Team Reid the model for state GOP

The Nevada Republican Party's magical tea turned out to be 100-proof Kool-Aid in the Harry Reid-Sharron Angle U.S. Senate race.

Members of the state's Grand Old Party are still sifting through the detritus of Campaign 2010 for clues as to how their Tea Party revolutionary got blown away by the supposedly vulnerable Senate majority leader with the bull's-eye on his back.

While some Republicans cry foul and openly grumble about possible voter coercion, they continue down the road that veers hard right and toward future failure. It's a path that encourages anger and political paranoia but one that fails to focus on the important business at hand. Namely, how the Nevada GOP can assemble a machine capable of mounting a competitive statewide challenge to the Democrats.

Party officials could start by attempting to emulate the efforts of Team Reid, an intrepid group of dedicated partisans who spent years preparing for Campaign 2010.

That's right, years.

For his part, Reid needed no reminder of the high stakes involved. He had only to look at the calculated drubbing his predecessor Tom Daschle of South Dakota took in 2004 to remind him that, as the Democrats' leader in the Senate, he was being targeted by the opposition.

How would he avoid Daschle's fate?

By going on offense early.

Although Reid couldn't have succeeded without the help of his traditional Democratic base and the energy of organized labor, he needed more in 2010.

His Republicans for Reid campaign, designed by supporting GOP spin master Sig Rogich, won some converts and many headlines. But getting over the top one last time would take a coordinated effort of unprecedented scale.

In addition to gathering a devoted and energetic team, he created the equivalent of a rehearsal for 2010 when he pushed Nevada to the head of the line for the 2008 presidential caucuses. Candidates who might have mispronounced "Nevada" six months earlier poured money and personnel into the state. Democratic registration jumped, and the state party's infrastructure evolved rapidly.

By 2010, the campaign machinery was finely tuned. The candidate's 50 percent-plus negatives in outside polls shouted near-certain defeat, but Reid's own internal polls broke down Democratic demographics and revealed voters who were more frustrated with the economy than disdainful of the incumbent.

When Northern Nevada resident Angle won the June primary, besting better-known southerners Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian, pundits surmised the Tea Party's favorite revolutionary was the only candidate capable of losing to Reid. But that wasn't accurate. Lowden and even Tarkanian might have made life more difficult for Reid, but his team was busy leaving little to doubt while the press stayed focused on the incumbent's bankroll and high negatives.

If Republicans wanted to beat Reid, they were going to have to outwork and outthink his team. That didn't happen.

Angle was hamstrung by the failure of her campaign to rapidly respond to all attempts to define her in negative terms. Her history of delivering firebrand rhetoric to favored constituencies -- "Second Amendment remedies" to gun owners, the unemployed are "spoiled" to business conservatives -- haunted her from the outset. Firing machine-gun rhetoric of its own, Reid's camp found it easy to paint Angle as "extreme."

Her gaffes weren't just captured for posterity. They were dispatched to targeted voter groups. While Angle carpet-bombed the airwaves, Team Reid used a technique more akin to firing laser-sighted missiles.

The coordinated campaign was led by director Preston Elliot, whose experience included similar duty in Montana in 2006 and a stint on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2008. Elliot joined the re-election war already in progress.

Justin Gilbert's job was to target voters. He had been focused on that job since 2004. Reid insiders agree no one has a better handle on the quirks and character of the Nevada electorate than Gilbert. And Reid senior adviser Rebecca Lambe, who was lauded by the senator on Election Day, helped choreograph the entire effort.

Field Director Brian Dimarzio and deputy Cory Warfield spent four years in Nevada. They were intimately familiar with the '08 caucuses and the details of getting out the vote for a candidate for whom name recognition was not an issue.

In the south, regional field directors divided geography and demography from East Las Vegas (Stephen Montoya) and Henderson (Leora Olivas) to North Las Vegas (John Patillo) and Summerlin (Jordan Brandt.) Meanwhile, Mollie Binotto managed to wrangle Reno and rural Nevada.

Voter contact came early, personal and often and arrived not just through television ads and myriad mailers, but door to door and face to face.

Much has been made of the importance of the Hispanic vote to Reid's success, and it can't be overstated. With a big voter registration assist from former Las Vegan Gus West of The Hispanic Institute and numerous other Latino community Democrats, the potential began to be harnessed. Clearly not all of that potential was measured in public polls that rarely had Reid comfortably ahead.

African-Americans turned out in high numbers in 2008, and Darrel Thompson, Kenya Price and Yindra Dixon helped remind the community of the importance of the election for Reid and President Barack Obama as well.

The numbers are staggering. By the time of early voting, Team Reid had knocked on more than 1 million doors and had placed more than 2 million telephone calls, according to an official estimate. If you were a Democrat who waited to vote, you might have been contacted up to 40 times in one form or another. The team constantly "scrubbed" its voter rolls to eliminate redundancy and sent an army of volunteers into the field to drive voters to the polls.

Reid had high praise for his team. He had to know that without that effort, his name would be synonymous with Daschle's.

After a few days of reflection, Reid said, "I had the best campaign team on the ground anyone could ask for. They made sure we spoke to every possible voter during the course of the election, then turned out our supporters on Election Day. I am thankful for the work of every person on my team who made Tuesday a success."

In the wake of the Reid-Angle race, Republicans are suffering from a helluva hangover.

The question now is, will they learn a painful lesson, rise to this formidable challenge, and form a team of their own?

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.