Among politicos, the “Reid Machine” is the stuff of legend. In the 2002 midterms, Nevada Republicans carried all six constitutional offices in Carson City, from governor on down. Two years later, Reid, then the Senate majority whip, won reelection against a weak opponent — yet on the same day Nevada helped propel George W. Bush to a second term in the White House. It was the fourth straight cycle in which Democrats had struggled, and Reid, mulling the results at home in Searchlight, Nev., decided to shake things up.
For years, volunteers had largely run the skeletal organization known as the Nevada Democratic Party. There were no precinct captains and no real voter files. To mobilize rank-and-file Democrats, the party had relied instead on organized labor — and the quadrennial presidential campaigns.
Reid demanded a new approach. To that end, he recruited Rebecca Lambe, a Missouri-based strategist, to “professionalize” the state party. Lambe started in 2003, but her efforts ramped up after 2004. She hired paid staffers (including a communications director). She cast a wider voter net, targeting the state’s growing Latino and Asian immigrant communities. She built a permanent, web-based voter file. She trained canvassers to upload voter data from the field, via their mobile devices. She emphasized the importance of electing Democrats to local, nonpartisan offices, such as city councils and county commissions. Lambe was also the first to pitch Reid on securing an early presidential caucus for Nevada, and she pushed to hold presidential debates in the state — reforms that eventually helped the party raise millions of dollars and attract thousands of new voters. And later, as Reid’s chief political strategist, she quietly helped steer potential Democratic candidates into specific races and shape their campaign teams.
It didn’t take long for Lambe’s work to pay off. In 2006, Democrats won back four of Nevada’s six constitutional offices. In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain there by nearly 13 percentage points, while Democrats flipped the Third Congressional District and regained control of the state senate. Most impressive, however, is what happened in 2010 and 2016, two disastrous years for Democrats nationally. In 2010, even as the GOP’s tea party wave flipped six Senate seats and 63 House seats — and even as the final polls showed Republican challenger Sharron Angle leading by nearly 3 percentage points — Reid managed to win reelection by registering thousands of new Latino voters and winning two-thirds of their votes on Election Day. Similarly, in 2016, Democrats banked tens of thousands of early Latino votes and managed to flip the state legislature, elect two new Democrats to Congress, send the first Latina, Catherine Cortez Masto, to the Senate and secure the state for Hillary Clinton as a result — at the same time Trump and the GOP were winning traditionally Democratic territory elsewhere.
“We outperformed the national environment by small margins — 1, 2, 3 percentage points,” says Stewart Boss, who served as communications director for the state party in 2016 and now plays the same role on Rosen’s campaign. “That’s what folks in this business call a ‘field margin’ — when the ground game makes the difference in whether you win or lose.”
Lambe and others were instrumental in these success stories. But it was Reid — the machine’s boss, so to speak — who led the charge. Fully aware of his clout in Washington and back home, Reid cultivated the loyalty of the casino industry and the powerful Culinary Workers Union by pushing their favored policies on Capitol Hill and funneling development money to Las Vegas. In 2016, he personally called casino execs and secured paid leave for 300 culinary workers to knock on 350,000 doors, talk to over 75,000 voters, and ultimately deliver 54,000 early votes. For decades, he strengthened his ties to Nevada’s Latino community, which now represents almost 30 percent of the state’s population, by advocating for the DREAM Act and broader immigration reform — a major factor in the huge margins by which Nevada Latinos now routinely favor Democratic candidates. And Reid was also known to steer big donors toward his favored candidates — and to avoid divisive primaries by talking others out of the running.