Nevada's U.S. Senate Race Looks Wide Open-- Party Establishment Picks May Fail To Make The Final Ballot

The ad above by Save My Care started running yesterday in Nevada, where panic-stricken serial flip flopper Dean Heller is widely seen as the most vulnerable Senate incumbent up for reelection in 2018. After vowing to Nevadans to not help GOP extremists repeal Obamacare he was threatened by Trump and immediately buckled and voted against Nevadans. And now he's back with another bill he helped write that will rip healthcare away from even more Americans than the last one! Below is the ad a Trump SuperPAC, with money raised by Mike Pence, used as an effective cudgel to beat up Heller and force him to switch his postion from the pro-healthcare position that the popular Republican governor of Nevada, Brian Sandoval, embraces to flat-out a flat-out anti-healthcare stand that Nevadans hate:



Last year Clinton beat Trump in Nevada, 539,260 (47.92%) to 512,058 (45.50%). She won big in Clark County (Vegas)-- 52.43% to 41.72%-- and narrowly in Washow County (Reno)-- 46.39% to 45.14%-- enough to take the state's 6 electoral votes. On the same day Catherine Cortez Masto beat Republican Joe Heck for the U.S. Senate seat, also narrowly-- 521,994 (47.1%) to 495,079 (44.7%). Nevada is a swing state trending blue.

Schumer and Harry Reid have selected the worst possible candidate to run against Heller, conservative and utterly undistinguished and unaccomplished, Republican-lite freshman Jacky Rosen. Rosen has already earned one of the lowest "F" scores of any Democrat in Congress from ProgressivePunch, normally voting with the Blue Dogs on every important issue. In July Stanley Paher wrote in the Reno Gazette-Journal that it would be very unwise for the Democrats to run her. "For more than a half century," he wrote, "successful Nevada politicians have ascended from lower offices upwards into the U.S. Senate. These include Paul Laxalt, Harry Reid, Dick Bryan and Dean Heller. In contrast, a non-political background as touted by Rosen seldom translates into electoral success. How does synagogual leadership, computer programming skills, and familial experience translate into votes? Her lone electoral win last November was a 1% squeaker against a very weak Republican who had lost 5 elections over the past 8 years... The Rosen forces will point to Las Vegas’ large Democratic registration as an advantage for her statewide bid. But tell that to the bushel full of Nevada Democrats who lost in the 2014 midterm elections up and down ballot, as well as in 2010 when Joe Heck bested incumbent Las Vegas Congresswoman Dina Titus and Republicans Krolicki and Sandoval won in landslides for Nevada’s top two offices."

Rosen beat Danny Tarkanian, a crackpot Trumpist, for the open congressional seat last year, 146,869 (47.2%) to 142,926 (46%). The southern Clark County district, basically everything south of the airport, including Henderson and Boulder City, right down to the tip of the state where California, Arizona and Nevada meet in the Mohave Valley. Obama won the district both times but Hillary lost it to Trump 47.5% to 46.5%. Rosen's brief tenure in Congress has shown her to be, basically, everything that voters in NV-03 didn't like about Clinton. She's a disaster as a candidate and Reid and Schumer-- and EMILY's Lidt, of course-- stumbled right into it.

Meanwhile the Trumpist, Tarkanian, is primarying Heller with the support for Bannon and the rest of the whole nationalist fringe of the GOP. The most recent poll of Nevada Republicans-- which shows Trump with an 80% approval rating and Heller with a 34% approval-- indicates that Tarkanian would beat him 39-31% if the primary were held today.

Democrats do have a choice in their own primary as well. If they want to stand up to the party bosses-- Reid and Schumer-- they can vote for a Berniecrat in the race, Jesse Sbaih, someone who Reid rejected as a Democratic candidate last year because of his Muslim faith. When he was running for Congress, Reid told him to get out of the race because "a Muslim cannot win this race." Unlike Rosen Sbaih is a dedicated progressive and has pledged to fight for Medicare-For-All. Rosen is one of the minority of House Democrats who has refused to co-sponsor John Conyers' Medicare-For-All bill. Sbaih's wife is a physician and he has made Medicare-For-All one of the keystones of his campaign.