campaign contributions to the various parts of the organization. It ensures that allied grassroots groups are well funded. It’s a research organization and opposition communications outlet that starts looking at potential challengers years in advance. “The goal was to make sure those resources went to the kinds of tried-and-true programs here that we knew it would take to win,” Lambe said. Finds and trains political operatives and people to run for office and key party positions. For example, Reid noted Adriana Martinez’s better-than-expected run for local office in 2002 in a Republican part of the city. After her failed campaign, he called her, was impressed, and asked her to run the Nevada Democratic Party. “I had no idea what it would entail,” Martinez said. “It was just two Latinos [state party chairs] at that time.” Martinez was instrumental in recruiting Latinos to vote, volunteer and run for office. She later…
