Less than three weeks before crunch mid-term polls, a battle royale is playing out in Las Vegas, as the US’ top Democratic senator fights for his political life in this glittering desert gambling mecca.
Senator Harry Reid, leader of the Democrats in the US Senate, faces staunch conservative and Tea Party darling Republican Sharron Angle, an explosive match-up that is presently too close to call based on polling data.
“This is about as close as you’re going to get to [US -President] Barack Obama being on the ballot this year,” said Eric Herzik, political science professor at the University of Nevada at Reno.
“It also shows you the epitome of this new anti-incumbent wing of the Republican Party,” the professor told reporters. “If the Tea Party people can get Sharron Angle elected, then they have more clout than I have given them credit for.”
Angle, 61, is a former state assemblywoman thrust into the national limelight by her primary victory in June. Like the Tea Party groups she belongs to, she argues that the national debt is dangerously unsustainable and that government programs like Obama’s recent health insurance reform will harm the economy and violate personal liberties.
She has taken a long list of hard-core conservative positions including opposing the existence of Social Security and Medicare, the US programs that aid retirees with a pension and health insurance.
“I’m not too far right, there’s no such thing,” Angle said in May.
Reid, 70, is seeking his fifth term after becoming the most important and powerful elected official ever to emerge from his state.
He regularly points to billions of dollars in public works projects to show his clout for the small western state, and to a lengthy list of prominent Republican supporters in Nevada to show he’s more mainstream than Angle.
“When you become the majority leader, you have to take the party line, but I think Harry Reid has the best interests of Nevadans in mind,” said Sig Rogich, who chaired the campaigns of late US President Ronald Reagan, a Republican icon.
“For Nevada to go from No. 1 in power to No. 100 would be a huge mistake,” Rogich said.
Yet Nevada, with the US’ highest unemployment and home foreclosure rates, is also the epicenter of the economic morass gripping the nation.
The state went for Obama in the 2008 presidential race, but many voters don’t believe the stimulus packages that Reid shepherded through the Congress on behalf of the White House have eased the doldrums.
The campaign has been so ugly that a fistfight broke out between an Angle and a Reid supporter in the audience of a candidate forum last month in Las Vegas.
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