In the spring of 2010, an upstart political movement called the Tea Party held a rally dubbed the “Showdown in Searchlight.” An estimated 9,000 people trekked to a secluded desert area about two miles outside the old mining town, 50 miles south of Las Vegas.
It was a terrible location for a gathering of that size, as Searchlight is a tiny burg with few services. But the location was symbolically important to the Tea Partiers, because it was the hometown of one of their most hated foes—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Along with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Reid was regarded as a poster boy for everything that was wrong with Washington. Amid the dusty assemblage of the “Don’t Tread on Me” faithful, a man held a carefully crafted sign that read, “The Plague: Obama, Reid, Pelosi,” with the names of the Democratic leaders surrounding a skull-and-crossbones symbol. Another sign festooned a port-a-potty: “Harry Reid Donation Center.”
The “Showdown in Searchlight” occurred at a time when Reid was beginning a re-election bid for a fifth term, and it wasn’t looking good for him. His poll numbers were down, and a couple of potential Republican challengers looked like they could beat him.
But in the frenzy of the Tea Party movement, Nevada Republicans chose a little-known, far-right candidate in the primary, Sharron Angle. The Reid campaign celebrated.
Although Angle wasn’t a strong candidate, polls suggested she could beat Reid. Nate Silver’s calculations predicted his ouster. But Nevada Republicans had no answer for Reid’s ground game—his statewide political organization that concentrated on voter registration and turnout. Reid’s strategy was to win big in Clark County and Washoe County. In the 15 rural counties, he knew he couldn’t win, but he did everything he could to reduce the margins.
By 9:45 p.m. on election night, it was over. Major news outlets called the race for Reid. He won comfortably by 6 percentage points.
Reid’s victory contrasted with a national mid-term election that did not go well for the Democrats. They ceded control of the House of Representatives and lost six Senate seats, although they kept the upper chamber.
Although Reid had once again displayed his political acumen, the 2010 election foreshadowed a dramatic shift in Nevada politics. By 2014, Republicans controlled all of the major state offices in Nevada, and Democrats became the minority party in the U.S. Senate. Reid’s political domination—in Nevada and Washington—was coming to an end. He retired in 2017.
It had been quite a run for the “son of Searchlight,” who grew up in a shack made of railroad ties and chicken wire. Who attended a school with two classrooms. Who hitchhiked 40 miles to the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson to attend high school.
Reid blossomed at Basic High. He was elected student body president, and he played football and baseball. “Harry was not the biggest or the fastest player,” recalled the late Gov. O’Callaghan, one of Reid’s teachers, “but he displayed grit, eagerness, and a fierce competitive spirit that more than made up for his physical limitations.” Reid also took up boxing, and under O’Callaghan’s tutelage fought in the Golden Gloves.
The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight (Simon & Schuster, 2026), an excellent new biography by veteran Las Vegas journalist Jon Ralston, draws a connection between Reid’s determination to escape his hardscrabble origins and his relentless pursuit of legislative progress in Nevada and Washington, D.C.
“Reid’s career can be seen like the fifteen marathons he ran—an endurance test where he worked harder and stayed longer than anyone else, always playing the long game,” Ralston writes.
Nearly every journalist assigned to write a profile of Reid could not resist his origin story. But it’s worth reprising here to reacquaint ourselves with a person who, against incredible odds, climbed to the highest ranks of American politics and achieved important things.
Reid’s tenure in politics was almost derailed more than once in the years before his first congressional election. After the young trial attorney enjoyed a productive freshman term in the Nevada Assembly and won election as the state’s lieutenant governor, he took a bold leap in 1974, challenging popular Nevada Republican Paul Laxalt in a U.S. Senate race. The contest was closer than it deserved to be, with Reid losing by only 612 votes.
Rather than lying low for a while and contemplating his next move, Reid jumped into an ill-conceived campaign for Las Vegas mayor. He lost again. “Many thought Election Day 1975 signaled the end of Harry Reid’s political career,” Ralston writes.
But Reid’s old friend and mentor O’Callaghan asked him to chair the Nevada Gaming Commission, a high-profile post at a time when the state was ramping up efforts to pry organized crime out of the casino industry. His Gaming Commission tenure was tumultuous—so much so that there’s a character inspired by him in the Martin Scorsese film Casino—and it almost sunk him for good. FBI wiretaps recorded a mobster talking about a Nevada politician he called “Mr. Clean” or “Clean-Face.” He was talking about Reid, the nickname suggesting a naïve young man who would not be suspected of underworld entanglements.
As Reid denied wrongdoing, a thorough state investigation ensued. In the end, he was cleared, opening the door for a second life in elective politics. Wasting no time, Reid ran for Congress and won in 1982. He would remain in Washington’s corridors of power for the next 34 years.
In the late ’90s, after a close call in his re-election bid against John Ensign, Reid crafted the elements of a political strategy that became known in Nevada as the “Reid Machine.” He had a knack for cultivating personal relationships that he could depend on to deliver a steady stream of campaign contributions and votes. He even wheedled a modest campaign contribution out of New York businessman Donald Trump.
He also surrounded himself with a talented team of aides—mostly women—who helped him develop a formula founded on voter registration and turnout. Reid took over the state’s frail Democratic Party and turned it into a juggernaut that appealed to new constituencies.
“Reid presciently saw how decisive the Latino vote could be—for him and for other statewide contenders, including presidential nominees,” Ralston writes.
Reid was the ultimate pragmatist, managing to become a darling of environmentalists for his support of wilderness while at the same time staunchly defending the mining industry. He was opposed to abortion, but he supported a woman’s right to choose. He was comfortable alienating some voters—he was genuinely despised in vast stretches of rural Nevada—as long as he still had enough support to win on Election Day.
In this way, Reid became Nevada’s political godfather, grooming candidates and directing money and people to the party’s best advantage. The Reid Machine produced winners at every level of the Nevada ballot. It played a key role in national politics as well. Reid’s voter registration and turnout efforts transformed Nevada into a swing state with an early spot on the presidential nominating calendar, prompting candidates to schedule campaign rallies in Las Vegas, Reno and rural towns that had never seen a national politician before. Nevada became a “reliably blue state,” as Ralston puts it, favoring Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over the Republicans who traditionally carried Western states.
His influence in Nevada paled in comparison with what he achieved in Washington. From his earliest days in D.C., Reid built relationships that would serve him well as he climbed the ladder from committee chairman to whip to minority leader to, in 2007, majority leader. One of his earliest friends and mentors was Robert Byrd, the influential West Virginia senator. The two men bonded over their shared experience of “desperate poverty,” Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski recalls in The Game Changer. “They really liked the night school crowd over the prep school crowd.”
Ralston recounts multiple anecdotes about Reid’s relentless drive to pass or block legislation, but few can compare with the 2009 battle over the Affordable Care Act. Overcoming a seemingly endless string of obstacles, Reid wheeled and dealed to secure the 60 votes needed for Senate passage on Christmas Eve 2009. When President Obama signed the bill the following March, he lavished praise upon Reid for making it happen.
Reid’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was always a subject of curiosity, if not skepticism, during his political career. Ralston, with access to Reid and his wife, Landra, provides a sensitive portrait of the couple’s decision to join the church, in 1960, when he was an undergraduate in Logan, Utah. Harry and Landra were influenced by the example of a neighbor family that regularly sat down together for dinner and started with a prayer. Reid never had such an experience in his troubled youth and wanted it for his family. Although Reid did not often speak of his faith, Ralston says he attended church regularly and even taught Sunday school.
Politically, Reid’s LDS membership proved to be of mixed benefit. While he had church members who helped him with his campaigns, a large majority of the faith’s rank and file were very conservative and could not support him. Further hampering his cause, Reid was not born into the faith. He was not connected to any of the socially influential Mormon families with ancestry dating to the church’s founding.
Considering all that Reid accomplished, it would be easy for a biographer to gloss over his flaws and failures. Ralston, who as a political reporter crossed swords with Reid numerous times, does not shy from pointing out the late senator’s missteps and errors in judgment. Reid generated bipartisan scorn when he publicly called President George W. Bush a “loser.” His reference to Obama having “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one” fueled a backlash that Reid seemed to have trouble understanding. (Reid and Obama maintained a strong relationship before and after the comment was published.)
Reid also tarnished his legacy when he spread rumors about political rivals that he had no evidence to support. The most egregious example was his repeated assertion that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had not paid taxes for 10 years. Reid defended this smear campaign on the indefensible grounds that it worked. It did: Romney lost. But Reid’s derisive name-calling prefigured the steady stream of verbal abuse and lies that are the bedrock of the MAGA movement.
But it is a measure of Reid’s temperament that he decided, after years of obstinance, to embrace Ralston’s desire to write his biography. As Nevada’s most prominent political commentator, in print and on television, Ralston had skewered Reid on numerous occasions. In researching the book, Ralston found correspondence showing that Reid had gotten him fired from the local NBC affiliates.
Reid finally agreed to cooperate with Ralston, participating in 24 hour-long Zoom interviews in the months before his death. Reid knew he wouldn’t like everything Ralston would write, but he recognized the book would benefit from the memories and insights that only he could provide.
Remnants of the Reid Machine continue to play a role in Nevada politics, but without the man himself anointing candidates and pulling strings, the party seems to have lost some of its mojo. After Reid’s passing in 2021, Nevada’s presidential majority turned red again.
In his introduction to Reid’s book about his hometown of Searchlight, published in 1998, O’Callaghan promises that “in the future, there will be biographies written about Harry Reid, and he will be considered one of the pivotal political forces in Nevada history.” O’Callaghan was right about the biographies, but his prediction about Reid’s legacy understates the case.
“What Reid cared about was the acquisition of power and using it to the ends he saw were justified—for his country, his state, his family, his friends,” Ralston writes. In this sense, Reid was never a “Clean-Face,” as the mobsters described him. He could be as ruthless as they were in the pursuit of his political goals, a trait sorely lacking in his party today.
Geoff Schumacher is the author of Sun, Sin & Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas.