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      Why Republicans in Nevada Are Targeting Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s Seat

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      Seizing on signs that suggest Democrats are losing support among Hispanic voters nationwide, Republicans are targeting Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s seat.When Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and her allies unveiled their first paid ads of the 2022 election cycle, the Nevada Democrat’s intended audience was clear: the state’s quarter-of-a-million Latino voters, a critical swing vote.Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of the Senate Democratic super PAC, has a Spanish-language ad called “Siga Protegiendo” — “Keep Protecting” — airing on Telemundo in Las Vegas. It hails Cortez Masto for her work as Nevada attorney general and in the Senate to “fight sex trafficking rings” and “protect our children.”Another ad, titled “Led the Fight,” shows Cortez Masto speaking with Gladis Blanco, a Las Vegas hotel worker.“When Covid first hit, there was a lot to worry about,” Blanco says as she wheels a cart of clean towels down a hallway. “My first priority was keeping my family safe, and I was very worried about making a living.”“In times like that,” she added, “you want someone looking out for you. That’s what Catherine Cortez Masto did.”It’s hardly the first time Nevada Democrats have made the Latino community a priority. In many ways, the state’s Latino voters are the backbone of the political machine built by Harry Reid, the Nevada senator and former majority leader who died in December. Nevada’s economy is powered by tourism, and the state’s powerful service-sector unions are closely intertwined with Latino politics.Allies of Cortez Masto, the first Latina to serve in the U.S. Senate, also insist that it’s not usual to communicate this early in an election cycle with Latino voters. Their experience, they say, shows the importance of making persuasive arguments to the Hispanic community throughout a campaign — and not just toward the end.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.“Nevada’s a state where you need a bilingual strategy,” said Arturo Vargas, the chief executive of the NALEO Educational Fund, a national civic engagement organization. He noted that service-industry workers had suffered heavily during the Great Recession, and again during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when Las Vegas casinos were forced to shut down their operations. He said it made sense for Democrats to speak to their economic concerns.But Republicans now sense an opportunity to peel away many of those votes, and in ways that could have national political reverberations. Some data in the latest Wall Street Journal poll suggest why. According to the poll, Republicans enjoy a 9-point advantage over Democrats in the so-called congressional generic ballot among Latino voters — meaning that, by a 9 percentage-point margin, respondents said they would prefer to elect a Republican to Congress.There are reasons to be skeptical of these specific numbers: The poll sampled only 165 Latino voters, and the margin of error was plus or minus 7.6 percentage points. And Latino voters are hardly a monolith — the anti-socialism messages that have appealed to Cuban Americans in Florida differ widely from the jobs and health care-themed proposals that are effective with Mexican Americans elsewhere.Plenty of other data suggests Democrats ought to be concerned, however. John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who helped to conduct The Journal’s poll and a previous one in December, has called Hispanics “a swing vote that we’re going to have to fight for.”Last year, a study by the Democratically-aligned firm Equis Labs found that Democrats had lost support among key Latino communities during the 2020 election. In 2020, exit-poll data showed that Donald Trump had made gains among Latino voters in Nevada specifically, even as he lost the state in that year’s presidential election. And more recently, our colleague, Jennifer Medina, reported that the shift toward Republicans among Latino voters in South Texas has continued.“It’s not in question whether the Democrats are going to get a majority of the Hispanic vote in 2022 and 2024,” said Fernand R. Amandi, a managing partner of the Miami-based polling firm Bendixen and Amandi. “The problem for Democrats is they keep leaking oil against Republicans, and that is a trend that I think has been borne out over the last five years.”Republican challenger seeks Latino voteAdam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general whose campaign has the backing of both Donald Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, launched “Latinos for Laxalt” in an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThe bigger problem for Cortez Masto may be the low approval ratings of President Biden, which are dragging Democrats down with voters in general.Public polls of the Senate race put her ahead of her likely opponent, Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general and the scion of a Nevada political dynasty. But even in one January survey, showing Cortez Masto up 9 points over Laxalt in a head-to-head matchup, registered voters said they disapproved of Biden’s performance, 52 percent to 41 percent.Last week, the Laxalt campaign — which has the backing of both Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader — launched “Latinos for Laxalt” in an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters. Cortez Masto’s allies have made sure to use Spanish-language criticism by Latinos against Laxalt — what they say is just smart, hard-nosed campaigning.The Democratic Party in Nevada is also suffering from an unusual schism. In effect, the party has split in two between a group aligned with former allies of Reid, the late senator, and a smaller faction led by allies of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive.The state’s top Democrats — including Cortez Masto, Senator Jacky Rosen and Gov. Steve Sisolak — are all working through a new entity called Nevada Democratic Victory, which is coordinating field operations and other statewide campaign spending with the Democratic National Committee in Washington.It’s not completely clear what role the official Nevada State Democratic Party will play in the 2022 midterms. That group, which is led by Judith Whitmer, a Sanders ally, announced it had just half a million dollars on hand at the outset of the campaign season — money that it, nonetheless, said would be used to “mount a huge field campaign.” And while Cortez Masto’s allies insist that everything is running smoothly and that any tensions between the two groups have been ironed out, several also confess to having little idea of what the state party is doing.The Cortez Masto campaign says it is taking no community in the state for granted, and is simply continuing the senator’s longstanding efforts to engage with an important constituency that was hit hard by the economic disruptions of the last few years.“While Senator Cortez Masto continues to build on her strong record of fighting for the Latino community in Nevada, Adam Laxalt continues to show he can’t be trusted,” Josh Marcus-Blank, a spokesman for the Cortez Masto campaign, said in a statement.Vargas, the head of the NALEO Educational Fund, said that mobilizing Latino voters, especially younger voters, will be a critical factor in November. His group has projected that turnout among Latinos will grow by 5.8 percent in Nevada during the 2022 midterms, but he declined to speculate as to which party might benefit.“In the past, we’ve seen Latino voters express greater support for some candidates at the national level, but then it plummeted with other candidates,” he said. “The most recent election did suggest that, but it takes more than one election to determine a trend.”What to read President Biden said the United States would strip Russia of normal trade relations, joining the European Union and other allies in doing so, Ana Swanson reports. Keep up with our live coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.A well-timed congressional endorsement by Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina created some distance from Donald Trump, even as she was embracing him at the same time. Jonathan Weisman reports.The Democratic National Committee is expected to work on the sequence of presidential primary states. Astead W. Herndon reports.viewfinderJudge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, met with Senator Cory Booker at his office in Washington on Tuesday.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesLayers of historyOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Michael A. McCoy captured the photo above on Tuesday, as Senator Cory Booker met with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, in his office. Here’s what McCoy told us about capturing that moment:I was amazed by his book collection (and his Star Wars collection). One book was called Picturing Frederick Douglass, who was the most photographed person in the 19th century. I moved to the right side of Booker’s office, and once I was there, I saw how Jackson and Booker were speaking next to that photograph of Frederick Douglass. There were so many layers on top of layers in that photo. If it weren’t for Frederick Douglass, there would be no Cory Booker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Mike McCoy, or anyone else of color who works in politics. My body, my soul — that picture just caught me.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak Is Accosted by Man Who Threatens to Hang Him

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      The governor was dining with his wife and daughter at a Las Vegas restaurant when a man asked him for a photo together before going into a profanity-laced rant.Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada was accosted at a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas on Sunday by a man who recorded the confrontation in a video in which he threatens to “string you up by a lamppost.”In the video, the man asks Mr. Sisolak, a Democrat, for a photo together. The governor agrees, and the man puts his arm around him before going into a profanity-laced rant and calling the governor a “new world order traitor.”The governor and his wife begin to leave the restaurant, and the man follows him out.“Where’s your security at, punk?” the man says in the video. “We should string you up by a lamppost right now.”The man follows the governor and his wife into the parking lot of the restaurant, accusing Mr. Sisolak of treason and working for China. The governor’s wife, Kathy Sisolak, who was born in Nevada, is of Chinese descent, according to the governor’s website.“You’re lucky I’m a law-abiding citizen,” the man says.The governor and his wife are then joined near their vehicle by their daughter, who had been dining with them, at which point the man in the video leaves them alone.The encounter comes at a time when threats against public officials — both Republicans and Democrats — have surged, according to a recent New York Times review of more than 75 indictments of people charged with threatening lawmakers since 2016.A statement from the governor’s office on Monday said that Mr. Sisolak was “deeply disappointed in how this incident unfolded, particularly with the language used to talk about First Lady Kathy Sisolak’s heritage.”The statement continued: “We can disagree about the issues, but the personal attacks and threats are unwarranted, unwelcome and unbecoming behavior for Nevadans. The governor works on behalf of all Nevadans — even those who disagree with him — and he will continue to do so.”The governor’s office said the confrontation was being investigated, but it did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Mr. Sisolak would press charges.The man, Justin Andersch, held a news conference on Tuesday in Las Vegas, during which he said he would not apologize to the governor.“I will not apologize for speaking out and expressing two years of frustration,” Mr. Andersch said. “I will not apologize for holding public officials responsible for their choices.”Mr. Andersch said he had lost his job and his medical benefits because of Mr. Sisolak’s “desire to follow obediently in line with the other overreaching authoritarian measures” that he said had been implemented by public officials in the interest of public health.“We’ve endured for two full years of authoritarian overreach that is guided by the constant shifting of the scientific goal posts,” Mr. Andersch said. “Our nation has reached a point where many of us feel faceless and nameless against the ruling elite that appear to live by a different set of rules and the rest of us.”Mr. Sisolak recently lifted Nevada’s statewide mask mandate. However, like several other elected officials across the country, he faced backlash from some constituents throughout the pandemic over public health measures such as mask mandates and shutdowns. He is running for re-election this November.Mr. Andersch founded a podcast called “Cannabis and Combat,” which is described on its website as a show that is “shining a light on the darkest corners of modern culture.”“Get comfortable being uncomfortable because that’s what it’s going to take to bring the truth to the masses,” the show’s website says. “Thanks to our amazing supporters, we’re able to fight this battle every day. Evil never takes a day and neither do we.” More

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      ‘Being tough, being a fighter’: Obama and Biden salute Harry Reid at Las Vegas funeral

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      ‘Being tough, being a fighter’: Obama and Biden salute Harry Reid at Las Vegas funeral
      Two presidents, Pelosi and Schumer address service in Nevada
      Former Senate majority leader died at 82 in December
      Obituary: Harry Reid, 1939-2021
      Two presidents and Democratic leaders in Congress joined on Saturday to commemorate Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader who rose from poverty in Nevada to become one of the most powerful US politicians.Capitol attack panel investigates Trump over potential criminal conspiracyRead more“Being tough, being a fighter was once of Harry’s signatures characteristics,” Barack Obama said, at the service in Las Vegas.“He didn’t believe in high-falutin’ theories or rigid ideologies. Harry knew who he was. In a town obsessed with appearance, Harry had a vanity deficit. He didn’t like phonies. He didn’t like grandstanding.”Reid died on 28 December at home in Henderson, Nevada, at 82 and of complications from pancreatic cancer. He served for 34 years in Washington, leading the Senate through the great recession and a Republican resurgence after the 2010 elections.His work to push Obama’s signature healthcare act through the Senate was prominent among memories expressed at his funeral.Obama credits Reid for helping his rapid rise from the Senate to the White House. He delivered the eulogy.“He was more generous to me than I had any right to expect,” he said. “He was one of the first people to encourage me to run for president believing that, despite my youth, despite my an experience, despite fact that I was African American, I can actually win. At the time, that made one of us.”The turnout at the memorial service testified to Reid’s impact on some of the most consequential legislation of the 21st century.President Joe Biden escorted Reid’s widow, Landra Reid, to her seat before an honor guard bore Reid’s flag-draped casket to auditorium’s well.“Harry would always have your back, like the kids I grew up with in Scranton,” Biden said. “His story was unmistakably American. He was proof that there is nothing ordinary about America, and that Americans can do anything given half a chance.”Remembering a Senate colleague, Biden said America had lost “a giant, an honorable, decent, brave, unyielding man”.For Reid, Biden said, politics wasn’t about power for its own sake. It was about “power do right by people”.“That’s why you wanted Harry in your corner,” he said.Biden also worked with Reid for eight years after the senator from Delaware became vice-president to Obama.On Saturday, Biden spoke of his own decision to run for president in 2016, repeating themes outlined when he declared his campaign to oust Donald Trump from the White House and again last week, on the first anniversary of the Capitol attack.“The idea of America itself is under attack,” he said, “from dark and deepening forces. We’re in a battle for the soul America.”The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, also spoke. Schumer described Reid as a “truly honest and original character” and joked about receiving sartorial advice.Reid’s son, Leif, recalled his father’s well-known habit of abruptly ending telephone conversations without saying goodbye, sometimes leaving the other person – whether a powerful politician or a close family member – talking for several minutes before they realized Reid was gone.In a letter to Reid before his death, Obama recalled their close relationship, their different backgrounds and Reid’s climb from an impoverished former gold mining town in the Mojave desert to leadership in Congress.“Not bad for a skinny, poor kid from Searchlight,” Obama wrote. “I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”Trump has birthed a dangerous new ‘Lost Cause’ myth. We must fight it | David BlightRead moreOn Saturday, Obama spoke most clearly of Reid’s contribution to democratic principles. ”He understood we don’t have to see eye to eye on everything in order to live together and be decent toward each other,” he said. “That we can learn to bridge differences of background, race and religion.“He knew that our system of government isn’t based on demanding that everybody think exactly the same way.”In what almost amounted to a requiem for a vanished political era, Obama said Reid presumed to live in a big and diverse country and for people to still work together.“He may have been a proud Democratic partisan,” he said, “and he didn’t shy away from bare-knuckle politics. But what is true is that I never heard Harry speak of politics as if it was some unbending battle between good and evil.”TopicsDemocratsUS politicsUS CongressUS SenateNevadaBarack ObamaJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Harry Reid: Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and Obama attend Nevada memorial

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      Harry Reid: Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and Obama attend Nevada memorial
      Carole King and Brandon Flowers set to perform
      Former Senate leader died in December at 82
      Obituary: Harry Reid, 1939-2021
      The life of the former Senate majority leader Harry Reid was celebrated by two presidents and other Democratic leaders in Las Vegas on Saturday.Strategy shift: Biden confronts Trump head on after year of silent treatmentRead morePresident Joe Biden, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, were scheduled to speak at a memorial for the longtime Senate leader, who died on 28 December at home in Henderson, Nevada, at 82 and of complications from pancreatic cancer.Barack Obama, who credits Reid for his rise to the White House, was scheduled to deliver the eulogy.“The president believes Harry Reid is one of the greatest leaders in Senate history,” Karine Jean-Pierre, a deputy White House press secretary, said on Friday. “So he is traveling to pay his respects to a man who had a profound impact on this nation.”Biden served for two decades with Reid in the Senate and worked with him for eight years as vice-president.Elder M Russell Ballard, a senior apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was also to speak at the 2,000-seat concert hall about Reid’s 60 years in the Mormon faith. Vice-President Kamala Harris also attended.“These are not only some of the most consequential leaders of our time – they are also some of Harry’s best friends,” Reid’s wife of 62 years, Landra Reid, said in a statement announcing plans for the Smith Center for the Performing Arts event.“Harry loved every minute of his decades working with these leaders and the incredible things they accomplished together.”Reid’s daughter and four sons were scheduled to speak too.In a letter to Reid before his death, Obama recalled their close relationship, their different backgrounds and Reid’s climb from an impoverished former gold mining town of Searchlight in the Mojave Desert to leadership in Congress.“Not bad for a skinny, poor kid from Searchlight,” Obama wrote. “I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”Reid spent 34 years in Washington and led the Senate through a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections. He muscled Obama’s signature healthcare act through the Senate.Reid hitchhiked 40 miles to high school and was an amateur boxer before he was elected to the Nevada state Assembly at 28. He had graduated from Utah State University and worked nights as a US Capitol police officer while attending George Washington University Law School in Washington.In 1970, at 30, he was elected state lieutenant governor with a Democratic governor, Mike O’Callaghan. Reid was elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986.Reid built a political machine in Nevada that for years helped Democrats win key elections. When he retired in 2016 after an exercise accident at home left him blind in one eye, he picked a former Nevada attorney general, Catherine Cortez Masto, to replace him.Cortez Masto was the first woman from Nevada and the first Latina ever elected to the US Senate.“Most of all, you’ve been a good friend,” Obama told Reid in his letter. “As different as we are, I think we both saw something of ourselves in each other – a couple of outsiders who had defied the odds and knew how to take a punch and cared about the little guy.”Democrats could still salvage Build Back Better – and perhaps their midterm prospects Read moreThe singer-songwriter and environmentalist Carole King and Brandon Flowers, lead singer of the Las Vegas-based rock band the Killers, were scheduled to perform during the memorial.“The thought of having Carole King performing in Harry’s honor is a tribute truly beyond words,” Landra Reid said.Flowers, a longtime friend, shares the Reids’ faith and has been a headliner at events including a Lake Tahoe Summit that Reid founded in 1997 to draw attention to the ecology of the lake, and the National Clean Energy Summit that Reid helped launch in 2008 in Las Vegas. Among other songs, Flowers was scheduled to sing the Nevada state anthem, Home Means Nevada.Those flying to Las Vegas arrived at the newly renamed Harry Reid international airport. It was formerly named for Pat McCarran, a former Democratic US senator from Nevada who once owned the airfield and whose legacy is clouded by racism and antisemitism.TopicsUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsDemocratsJoe BidenBarack ObamaNancy PelosinewsReuse this content More

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      Harry Reid obituary

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      Harry Reid obituaryVeteran Nevada senator who shepherded and protected Obamacare on its difficult passage into law During a long, combative career in US political life, Harry Reid, who has died aged 82, made his most telling contribution as Democrat majority leader in the Senate. There, in 2010, he pushed through and then vigorously defended President Barack Obama’s groundbreaking healthcare reforms.Given the huge strength of Republican feeling against “Obamacare”, the president needed a streetfighter to drive his measures through to the statute book – and Reid was the man for the job. Quietly spoken but toughened by a hard early life and years spent swimming in the shark-infested waters of Nevada politics, he fought through the deeply polarised atmosphere that surrounded Obama’s health reforms to shepherd the Affordable Care Act through the Democrat-controlled Senate.Just as importantly, he defended that landmark piece of legislation – which aimed to extend health insurance to more than 30 million uninsured people – against repeated attempts at derailment by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. In particular, he orchestrated Senate resistance to House amendments that would have emasculated Obamacare, and in 2013 brokered a deal that ended a partial government shutdown engineered by Republicans in protest at the legislation. Obamacare aside, in Washington Reid was a centrist Democrat, and for the liberal wing of the party far less dependable than his firebrand counterpart in the House, Nancy Pelosi. He was opposed to abortion, supported the 1991 Gulf war, and at first backed George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, although in 2007 he came out against the second conflict there. He also raised more than a few hackles when he observed that Obama had been helped in his presidential campaign because he was “light-skinned”.But Reid survived that problem, as he survived so many others on the road to his elevated position in the Senate, and Obama acknowledged the early encouragement that Reid had given to his presidential aspirations. To the Democrats, he was a usefully blunt, outspoken scrapper who was happy to tackle the Republicans head on – and was prepared to publicly call Bush a “liar” and a “loser”. Although a pragmatist, he would not cut deals with the Republican leadership on what he saw as vital issues. “I know my limitations,” he once said. “I haven’t gotten where I am by my good looks, my aesthetic ability, my great brain or my oratorical skills.” Reid’s strengths were his sheer energy and political shrewdness, honed during a long rise to the top from difficult beginnings. He was born in Searchlight, Nevada, a tiny, searingly hot former gold-mining town in the Mojave desert, in a shack that had no toilet or hot water. Until the 1950s, Searchlight was best known for a notorious brothel called the El Rey, where it was said that Reid’s mother, Inez (nee Jaynes), did the laundry. His father, Harry Sr, was a miner and an alcoholic; in 1972 he shot himself.There was no high school in Searchlight, so Reid had to stay with relatives 40 miles away in Henderson, outside Las Vegas, where he went to high school at Basic Academy. His lucky break came there in the burly shape of Mike O’Callaghan, the school’s football and boxing coach. Young Reid was tough: he boxed as a middleweight and played on the football team. “I’d rather dance than fight, but I know how to fight,” he said later.An ambitious young man, he graduated from Utah State University, where he became a Mormon. He went to Washington DC and found a job with the US Capitol police, who are charged with protecting Congress, while he worked for a law degree at George Washington University. From there he returned to Nevada to become a prosecutor and, shortly after his father’s suicide, married Landra Gould, the daughter of Jewish immigrants.He soon became involved in Democratic politics, first in Henderson and then statewide. By 1968 he was a member of the state assembly and in 1970 was asked by his high school mentor, O’Callaghan, to run with him. O’Callaghan was elected governor of the state and Reid became his lieutenant governor.In 1974 he ran for the Senate, but was narrowly beaten by Ronald Reagan’s friend Paul Laxalt. In 1975 he stood, again unsuccessfully, for mayor of Las Vegas, a city dominated by gambling, tourism and entertainment.From 1977 to 1981 he was chair of the Nevada Gaming Commission, a job that was to be the making of him. When he was offered a bribe of $12,000 by Jack Gordon, the Las Vegas gambling and prostitution operator, Reid tipped off the FBI. At the moment when Gordon produced the money, FBI agents rushed in; he was sentenced to six months in prison. In 1981, a bomb was found under Reid’s car, which he always blamed on Gordon’s heavies. After that, the more respectable elements of the US gambling industry supported Reid, although his opponents repeatedly tried to tar him with suggestions of ethical violations.In 1982 he was elected to the House of Representatives from the Las Vegas district, and served there until 1986, when he entered the Senate for the first time. He was re-elected easily in 1992, but six years later was nearly beaten in a high-spending campaign that his Republican opponent, John Ensign, a man with casino connections, freely conceded was “nasty”. Nonetheless, Reid and Ensign eventually became good friends as Nevada’s two senators.By 2004, when Reid’s time for re-election came around again, Nevada’s population had grown so fast that many of his constituents had never heard of their senior senator. So Reid raised a lot of money for a campaign to make himself known. He became the leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate in 2005 after Tom Daschle failed to be re-elected, and after the 2006 election – when the Democrats benefited from the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – he was confirmed as the Democrats’ majority leader, serving in that role until 2015.He retired from the Senate as minority leader by not seeking re-election in 2016, following injuries in an accident with exercise equipment in his home. In 2018 he revealed that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.Reid was known in Washington for his terse manner. In a tribute to him in 2019, Obama joked: “Even when I was president, he would hang up on me.” Shortly before his death, Las Vegas’s airport was renamed after him.Reid is survived by Landra and by their four sons and one daughter. Harry Mason Reid, politician, born 2 December 1939; died 28 December 2021TopicsUS politicsNevadaUS SenateUS healthcareBarack ObamaobituariesReuse this content More

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      Harry Reid, who led Senate Democrats for 12 years, dies at 82

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      Harry Reid, who led Senate Democrats for 12 years, dies at 82Nevada senator helped to pass Obama’s Affordable Care ActReid called Trump ‘the worst president we’ve ever had’ Harry Reid, who emerged from the unforgiving political landscape of Las Vegas, Nevada, to lead the Senate Democrats for 12 turbulent years, died on Tuesday at age 82. Reid died Tuesday, “peacefully” and surrounded by friends “following a courageous, four-year battle with pancreatic cancer,” Landra Reid said of her husband.Tributes for the late Senator poured in after the news of his death, led by president Joe Biden, who called him a “great American”.A son of Searchlight, Nevada, Harry never forgot his humble roots. A boxer, he never gave up a fight. A great American, he looked at challenges and believed it was within our capacity to do good — to do right.May God bless Harry Reid, a dear friend and a giant of our history.— President Biden (@POTUS) December 29, 2021
      The Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called Reid “one of the most amazing individuals I’ve ever met”.“He was tough-as-nails strong, but caring and compassionate, and always went out of his way quietly to help people who needed help,” Schumer said in a statement.Steve Sisolak, the governor of Nevada, said that calling Reid “a giant” failed to “fully encapsulate all he accomplished on behalf of the state of Nevada and for Nevada families. There will never be another leader quite like Senator Reid.”Ex-Senate majority leader Harry Reid on UFOs: ‘We’re at the infancy of it’Read moreFormer president Barack Obama said he’d written a letter to Reid at the request of his wife, Landra, near the end of Reid’s life. He posted the letter on Twitter, which read: “You were a great leader in the Senate, and early on you were more generous to me than I had any right to expect. I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”“Most of all, you’ve been a good friend,” he added.When Harry Reid was nearing the end, his wife Landra asked some of us to share letters that she could read to him. In lieu of a statement, here’s what I wrote to my friend: pic.twitter.com/o6Ll6rzpAX— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 29, 2021
      Reid’s reputation as a quiet leader with a sometimes quick temper was reinforced by decades of hard-fought legislative wins, including the passage of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, an economic stimulus package following the 2007-08 recession and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.But his policy legacy was marred in some eyes by his push in 2013 to alter Senate rules to make it easier to confirm Obama’s judicial nominees, a move that paved the way for Donald Trump’s controversial supreme court nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority.Reid defended the tactic to the end.“They can say what they want,” he told the New York Times Magazine in December. “We had over 100 judges that we couldn’t get approved, so I had no choice. Either Obama’s presidency would be a joke or Obama’s presidency would be one of fruition.”Reid’s sometimes defiant bluntness was forged by a childhood in Searchlight, Nevada, a desert crossroads where his father was a gold miner and his mother did laundry for the brothels. The family home had no indoor toilet, hot water or telephone and the town had no high school, so Reid boarded with relatives 50 miles away.Reid and his wife, Landra, met as students at Utah State University, where they converted to Mormonism. In the 1960s the couple moved to Washington DC, where Reid enrolled at George Washington University law school and worked six days a week on the police force patrolling the Capitol, where he would later climb the heights of political power.First, the amateur boxer had to come up through the harsh terrain of Nevada politics, defined by Las Vegas, the state’s casino interests and the presence of organized crime.At the end of her husband’s four-year stint as Nevada gaming commissioner in 1981, Landra Reid found an explosive device in the family station wagon. As Senate majority leader decades later, his chief of staff told the New Yorker, Reid still weighed conflicts by reflecting: “No one is going to kill me over this.”Multiple Republicans bore scars from tangling with Reid. During the 2012 presidential race between Obama and Mitt Romney, Reid announced on the floor of the Senate that Romney had not paid taxes in 10 years: an unfounded and ultimately debunked claim spurred by Romney’s refusal to release a full set of tax returns.Asked if he regretted the charge, Reid said: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”Trump found his way into a war of insults with Reid after the New York developer, then a candidate, criticized Hillary Clinton’s health. Reid replied that Trump was in no position to criticize because he “is 70 years old, he’s not slim and trim, he brags about eating fast food every day”. Trump then mocked Reid for an exercise accident a year earlier that had blinded the senator in one eye.In December, Reid called Trump “amoral” and “the worst president we’ve ever had”.Trump had reason to resent Reid. So well-oiled was Reid’s political machine in Nevada that the state bucked national demographic trends in 2016 to reject Trump. In 2018, voters threw out incumbent Republican senator Dean Heller.Efficacy behind the scenes became a trademark for Reid, who won loyalty from colleagues for his willingness to bestow credit and cede the limelight.“I know my limitations,” Reid told the New Yorker in 2005, the year he took leadership of the Democrats in the Senate. “I haven’t gotten where I am by my good looks, my athletic ability, my great brain, my oratorical skills.”Reid is survived by his wife, five children and 19 grandchildren. Asked in March last year what he thought of Washington since his retirement, Reid shrugged: “I just shake my head is all I can do.”Reid in May 2018 revealed he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment.Less than two weeks ago, officials and one of his sons, Rory Reid, marked the renaming of the busy Las Vegas airport as Harry Reid international airport.Agencies contributed reportingTopicsNevadaDemocratsUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Nevada Man Is Charged With Voting Using His Dead Wife’s Ballot

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      Donald Kirk Hartle, a Republican, had claimed that someone voted in the 2020 election by using the mail-in ballot of his wife, who died in 2017. He now faces two counts of voter fraud.Speaking to a Las Vegas news station in November, Donald Kirk Hartle described being “surprised” by the possibility that someone had stolen his dead wife’s mail-in ballot and used it to vote in the 2020 election. “That is pretty sickening to me, to be honest with you,” he told KLAS-TV.But this week, the Nevada attorney general filed two charges of voter fraud against Mr. Hartle, 55, claiming that he was the one who forged his wife’s signature to vote with her ballot.“Voter fraud is rare, but when it happens it undercuts trust in our election system and will not be tolerated by my office,” the attorney general, Aaron D. Ford, said in a statement on Thursday. “I want to stress that our office will pursue any credible allegations of voter fraud and will work to bring any offenders to justice.”The announcement from Mr. Ford’s office comes months after waves of Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, falsely asserted that the 2020 election had been tainted by widespread voter fraud, including in Nevada, a state that Mr. Trump lost.Mr. Hartle, a registered Republican, was charged with voting using the name of another person and voting more than once in the same election, the attorney general’s office said in the statement. Each charge carries a prison sentence of up to four years and a fine of up to $5,000, the prosecutors said.The criminal complaint did not explain how prosecutors came to the conclusion that Mr. Hartle had committed voter fraud. Questions sent to the office of Mr. Ford, a Democrat elected to the position in 2018, were not immediately responded to on Saturday.David Chesnoff, a lawyer for Mr. Hartle, said in a statement that his client “looks forward to responding to the allegations in court.” Mr. Hartle is scheduled to appear in the Las Vegas Township Justice Court on Nov. 18.The Nevada Republican Party had cited Mr. Hartle’s story as evidence of voting irregularities on Twitter last year, saying that Mr. Hartle “was surprised to find that his late wife Rosemarie, a Republican, cast a ballot in this years election despite having passed away” in 2017.Since the announcement of the charges against Mr. Hartle, however, the party has not corrected the record, said Callum Ingram, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.“The state Republican Party has been pretty quiet certainly on this case since the narrative got flipped on its head,” Dr. Ingram said in an interview on Saturday.Mr. Hartle is the chief financial officer and treasurer of Ahern Rentals, according to his LinkedIn profile. The business rents out construction equipment and is a part of the Ahern Family of Companies. One of its businesses, Xtreme Manufacturing, was fined $3,000 in 2020 for hosting a Trump rally that did not comply with the state’s Covid regulations at the time, said Kathleen Richards, a spokeswoman for the city of Henderson, Nev.Nevada was one of several states in November that was dealing with dubious claims of voter fraud after the presidential election.The Nevada secretary of state, Barbara K. Cegavske, said in a document posted in December titled “Facts vs. Myths” that there was no evidence of large-scale voter fraud in the state.Ms. Cegavske’s office led the investigation of Mr. Hartle’s case.“Our office takes voter fraud very seriously,” Ms. Cegavske said in the statement released by Mr. Ford’s office. “Our securities division worked hard to bring this case to a close.”Conservative news outlets spread Mr. Hartle’s story. After the state Republican Party highlighted the case on Twitter, the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza discussed the case on his show. Then the Fox News host Tucker Carlson promoted Mr. Hartle’s account, saying: “We don’t know who did this. We wish we did, because it’s fraud.”For many voters in the state, Dr. Ingram said, proving that widespread voter fraud did not occur “is something that no amount of counterevidence, no amount of effort to prove folks wrong with facts or reason, is ever going to touch because it’s an unquestionable article of faith.” More

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      Testimony at Lev Parnas Trial Offers Peek at His Place in Trump’s Orbit

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      Among other things, Adam Laxalt, a U.S. Senate candidate in Nevada, described his suspicions about a donation to his run for governor in 2018.Adam Laxalt was a Republican candidate for governor of Nevada in 2018 when he bumped into Rudolph W. Giuliani in a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.Mr. Laxalt, who, like Mr. Giuliani, was a staunch supporter of President Donald J. Trump, accompanied Mr. Giuliani to a balcony, and told him that the governor’s race was “very close.”Among a group smoking cigars and having drinks, someone Mr. Laxalt did not know spoke up: It was Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American businessman.“He immediately offered to help my campaign,” Mr. Laxalt said on Friday while testifying as a prosecution witness at Mr. Parnas’s corruption trial in federal court in Manhattan. “He offered to throw a fund-raiser.”Mr. Parnas is charged with conspiring to make campaign contributions by a foreign national and in the name of a person other than himself. Among the contributions at issue is one made in the maximum amount, $2,700, to Mr. Laxalt in 2018. An indictment says Mr. Parnas made the contribution using a credit card belonging to a business partner, Igor Fruman, and another person.Later, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman became known for helping Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, as he oversaw an effort in Ukraine to uncover damaging information about Joe Biden, at the time a leading Democratic presidential candidate who went on to beat Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.Mr. Laxalt’s testimony illustrated how thoroughly Mr. Parnas appeared to have installed himself in Mr. Trump’s orbit. Mr. Laxalt was a co-chair of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign in Nevada and he supported an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss there.The interactions between Mr. Laxalt, who is currently running for a U.S. Senate seat in Nevada, and Mr. Parnas also provided a glimpse into the life of a political candidate eager to keep money flowing to his campaign.Although Mr. Laxalt is well known in Nevada — his grandfather was Paul Laxalt, a U.S. senator from the state — he testified that his race against Steve Sisolak, the Democrat who ultimately prevailed, was a “long, grueling, very tense” experience.The day after the meeting at the Trump hotel, Mr. Laxalt testified that he and Mr. Parnas exchanged text messages and that he believed some of them were related to plans to attend a rally that was to include Mike Pence, the vice president at the time.The text exchanges continued for weeks. A pattern emerged, in which Mr. Laxalt asked Mr. Parnas about donations, and Mr. Parnas provided responses that were short on commitment.Mr. Laxalt’s apparent friendliness in his messages to Mr. Parnas may have been partly professional. On cross-examination, he acknowledged that he had referred to Mr. Parnas as “a clownish guy with a gold chain,” and wondered whether he was an oddball from Brooklyn with a home in Florida who was more interested in taking photos with candidates than in writing checks to them.“Are you going to deliver on this fund-raiser,” Mr. Laxalt texted Mr. Parnas at one point. Mr. Parnas suggested some possible dates. But they passed without the event taking place.Mr. Laxalt testified that he encountered Mr. Parnas at a rally for Mr. Trump in Elko, Nev. They also arranged to have dinner, along with a few others, at a restaurant in Las Vegas that Mr. Laxalt described in a text message to Mr. Parnas as “an old mob joint.” (Mr. Parnas responded “love it” and included a thumb’s up emoji.)At times, the two exchanged comments about the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a good friend of Mr. Laxalt’s whom Mr. Parnas was also supporting as he ran for governor of Florida.As the election neared, Mr. Laxalt kept inquiring about money. Mr. Parnas said he would bring Mr. Giuliani to Nevada to barnstorm on Mr. Laxalt’s behalf. Mr. Parnas also asked Mr. Laxalt whether he would like help in arranging a robocall.Eventually, Mr. Parnas told Mr. Laxalt by text that he could arrange for donations totaling $20,000 from three people. Mr. Laxalt was appreciative but he asked whether Mr. Parnas himself was going to donate.“I can’t,” Mr. Parnas replied, citing a Federal Election Commission matter, an apparent reference to a complaint that a $325,000 donation to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, America First Action, by an energy company started by Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas had broken the law.“My attorney won’t allow it,” Mr. Parnas wrote to Mr. Laxalt, adding that he had tried to get his wife to donate but that his lawyer had also vetoed that idea.A short time later, on Nov. 1, 2018, less than a week before Election Day, Mr. Laxalt’s campaign received a $10,000 donation from Mr. Fruman.Mr. Laxalt said during his testimony on Friday that he was suspicious of the donation and, on the “advice of counsel,” had decided to send a check in that amount to the U.S. Treasury. More