Republican Dean Heller was appointed to the Senate in May 2011. GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval chose Heller to replace Republican Sen. John Ensign after Ensign resigned in advance of a harshly critical Senate Ethics Committee report on his extramarital affair with the wife of a former aide and allegations of a hush-money scheme. Heller, who was Nevada’s 2nd District representative at the time of the appointment, had been planning to run for Ensign’s Senate seat in 2012. Read More

Republican Dean Heller was appointed to the Senate in May 2011. GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval chose Heller to replace Republican Sen. John Ensign after Ensign resigned in advance of a harshly critical Senate Ethics Committee report on his extramarital affair with the wife of a former aide and allegations of a hush-money scheme. Heller, who was Nevada’s 2nd District representative at the time of the appointment, had been planning to run for Ensign’s Senate seat in 2012.

Heller was a political fixture in Carson City long before he won his first House contest in 2006. He got a taste of politics during childhood when his newspaper route included deliveries at the state Capitol. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1985 with a degree in business administration, and then worked as a stockbroker trading on the Pacific Stock Exchange. In 1990, he won the first of two terms in the Nevada House, and in 1994, he was elected to the first of three terms as Nevada secretary of state. During his 12-year tenure, Heller streamlined the corporation registration process, increasing revenues tenfold. He supported more public access to government records and greater transparency in the state campaign finance system. Nevada was seen as a national model in 2004, when it became the first state to create a paper trail for its electronic voting machines.

Heller decided to make a bid for the U.S. House when five-term Republican Jim Gibbons gave up the 2nd District seat to run for governor. Heller faced competition for the Republican nomination from Assemblywoman Sharron Angle and former Assemblywoman Dawn Gibbons, the outgoing congressman’s wife. Heller and Gibbons began with the strongest name recognition, but Gibbons’ underfunded candidacy never took off. Angle, a Christian conservative, emerged as a serious primary rival after she picked up the endorsement and financial support of the deep-pocketed Club for Growth, a national anti-tax group. Angle ran as the race’s true conservative, while Heller campaigned on his record in state office and called for cuts in taxes and government spending. He won the nomination with 36% of the vote, a 421-vote victory over Angle, who got 35%. Gibbons finished third with 25%. Angle went on to give Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada the toughest race of his career in 2010.

Heller entered the general election campaign with a depleted campaign treasury to face Democrat Jill Derby, an 18-year veteran of the Nevada Board of Regents. He ran the race as a referendum on President George W. Bush, emphasizing his support for the Iraq war, for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent and for creating private Social Security accounts for young workers. While many Republican candidates elsewhere considered Bush a liability in 2006, the president stumped twice for Heller and helped motivate the traditionally Republican-leaning rural vote. Derby emphasized her rural roots, criticized Heller for his stance on the war and framed the election as a chance for voters to reject Republican control in Washington. Heller defeated her 50%-45%.

In selecting Heller to replace Ensign, Sandoval cited the need for an “experienced voice” in Washington. “Too many important issues face our state and our nation to name a caretaker to this important position,” the governor said. Nevada was among the states hardest hit by the 2007-09 recession and in March 2011 had an unemployment rate of 13.2%, the nation’s highest.

Heller was given seats on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee as well as the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Ensign had served on the latter. Heller said he would seek to lower rising gasoline prices and undo “heavy-handed regulations” that he said were hurting businesses. “If we are going to encourage economic growth, we need to address climbing gas prices, ensure our transportation needs are met and foster a regulatory climate that does not impede interstate commerce,” he said.

In the House, Heller broke with conservatives on some issues, but was generally a reliable Republican vote. He was the chamber’s 69th most conservative member in 2010, according to National Journal’s rankings. He supported nuclear energy on the condition that the radioactive waste would be stored where it was produced, not at the Department of Energy’s Yucca Mountain project about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Heller also got into an unusual family squabble in 2008, when he criticized what he called the limited impact of the Republican takeover of the House led by Republican Newt Gingrich in 1994. “They came to change Washington, and Washington changed them,” he said, adding that he thought it was time for Republicans to clean house.

But Heller was enough of a loyalist to land a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee in the 111th Congress (2009-10). He proposed a series of unsuccessful amendments to the health care overhaul, including one requiring members of Congress to take part in a proposed government-run “public option” and another forgiving education loans for doctors and nurses who agree to work in underserved areas. He also had no luck adding a provision to a small business tax bill in March 2010 to allow capital gains exclusion of up to $50,000 for non-primary residences in one of the nation’s top 200 high foreclosure areas. Heller teamed with Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Giffords to get a bill through the House in September 2010 to toughen penalties on drug smugglers using ultralight planes. He also backed a bill that year to extend unemployment benefits, but irked liberals when he posed the question, “Is the government now creating hobos?”

Derby and the Democrats tried again for the seat in 2008, but Heller took a comfortable lead in early polls and won the rematch, 52% to 41%. He disappointed Republicans in 2009 when he declined to challenge Reid the following year; he won re-election 63%-33% over Democrat Nancy Price.

In early 2011, Heller was being mentioned as a possible candidate for Ensign’s seat. Once seen as a rising star, Ensign’s political career had begun to unravel in June 2009, when he publicly admitted to having an extramarital affair with the wife of his top Senate aide. The day after his admission, Ensign resigned his leadership post but said he would remain in the Senate. The following month, Ensign admitted that his parents had paid the woman and former aide $96,000, but he maintained that the money was a gift and not intended to buy her silence. His troubles deepened in October 2009 with a story in The New York Times that said Ensign had helped former aide Doug Hampton, his mistress’ husband, get a lobbying job and then assisted Hampton in securing clients. E-mail messages that publicly surfaced in March 2010 revealed that Ensign urged a Las Vegas development firm to hire Hampton after the company had approached the senator for help on energy projects.

It initially appeared Ensign might seek to follow the example of Louisiana GOP Sen. David Vitter, who rebounded from an embarrassing prostitution sex scandal to win re-election in 2010. Vitter argued to voters that for all of his personal failings, Democrats could do far less damage with him in office. But in the early months of 2011, Ensign’s poll numbers plummeted, with Heller outdistancing him 53%-38% in a potential matchup. The Ethics Committee announced the appointment of a special counsel, a sign that its inquiry was becoming serious. And during a February town hall meeting in Las Vegas, Ensign was asked whether he had “repented to God for your affair”—an ominous indication of questions likely to surface in a re-election campaign.

He announced in March that he would not seek another term, and then a month later said he would resign immediately. The Ethics Committee voted unanimously in May to refer the case to the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission to examine whether any laws were broken. Ethics Chairman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said that if Ensign had not resigned, the special counsel was prepared to recommend that senators vote on whether to expel him. When Ensign announced his departure, Heller jumped into the race for a successor and immediately was considered the front-runner.

With his subsequent appointment to the Senate, Heller enjoyed some of the advantages of incumbency, such as the ability to communicate with constituents from all parts of the state. He also was likely to get more financial help from national Republicans than if he had remained in the House. But the prospects of Heller retaining the seat in 2012 were by no means a given. Two Democrats—Rep. Shelley Berkley and wealthy businessman Byron Georgiou—were also interested in running, and both were able to raise the money to compete against Heller. Reid also could be counted on to pull out all the stops to try to make the seat a Democratic pickup, drawing from the political network that enabled him to win a brutal re-election battle against Angle in 2010. And because Nevada is a competitive state in presidential politics, President Barack Obama is likely to spend plenty of time there during his 2012 re-election campaign.