Elected 1986, seat up 2004 Born: Dec. 2, 1939, Searchlight Home: Searchlight Education: S. UT St. Col., A.S. 1959, UT St. U., B.S. 1961, George Washington U., J.D. 1964, U. of NV, 1969-70 Religion: Mormon Marital Status: married (Landra)

Career:

• Political: NV Assembly, 1968-70; NV Lt. Gov., 1970-74; U.S. House of Reps., 1982-86.
• Professional: Practicing atty., 1969-82; Henderson City Atty., 1964-66; Chmn., NV Gaming Comm., 1977-81.

DC Office: 528 HSOB 20510, 202-224-3542; Fax: 202-224-7327; Web site: www.senate.gov/~reid

State Offices: Carson City, 775-882-7343; Las Vegas,702-388-5020; Reno,775-686-5750.

Committees:

• Majority Whip
.
• Aging (Special).
• Appropriations: Defense; Energy & Water Development (Chmn.); Interior; Labor, HHS & Education; Military Construction; Transportation.
• Environment & Public Works: Clean Air, Wetlands & Climate Change; Fisheries, Wildlife & Water; Transportation, Infrastructure & Nuclear Safety (Chmn.).
• Ethics (Select) (Chmn.).
• Indian Affairs.

Harry Reid, a Democrat first elected in 1986, has held high office in Nevada for most of the last 30 years. He grew up in Searchlight, Nevada, in the scorching desert south of Las Vegas, and hitchhiked 40 miles to high school in Henderson, where his civics teacher and boxing coach Mike O'Callaghan became his political mentor. Reid was elected to the Assembly in 1968, at age 28; in 1970 Callaghan was elected governor and Reid, running separately, was elected lieutenant governor. In 1974 he came within 624 votes of beating Paul Laxalt in the race for senator, lost for mayor of Las Vegas in 1976, and then became head of the Gaming Commission from 1977-81--as sensitive a post as any in Nevada. In 1982, when Nevada got two House seats for the first time and Congressman-at-Large Jim Santini ran for the Senate, Reid ran in the Las Vegas-based 1st District and won. Laxalt retired in 1986 and Reid ran for the Senate again; his opponent turned out to be Santini, who had switched parties at the last minute and was running as a Republican. Reid's ads depicted him as David to Santini's Goliath, and he won 50%-45%.

Reid is now the Democratic whip in the Senate, the number two man in the party's leadership, a constant presence on the floor and one of the reasons why Senate Democrats have managed to be a major force. He is soft-spoken and frank, far from an eloquent debater; he has managed to develop good working relations with Republican leaders while remaining a tough and persevering partisan. He strongly supported Al Gore in 2000 (he was one of the few members of Congress to support Gore's campaign for president in 1988) and after George W. Bush appeared at Bob Jones University, Reid and Bob Torricelli introduced a resolution to condemn the institution; at the Democratic convention he was ready with plenty of harsh criticism of Bush. He has a conservative record on some issues: He is against abortion, was one of the few Democrats to vote for the Gulf war resolution, and has opposed environmental groups consistently on mining issues. But he is also a party man: for the 1993 budget and tax increase, for the 1994 crime bill with its gun control provisions, casting a decisive vote against the balanced budget amendment in 1993. After the 1994 election, he said, "We have to all swallow a little bit of our pride and go toward the middle." In December 1998, after months of rounding up votes, he was elected minority whip, even after winning re-election by only 428 votes.

On national issues, Reid has taken some distinctive positions: he worked for the Taxpayers Bill of Rights in 1988 and the IRS reform of 1998; he has demanded prosecution of IRS officials who encouraged or tolerated collection quotas; he wants to remove J. Edgar Hoover's name from the FBI Building in Washington. He has sponsored an air travelers' bill of rights and an increase in fines for passengers who assault flight attendants. He has worked to speed up the timeline for changing export controls on computer equipment and launched the Senate Democrats' High-Tech Working Group. Although Reid opposes abortion, he stalled the adjournment of the Senate in October 1998 to protest the killing of an amendment to provide contraceptive insurance to federal workers, and he co-sponsored a resolution disapproving of George W. Bush's reinstatment of the Mexico City policy to deny funding for international organizations that pay for abortions.

Although he has opposed environmental groups on mining issues, Reid has opposed other Republican-backed riders. On the Environment and Public Works Committee, he co-sponsored a brownfields bill to increase annual federal funding for the cleanup of contaminated former industrial sites from $92 million to $200 million; this passed the Senate 99-0 in April 2001. With Nevada colleague John Ensign, he sponsored a bill to provide $750 million annually to help small communities build water-treatment systems to reduce arsenic levels. He has strongly opposed steps to build the 1987-approved Yucca Mountain permanent nuclear waste repository in Nevada and to build a temporary storage site in the state. He assembled enough votes to uphold Bill Clinton's veto of a temporary site in 1997 and then, with Nevada colleague Richard Bryan, prevented a vote in 1998 and 1999; when the bill passed in April 2000 there were again enough votes to prevent an override. "We have 34 votes, and we will always have 34 votes," he said triumphantly. George W. Bush in 2000 pledged not to support a temporary site, but Bush also refrained from promising to veto a permanent one, saying that his decision would be based on "sound science and not politics."

Reid has worked on a host of other Nevada issues. He has strongly supported the gaming industry, and in December 2000 he and Ensign announced that their number one priority was to oppose the bill, backed by John McCain and others, to prohibit betting on college and amateur sports. Nevada is the only state to allow this form of wagering. In 2000 Reid supported giving permanent resident status to immigrants who have been in the United States illegally since 1986, with a five-year rolling registry; Nevada's population in 2000 was 20% Hispanic. He pushed through a "source tax" amendment barring states from taxing the state pensions of retirees who move to another state--as many have to Nevada. Through two years of negotiation he produced an agreement on allocating water from Lake Tahoe and the Truckee River between Nevada and California; Reid got the Pyramid Lake Paiute Indians to agree to return their fisheries to the state for $25 million, plus $40 million in economic aid. He got $121 million for the Western Shoshones to settle their land claims. He got a grant for a Suicide Prevention Center at the University of Nevada's medical school--Nevada's suicide rate is the nation's highest--and opposed lowering the blood alcohol level for DWIs--a measure disliked by owners of hotels and bars. He co-sponsored with Dianne Feinstein the Lake Tahoe cleanup law passed in 2000. The Senate also passed Reid's bill to let Clark County buy 6,500 acres of federal land in the Ivanpah Valley to build a second airport.

Despite all this, Reid has never won a Senate election with more than 51% of the vote. He was elected in 1986 by 50%-45%. In the 1992 primary he won 53%-39% over Charles Woods, a businessman badly wounded and scarred in World War II; in the general he beat rancher Demar Dahl 51%-40%. In the 1998 race his opponent was 1st District Congressman John Ensign, who had run and won high-spending races in the Las Vegas area in 1994 and 1996. Reid in his feisty way attacked Ensign harshly as an "extremist" who called environmentalists "socialists," and would gut Social Security. "You send Ensign to the Senate, you send nuclear waste to Nevada," he proclaimed; an assertion Ensign vehemently disputed. He argued that Reid voted for higher taxes in the Senate. But Reid, the father of five and grandfather of nine, ran an ad showing his wife saying, "For me, Harry Reid's greatest accomplishment is being a devoted husband and father who helped raise five exceptional children. His being a senator is great, but having the love and respect of your family is the ultimate accomplishment."

This was Nevada's most expensive Senate campaign ever. Reid put ads up on the air in April 1998, Ensign in May. Eventually they spent $4.9 million and $3.5 million respectively; both were supported by the gaming and mining industries. The League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club spent $400,000 on ads to help Reid. The Foundation for Government spent $300,000 against Reid because of his opposition to triple-trailer trucks. The AFL-CIO ran a "ground war" campaign costing perhaps $300,000. That in many observers' views made the difference, but Reid believes he won because of his inroads with Republican voters in Reno and Washoe County from his work on local projects; he lost the usually Republican area by only 48%-46%. Ensign did better in the Cow Counties, winning 59%-36%. In Las Vegas' Clark County, both candidates' home base, Reid won 53%-44%. The election night tally showed Reid ahead by 459 votes; Ensign called for a recount, and it turned out that the Washoe County ballots had been misprinted, preventing some from being read by machines. The hand count there took weeks, and Ensign finally conceded December 9, with Reid ahead by 428 votes.

After the election Reid reshuffled his local staff. But Nevada is still attracting hundreds of thousands of newcomers, and he may have a serious challenge again in 2004, possibly from Congressman Jim Gibbons. In the meantime he remains a formidable member of the Senate.

Group Ratings
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2000	90	29	100	86	54	70	12	40	12	6	46
1999	90	--	100	67	51	--	5	35	12	--	--

National Journal Ratings
	1999 LIB	--	1999 CONS		2000 LIB	--	2000 CONS
Economic	90%	--	0%		84%	--	11%
Social	56%	--	42%		54%	--	44%
Foreign	62%	--	29%		62%	--	34%

Key Votes of the 106th Congress
1. Educ. Savings Accts. N 2. Prescrip. Drug Benefit Y 3. Delay Ergonomic Standards N 4. Phase Out Estate Tax N 5. Review Movie Violence N 6. Gun Show Bckgrnd. Checks Y		7. Ban Part.-Birth Abortion Y  8. Broaden Hate Crimes List Y  9. NATO War in Serbia Y 10. Table Cuba Travel Ban Y 11. Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Y 12. Perm. Trade with China N

Election Results
1998 general	Harry Reid (D)	208,650	(48%)
	John Ensign (R)	208,222	(48%)
	Other	18,918	(4%)
1998 primary	Harry Reid (D)	unopposed
1992 general	Harry Reid (D)	253,150	(51%)
	Demar Dahl (R)	199,413	(40%)
	Other	43,333	(9%)

Campaign Finance
1998	Receipts	Receipts from PACs	Expenditures
Harry Reid (D)	$3,905,324	$1,219,324	$4,939,010
John Ensign (R)	$3,454,820	$1,295,185	$3,490,256