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Nevada: Senior Senator Sen. Harry Reid (D) Last Updated July 14, 2003
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, where his father was a hardrock miner. He hitchhiked 40 miles to high school in Henderson, where his civics teacher and boxing coach Mike O'Callaghan became his political mentor. Henderson businessmen helped him pay for college, and he graduated from Utah State and George Washington Law School. He was an amateur boxer and at nights during law school he worked as a Capitol Police officer. He returned to Henderson and practiced law. 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 Democrats became the majority in the Senate from June 2001 to January 2003. He is soft-spoken and frank, a dogged and unrelenting partisan. 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 in 1991 and voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002, and has opposed environmental groups consistently on mining issues. But after winning reelection by 428 votes in 1998, he took on the job of whip and has spent most of his time on the floor, advancing the cause of his party, evidently without regard to what that might do to his popularity at home. In June 2002 he angrily called for George W. Bush to denounce conservatives who were trying to persuade trade associations to hire Republicans in their top positions. In May 2001 he contributed $500 to Torricelli's legal defense fund. Then in July 2002 Torricelli's case came before the Ethics Committee, which Reid chaired. Common Cause called on Reid to recuse himself; at first he refused, but a week later he did so. He has worked closely and cooperatively with Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, and in November 2002, when Daschle was considering running for president, he all but endorsed Reid to succeed him. "I honestly don't think he would be challenged if I weren't to run." But the point became moot when Daschle decided not to run. Reid played a key role in persuading Jim Jeffords to leave the Republican party in May 2001. For a month Daschle, Christopher Dodd and Reid talked with Jeffords and coaxed him to switch. Reid offered to decline the chairmanship of the Envrionment and Public Works Committee, to which he was entitled by seniority, and let Jeffords be chairman. That may have been the vital selling point, though Jeffords, Daschle and Reid deny that there was a quid pro quo. The key federal issue for Nevada is the proposed nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain. The federal government assumed responsibility for nuclear waste in 1982 and a bill passed in 1987, Reid's first year in the Senate, named Yucca Mountain and one other contender as the only two sites; the other one was later ruled out. Reid has stubbornly and persistently opposed the repository with every parliamentary and political tool at his command. Both other senators with nuclear waste piling up in their states (and 39 states have it) and especially Larry Craig of Idaho, where the government established a temporary nuclear waste site, have pressed hard for designation of Yucca Mountain. Bill Clinton carried Nevada by narrow margins in 1992 and 1996 largely because he promised to veto even a temporary site in Yucca Mountain, and so Reid's task was to assemble enough votes to prevent an override of his veto. He did so in 1997, then prevented a vote in 1998 and 1999, then kept 34 votes in line in April 2000--just barely enough. George W. Bush in 2000 pledged not to support a temporary site, but he also refrained from promising to veto a permanent site, saying that his decision would be based on "sound science and not politics." In February 2002 Bush, on the recommendation of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, designated Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. The law provided for a veto by the governor, which could be overridden by majorities in both houses of Congress. In April 2002, with great ceremony, Governor Kenny Guinn issued his veto. In May 2002 the House cast a large majority for Yucca Mountain. Reid lobbied furiously for Democratic votes, while John Ensign, his 1998 opponent and now his Republican colleague, lobbied desperately for Republican votes. Reid argued that the site was geologically flawed and that transporting nuclear waste to it would be hazardous, especially after September 11. Some $2 million was spent on ads in states over which trucks and trains carrying the waste would pass. Reid spoke passionately when the issue was debated in July, enough so to convert Debbie Stabenow, who had voted for the Yucca Mountain site in the House. Altogether he got 35 Democrats and Jeffords to vote his way. Ensign, opposed by the Bush administration, could get only two other Republicans, Lincoln Chafee and Ben Nighthorse Campbell. So the site was approved 60-39. But for Reid the fight was not over. Lawsuits had been filed against the plan, and the Energy Department must get approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which could take many years. Reid chaired the Appropriations subcommittee with juridiction over the Energy Department; in 2002 it cut $189 million from the Yucca Mountain budget. When retiring Utah Republican Jim Hansen, who voted for the Yucca Mountain site, got a provision in an appropriation barring transport of nuclear waste to a site in Utah, Reid got it removed in conference. He has worked for greater security around nuclear plants. Despite his strong partisanship and the bitterness and the closeness of the 1998 campaign, Reid and Ensign have become friendly colleagues who work together on many Nevada projects. Needless to say, they both strongly support the gaming industry. They have worked to block the bill, backed by John McCain and others, to prohibit betting on college and amateur sports, which is legal only in Nevada. They worked with Congressman Jim Gibbons on a Clark County Lands Act to declare some wilderness study areas as wilderness and open others to development; it became law with scarcely a dissenting vote. 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. He has steered counterterrorism money to Nevada and has worked to get the old Nevada nuclear test site, with its hundreds of underground tunnels, made into a $250 million center for training first responders how to cope with acts of terrorists. 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. This was Nevada's most expensive Senate campaign ever: Reid spent $4.9 million and Ensign $3.5 million. Unlike many small state Democrats, Reid has raised most of his money in his home state; big contributors in Las Vegas have known and supported him for many years. Reid carried Clark County, which casts two-thirds of the vote and is normally more Democratic than the rest of the state, by only 53%-44%; he may have won because he ran ahead of party lines in the usually Republican Reno area, where his work on local projects was appreciated. The election night tally showed Reid ahead by 459 votes; Ensign called for a recount, and a hand count in Reno's Washoe County took weeks. Ensign finally conceded December 9, with Reid ahead by 428 votes. Reid's problem is that there are so many newcomers to Nevada, most of them Republicans unfamiliar with his work in almost 40 years of public life. About 4,000 people have been moving to the Las Vegas area every month--which means nearly 300,000 Nevadans in 2004 will not have been in the state the last time Reid ran. Not all of them are voters, but they will bulk large in a state where 613,000 votes were cast in 2000. In 2002 Reid contributed to three Democrats running for statewide office; all three lost, as Republicans won all six statewide constitutional offices for the first time since 1890. The only positive news for Reid is that his son Rory Reid was elected to the Clark County Commission. In December 2002 White House political strategist Karl Rove met with 2d District Congressman Jim Gibbons and urged him to run; both Rove and Gibbons graduated, in different years, from Sparks High School near Reno. Gibbons represents everything in Nevada outside Clark County plus part of Clark County itself, and has won reelection by overwhelming margins. But the close cooperation within the Nevada delegation on many issues, especially Yucca Mountain, may prevent make it hard for Gibbons to wage an aggressive race against Reid. And George W. Bush's selection of the Yucca Mountain site may mean that Bush appearances will do less good for a Republican than they did in other states in 2002. Others mentioned as possible candidates include Secretary of State Dean Heller, Treasurer Brian Krolicki, Controller Kathy Augustine and Attorney General Brian Sandoval; the first three are term-limited and cannot run for their offices again in 2006.
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