“Deborah was really the first woman politician,” Ms. Angle told the newspaper.
Ms. Angle went on to become a pro-gun, anti-tax state legislator from northern Nevada who relished being the antiestablishment outsider. In 2008, for example, she unsuccessfully challenged
a veteran Republican leader from Reno,
State Senator William J. Raggio, in a mean primary. Then, in the Republican primary for the United States Senate in June, she came from far behind to beat several established candidates, including Sue Lowden, a former chairwoman in the state Republican Party.
The hurt feelings created by her audacity have not eased. Mr. Raggio, who is among several prominent state Republicans reluctantly supporting Mr. Reid, recently issued a statement that criticized Ms. Angle’s unwillingness to work with others, even those in her own party, as well as “her extreme positions” on a range of issues.
Some Republicans fear losing such a powerful ally in Washington — no matter that his name is Reid — at a time when Nevada is in precarious economic shape. And Ms. Angle’s relationship with
Republicans in Washington is complicated. She eyes them warily, while they fret that their overt help might offend her Tea Party supporters.
Even so, Ms. Angle is not above accepting the help of
the Republican establishment, whether by receiving significant financial support from, say, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, or holding an event on Friday night with
Senator John McCain of Arizona. She melds the inside with the outside, as when, during a recent appearance with Newt Gingrich, she told her supporters — “Nevada patriots,” she called them — that she wanted to cut any federal spending not provided for in the Constitution.
Still, it seems that no adviser can stop Ms. Angle from being herself, as when she suggested to a rural community that
Islamic religious law had taken hold in Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Tex., which no longer exists. (“I think that’s arguably the craziest thing that she has said, and the most dangerous,” said Jon Ralston, who writes the state’s
most influential political column for The Las Vegas Sun.)
Her candor has caused advisers to suggest that she lie low in these last days, so low that reporters have relied on
the Twitter messages of a Democrat dressed as a chicken to track Ms. Angle’s whereabouts.
But Ms. Angle’s outlandish comments and harsh commercials — juxtaposing menacing, dark-skinned men with anxious white people — have not affected her ability to raise and spend money. From July 1 to Oct. 13, her campaign spent $16.9 million, well more than the $11.2 million spent by the Reid campaign, and her advisers say their ground game is better than people might imagine.
“If you include the enthusiasm advantage that we have, we’re feeling quite good,” said Jordan Gehrke, Ms. Angle’s deputy campaign manager.
In a union hall tucked among subdivisions and wisps of desert, some steelworkers, letter carriers and culinary workers filed in to get their Saturday morning coffee and marching orders before heading out to
canvass for Democrats. Many of them passed a handwritten sign suggesting how to respond to “Reid Distrust.” It advised:
“Acknowledge: ‘I hear you, but despite what the media says ... Harry brings it home for NV.”
Mike Reinecke, the state political director of Labor 2010,
, gave a pep talk and released them with: “See your captains, grab your packets and let’s hit the pavement.”
Union members have knocked on 200,000 doors and made 48,000 calls as part of a one-vote-at-a-time effort by
to counter a general disgust with the establishment — personified these days by Mr. Reid, who might otherwise be seen as
a Horatio Alger character from Nevada: a poor, pugnacious kid from Searchlight who rose to become a power broker able to secure federal money for large, jobs-creating state projects.
Well aware that polls show Ms. Angle slightly ahead, Mr. Reid has been forced to shed his dour Washington persona and stump like a challenger. At a recent rally in Las Vegas’s Chinatown, he posed for photographs for 45 minutes with any supporter who wanted one, then left to shake hands and share hugs at a barbecue with black supporters.
Still, Mr. Reid cannot deny being such a creature of distant Washington that he made the tone-deaf decision years ago to move into the Ritz-Carlton — a name that, in these hard Nevadan times, smacks of exclusive luxury. And for all his kisses and embraces, he still has that undertaker’s parched look; he still has that propensity for clumsy statements, as when he recently suggested that: “But for me, we’d be in a worldwide depression.”
With all this in tow, Richard and Tracy Griffin, a married couple who, as letter carriers, know how to calm barking dogs, headed out into the key Third Congressional District, where the chocolate-brown
Black Mountains loom in the distance, the deep cuts in their sides all that exist of luxury developments never completed.
In recent elections,
the global-positioning systems used by the union door-knockers could not keep up with all the new roads. Now the district is the foreclosure
capital of a state that is the foreclosure capital of the nation — and Mr. Reid needs the votes of its anxious, angry electorate.
“In the beginning it was very tough,” Ms. Griffin said as she went door to door, talking to laid-off workers, cranky retirees, homeowners nervous about the future. “It seems to be changing now, as we get closer to the elections, and the realization of putting her in office is starting to hit people. We have rarely heard a pro-Angle, it’s usually —— ”
“Anti-Reid,” said Mr. Griffin, finishing the thought.