Clearly it was an unhappy development, especially for a Democratic incumbent governor in the final weeks of a close reelection race, but it didn’t appear debilitating: The state’s largest teachers’ union announced last week that it would be withholding an endorsement. For connoisseurs of Nevada politics, though, the news was closer to the rumble of an approaching earthquake. “This would never have happened,” one Nevada Democratic insider says, “if Senator Reid were still alive.”

Harry Reid was a singular, quirky figure in both American and Nevada politics: a Mormon and an accomplished amateur boxer who’d grown up impoverished in a tiny rural town—his family lived in a shack with no running water or phone—and had risen to become, as Senate majority leader, the second most powerful person in Washington. During that journey Reid faced what he anticipated would be his most difficult reelection run, in the 2010 midterms. So in 2008, he began building what would come to be known as the Reid machine: a highly efficient registration and turnout operation whose key elements included Nevada’s culinary union and its heavily Latino membership. “Sure, his fundraising prowess was part of it,” says Jim Manley, who was a top Senate aide to Reid. “But he really leaned hard on the get-out-the-vote stuff.” The machine’s test run was crucial in turning Nevada, a traditionally red state, blue for Barack Obama in 2008. Two years later it delivered Reid to victory over Sharron Angle, giving him a fifth and final term in the Senate. And when Reid retired, the machine helped elect his chosen successor, Catherine Cortez Masto, to the Senate in 2016.

Reid died after a battle with pancreatic cancer, at the age of 82, in December 2021. Now, 11 months later, in the first elections since the death of the machine’s chief engineer, Reid’s Nevada political legacy is facing its stiffest test—not simply in Cortez Masto’s bid for a second term against Adam Laxalt, but in Governor Steve Sisolak’s tight reelection contest, and in the campaign for Nevada secretary of state, where the Republican nominee, Jim Marchant, says he would have refused to certify Joe Biden’s Nevada win in 2020. Marchant has vowed to be part of a coalition of state election officials that will “fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”

Reid’s top political lieutenant, Rebecca Lambe, has inherited leadership of the machine, a succession that makes other Democrats hopeful, if not completely confident, this fall. “Rebecca Lambe is the single best strategist in the state of Nevada and one of the best strategists in the country,” says Jef Pollock, a pollster who was part of the team behind Jacky Rosen’s 2018 defeat of incumbent Nevada Republican senator Dean Heller, another win in which the Reid machine was instrumental. “She is a fucking genius.” 

Yet even Lambe wasn’t able to head off a damaging fracture with the state’s Democratic Party. In March 2021 a slate of five candidates backed by the Nevada chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America swept elections for party leadership positions. In response, every staff member of the state party, most of them Reid machine allies, quit. The conflict has been a drag on Democratic campaign efforts, leading to disputes over everything from primary endorsements to support for Israel and initially complicated fundraising this fall. “The chaos in Nevada between the Reid operation and the state party was unfortunate,” Pollock says. “But those who count out what Harry Reid and his operation built do so at their own peril. The folks in that operation know what they’re doing in making sure there’s a ground game.”

Perhaps a larger problem for Cortez Masto, Sisolak, and the Reid machine is that unlike in other high-profile races around the country, their Republican opponents are more polished than many of their neophyte colleagues. Laxalt, the Senate candidate, and Joe Lombardo, the gubernatorial candidate, are plenty conservative, but neither has an expanding list of secret children or has peddled “miracle” weight-loss remedies. Laxalt and Lombardo, the sheriff of Nevada’s most populous county, have emphasized conventional campaign themes, instead of culture wars, in their current races: inflation, crime, and tying their Democratic adversaries to President Biden, whose job approval numbers remain mired in the low 40s. “They are ‘normal’ Republicans, which is what you want to be this year—vanilla. That favors a Republican in a midterm election in a state Biden won by the hair of his chin,” a national Democratic consultant says. “What you don’t want to be is Blake Masters or Mehmet Oz or Herschel Walker.” John Anzalone, who is Biden’s pollster and is also working with Sisolak’s campaign in Nevada, among other big races this fall, describes the endgame more pithily. “The last 30 days,” Anzalone says, “is really coming down to headwinds versus head cases.”

Nevada is an exception. State Republicans did not nominate the most MAGA options for Senate and governor, giving the party a real shot at the independent voters, many of them non-college-educated whites, who are likely to make the difference. Yet the stakes of both races remain high. Laxalt, the grandson of former Nevada Republican senator Paul Laxalt, has enthusiastically welcomed Trump’s support and has questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 win; he called the overturning of Roe v. Wade “a historic victory” and has supported a 13-week ban. Lombardo is running as a tough-on-crime Republican and blaming a 2019 bipartisan criminal justice reform law, signed by Sisolak, for any increases. Add in the secretary of state contest, and the results in Nevada this fall could have an impact on everything from the Democrats’ retaining a Senate majority to the legitimacy of the 2024 presidential election.

Reid’s game plan for electing Nevada Democrats relied on bringing labor unions on board and keeping them there—which is what makes the pointed neutrality of the Clark County teachers’ union in the governor’s race an ominous sign. Four years ago the union endorsed Sisolak—over Adam Laxalt—to succeed term-limited Republican Brian Sandoval. Since then, of course, Sisolak has compiled a record as governor, and the teachers’ union has sparred with him on everything from class sizes to educational policies related to the pandemic. The governor’s campaign has been touting his management of the state’s economy during rocky times, including attracting revenue-generating major sports events and avoiding tax increases. Cortez Masto, who has raised four times the amount of campaign money as Laxalt, has leaned on her role in passing federal COVID relief and infrastructure packages that pumped money into Nevada’s tourism and solar panel industries, and on her votes to lower health care costs; she has also dialed up mentions of her heritage as a pioneering Latina legislator.

Lambe is said to be reassuring outsiders that the Reid machine is maintaining its focus on coordinating its field operation with the culinary union, which represents thousands of Latino service workers in Las Vegas; Latinos are a historically crucial and nuanced voting cohort that is expected to make up 15 to 20% of the Nevada electorate in November. But if Nevada swings back into Republican hands, however, a prime narrative will be that what was missing was the iron fist of Harry Reid.