By Kate Bachelder
Wall Street Journal
October 18, 2016
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ca
Joe Heck is facing long odds, even for Vegas: The three-term Nevada congressman is running for Senate against the chosen heir to Minority Leader Harry Reid, who over the past 30 years has put away five Republican opponents. The Reid machine is hellbent on passing the retiring senator’s seat to a Democrat and leaving Washington with a new liberal Senate majority. Mr. Reid says he has a “proprietary” interest in the outcome, and his staff is running the campaign of the Democratic nominee, Catherine Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general.
Mr. Heck will appear on the ballot with the most divisive and unpopular GOP presidential nominee in modern history. As a special bonus, the Nevada ballot gives disgusted voters the option to select “none of these candidates”—a choice that is polling in the mid-single digits. Earlier this month, Mr. Heck pulled his support for Donald Trump and called for the New Yorker to step down. Nevada is also a microcosm of the GOP’s demographic challenges. Hispanics might constitute 20% of the electorate this year, up from 15% in 2008.
Yet Mr. Heck could win. He’s running nearly even with Ms. Cortez Masto—41% to her 43% in the latest Real Clear Politics average. There are several reasons he’s competitive: Mr. Heck is a sharp and disciplined candidate, his opponent has no discernible ideas, and he’s running to expand the GOP’s appeal.
Sen. Reid first won his Senate seat in 1986 on the slogan “Independent Like Nevada.” That’s a punch line now that Mr. Reid has become the most visceral partisan in Washington. But it’s true of the state: Nevada has voted for the winner in all but two presidential contests since 1908, the third time William Jennings Bryan carried the Silver State. Barack Obama won Nevada in 2012 with 52%, but that year Republican Sen. Dean Heller eked out re-election by about 10,000 votes. (Sen. Heller’s opponent was ensnared in an ethics investigation, which helped.)
A majority of Nevadans live in or around Las Vegas’s Clark County, a metropolitan area pounded by the 2008 recession. More than 400 miles north is the swing county of Washoe, in Reno, where residents are known for disdaining bossy politicians. About 85% of state acreage is owned by the federal government, and the U.S. Navy “Top Gun” fighter school is out in the desert east of Reno.
Mr. Heck, whose district spans the suburbs of Las Vegas, is a brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserve, physician and former business owner. So Democrats are having a rough time making this guy look like an evil Republican: Mr. Heck ran a combat support hospital in Iraq; this week he left the campaign trail to report for reserve duty. Last month in West Virginia a semi-truck smashed into three cars in front of Mr. Heck and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who were driving from an event. The pair pulled over and helped one victim escape the wreckage. Mr. Heck treated others until emergency responders arrived.
Ms. Cortez Masto’s biographical notes are less inspiring. She spent eight years as Nevada’s attorney general before being named executive vice chancellor of the state’s university system, despite never having worked at a college. Her entire campaign is predicated on attaching Mr. Heck to Donald J. Trump, but she and the New Yorker have at least one thing in common: Ms. Cortez Masto has tried to jail a political opponent.
As attorney general in 2008, she indicted then-Lieutenant Governor Brian Krolicki on felony charges of mishandling public money. As it happens, Mr. Krolicki looked likely to challenge Sen. Reid in 2010. A judge threw Ms. Cortez Masto off the case, and it emerged that her husband had planned a fundraiser for Mr. Krolicki’s opponent for lieutenant governor. A district court dismissed the charges against Mr. Krolicki, but the indictment’s damage protected Sen. Reid.
Perhaps as thanks, Mr. Reid selected Ms. Cortez Masto to inherit his seat; it clearly wasn’t because of her policy acumen or political skill. At a debate Friday in Las Vegas, Ms. Cortez Masto unloaded this free association about Mr. Heck’s plan to repeal the mandates and penalties in ObamaCare: “We’re not talking about preventive care anymore. The premiums are going to skyrocket under his plan. That’s the difference here, you know, again, he’s a typical Washington politician.” Voters understand that premiums are already skyrocketing—thanks to ObamaCare. Mr. Heck suggested a tax credit to help Americans buy insurance in the private market. Ms. Cortez Masto proposed nothing.
The question is whether ideas matter in the Year of Trump, and the dispiriting answer is that they don’t. The Cortez Masto campaign is hammering Mr. Heck for initially sticking with Mr. Trump and then walking away. Democrats hope that Trump supporters will refuse to vote for Mr. Heck—and that undecided voters will break against him because of his past endorsement.
Yet one GOP internal poll last week suggested that Mr. Heck’s unendorsement is a wash: Nearly 70% of voters said it made no difference to them. And Mr. Heck has one advantage, which is the enduring loathing of Harry Reid. Less than 40% of Nevadans have a favorable view of their senior senator. Even the most ardent Trumpians may decide that defeating the minority leader’s protégé is the better political revenge.
There is also evidence that Mr. Heck can expand his coalition beyond traditional Republicans. In 2012 he won re-election even as President Obama carried his district, which is 15% Hispanic and 11% Asian. In 2014 Mr. Heck won again—by more than 20 points, while taking nearly 40% of the Hispanic vote.
Ms. Cortez Masto would be the first Latina U.S. senator, but Mr. Heck is campaigning among Hispanics and Asians across the state; he has been endorsed by the leader of the Latin Chamber of Commerce, who in the past supported Sen. Reid. Mr. Heck tells me that he subscribes to the “big tent” view of the GOP.
Many Republicans, he adds, “really don’t do anything in those communities until maybe two months before an election. And then they want to go knock on a door and try to earn a vote. Which, of course, they aren’t successful in doing, because their activity is seen for what it is.” He says GOP candidates who embed in Asian and Hispanic communities early and while in office will learn that many of them “are Republicans—they just don’t realize it yet.”
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are descending on Las Vegas for the final presidential debate on Wednesday, and who knows what fresh Trump news could wreck Republicans’ chances over the next 20 days. But a last word about Nevada’s confounding realities: Mr. Trump is trailing Mrs. Clinton in the polls by less than five points, though the state is home to a large population of Mormons, who aren’t warm to his charms. No one in Nevada seems to care about Mr. Trump’s trade fatwas; the state economy is largely built on services, less so on manufacturing. Mr. Trump’s deportation promises aren’t popular, either.
In other words, Silver State voters defy normal political categories. Maybe they’ll reject the received wisdom that no one can beat Harry Reid.
