Sen. Harry Reid's popularity in Nevada has remained stable the past five months, with fewer voters rating his performance as Senate minority leader as excellent and more saying it has been good, according to a new poll.
Ten months after he was selected Democratic leader, support for Reid among Nevada Democrats inched up while support among Republican voters dropped since May, the poll showed.
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The poll of 625 registered voters was done Friday through Monday for the Review-Journal by Washington, D.C.-based Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.
"He's been relatively popular in Nevada. He's a bit of a lightning rod. Democrats love him, and Republican support has slipped over the past four years," pollster Brad Coker said.
When asked to rate Reid's performance, 27 percent of voters polled said Reid is doing an excellent job, and 26 percent said he is doing a good job. Sixteen percent of those polled said Reid is doing a fair job and 28 percent said he is doing a poor job, according to the poll. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
In a May poll, taken at a time when Reid was leading Democratic opposition to President Bush's judicial nominations, 32 percent of Nevada voters polled ranked Reid's performance as excellent and 23 percent said he was doing a good job.
In the poll completed Monday, 84 percent of Democrats polled said Reid's performance was either excellent or good. Nearly three out of four Republicans rated his performance as fair or poor.
Independents, meanwhile, were split with 54 percent saying it was either excellent or good and 44 percent rating him fair or poor.
"His national position has changed the way Republican voters see him," Coker said. "When you are minority leader, you have to take positions that might be unpopular with the constituents because you have to represent your party. You can't go too far out of the mainstream of your caucus or you risk losing your position with your fellow senators."
Reid couldn't be reached for comment Wednesday, and the state Democratic Party referred calls to Reid's office.
Richard Ziser, the Republican nominee who unsuccessfully ran against Reid last year, said the poll results show that Republicans who voted for Reid a year ago don't support him now.
Reid won the election with 65 percent of the vote, while Ziser received 31 percent of the vote.
In the last Review-Journal poll taken before the November election, 59 percent of state voters polled supported Reid while 35 percent supported Ziser.
Reid had support from 92 percent of the Democrats polled, 25 percent of the Republicans and 60 percent of Independent voters, according to the October 2004 poll.
Ziser said that Reid campaigned as an independent but that he has betrayed such an image as one of the most high-profile spokesmen for the Democratic Party and its positions in Washington.
"If 51 percent of Republicans in the state of Nevada think he is doing a poor job, that tells me there are a lot of Republicans who made a mistake when they voted in November," Ziser said of the recent poll numbers.
"There were a lot of people in the state who bought the line that Reid would be good for Nevada because he was in the leadership."
Coker disagreed with Ziser, saying that the election results didn't show that Reid was more popular among Republicans a year ago.
Instead, they showed that Independents and Republicans chose Reid because they preferred him to the alternative, Coker said.
"I think a lot of Republicans voted for him (Reid) because of who his opponent was," he said.
"I think voters preferred Reid to Ziser. I think if they were asked today to make the same choice, they would make the same choice."
