The National Rifle Association dropped $1 million on a new ad hitting Nevada Democratic Senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto as being a repeat of retiring Sen. Harry Reid.
The ad highlights Reid's leadership in the Senate when he was majority leader and his votes for gun control and for judges whom the ad called "anti-gun." The ad then says Reid is trying to force Nevada to elect Cortez Masto, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
"Masto doesn't sound like Harry Reid or look like Harry Reid," the narrator says of the former Nevada attorney general. "But she'd vote like Harry Reid."
Not only is this race important in holding onto the U.S. Senate it’s also a chance to make history:
In a community where Spanish-speaking immigrant parents often take social cues from their bilingual children, Cortez Masto is betting on the kids going home after school and telling the adults seated around the dinner table that they met a woman who could become the first Latinx woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
“If you can’t vote, then you need to get out there and talk to people who can and fight for the issues you believe in,” the candidate told the kids.
That support could help make history, she stressed.
“It should have happened a long time ago,” Cortez Masto told me afterwards, referring to the possibility of becoming the first Latinx woman elected to U.S. Senate. The government needs to better reflect the diversity in the population, she said. “We need more women. We need more diversity,” Cortez Masto insists.
She says one limiting factor is that “women sometimes have the tendency to question whether they really have the ability to jump in” to national politics. She said that’s why encouragement and mentoring efforts are so important.
“We need more women who are mentoring other women, particularly women of color, to say here’s how it can be done,” said Cortez Masto.