Senator Harry Reid (D – NV), Minority Leader and former Majority Leader, announces his retirement:
Given deep partisan tensions on Capitol Hill, Mr. Reid’s tenure has become increasingly combative in recent years and included a procedural change on nominations that infuriated Republicans. He also came under fire for blocking floor debate, and even some of his Democratic colleagues suggested that he was stifling the Senate. Just this week, he alienated House Democrats who thought he was sabotaging a compromise on Medicare.
Mr. Reid’s re-election fight would have been a high-spending slugfest in the presidential battleground of Nevada. Conservatives such as Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who were a favorite target of Mr. Reid’s criticism in 2014, would most likely have spared no expense in trying to oust him.
First elected to the House in 1982, and 75 years old, it’s time to let someone else take the seat. And who will it be? Surely not his last Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, who was Reid’s preferred opponent:
“The campaign began to prepare at the beginning of 2010 to face Sue Lowden, the deep-pocketed, telegenic former anchorwoman and state senator. ‘She was the person,’ as one insider put it via E-mail,” says [the Las Vegas Sun’s Jon] Ralston, “‘we were least interested in facing so we set out to make sure that she either 1) came out of the primary bruised and battered or 2) didn’t come out of the primary at all so we would face Sharron Angle or Danny Tarkanian.’” Meaning Reid’s political team could spend its time working to help the GOP pick its nominee.
In case memory fails you, she was the one who ran from unwelcome questions during the 2010 campaign:
Angle invited members of the media to her first big press event since her primary win. However, once the event ended and the press tried to ask her questions, Angle bolted.
This truly baffled me. You’re an American politician running for one of the most important elective posts in the country and you aren’t even willing to say, “I don’t know”? I vividly recall then-candidate Jesse Ventura answering a question, during a gubernatorial debate, with, “I don’t know, but I’ll get the best experts I can find” – and he won that race, as a member of the Reform Party, against two highly experienced opponents, Mayor of St. Paul Norm Coleman (later Senator) and State AG and State Legislator “Skip” Humphrey, son of the famous Hubert Humphrey.
Nevada in general runs politically red, so the Dems will have trouble retaining the seat. I suspect there will be a pitched battle for key members of Reid’s campaign team. The Republicans need to worry about the last debacle, as the Angle team was shocked to lose the election; their polling right up to election day showed them with a lead. One presumes they brought in polling experts in the post-mortem to discover their methodological errors. Too bad primary methodologies are not so easy to correct.
