Harry Reid Jumps Out to a Lead Over Sharron Angle in New Nevada Senate Poll
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has regained a solid lead over his Republican opponent Sharron Angle in the Nevada Senate race, a new poll shows, after weeks of relentlessly portraying Angle as too extreme.
Reid leads Angle 44 percent to 37 percent in the new Mason-Dixon poll, conducted for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Ten percent were undecided, and 5 percent chose "none of these candidates."
Polls this year so far have shown the four-term Democrat to be unpopular among Nevada voters, who have had to deal with the nation's highest unemployment rate at 14 percent. Reid has largely trailed Angle in the polls this year, but since the Tea Party-backed Republican won her party's nomination in June, he has launched an aggressive campaign against her conservative views. The two candidates also got in a legal scuffle earlier this month when the Reid campaign relaunched an earlier version of Angle's website to reveal her position on issues like dumping nuclear waste at Yucca mountain and her position on offshore drilling.
Reid's negative ads appear to have worked: Forty-six percent of voters said they have an unfavorable view of Reid, down from 52 percent in June. Meanwhile, Angle's unfavorable rating jumped from 25 percent in June to 43 percent now.
The senator isn't in the clear yet: More than a quarter of nonpartisan swing voters said they were undecided or would vote for neither candidate.
Reid has had the cash to run a much more aggressive campaign than Angle: He has $9 million cash on hand and has raised more than $19 million this election cycle, the Review-Journal reports, while Angle currently has $1.8 million on hand. But this past fundraising quarter was nearly as successful for Angle as it was for Reid: She raised $2.3 million, according to the Review-Journal, while he raised $2.4 million.
"While we were busy raising money, Harry Reid was busy distorting Sharron Angle's record while trying to hide from his own," Angle spokesman Jerry Stacy told the Review-Journal. "Now it's our turn. Now that we have the money, we're going to be able to run a more effective campaign."
