CAMPAIGN 2010: Reid banking on Yucca's death to help win over skeptical electorate (04/30/2010)

Alex Kaplun, E&E reporter
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has spent much of his congressional career battling the construction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository.
Now, the Democratic leader is banking on that advocacy to pay off politically and help sway an electorate that at the moment appears unwilling to give him another term on Capitol Hill.
Faced with a tough re-election fight, Reid has again and again pointed to the slow death of the Yucca facility as a sign of his power in Washington and his ability to deliver for Nevada.
Yucca is far from a top-tier political issue in what may be the closest watched Senate race in the country, but political observers say the issue helps feed into a broader narrative that the Reid campaign is trying to put together. Namely, that the four-term senator wields the kind of political power that no freshman lawmaker could and is able to single-handedly kill the kind of policies that would be harmful to Nevada.
"He is unabashed about claiming that his position of power brings benefits to the state," said Eric Herzik, a state politics expert at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Day after day, the Reid campaign has released press releases touting his efforts to bring millions of dollars to the state for various public projects, helping to negotiate the continued development of a major Nevada construction project, and, of course, blocking Yucca.
"It's been sort of a slow death over the last five or six years, and at the end of the day he's going to trumpet it," said David Damore, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "I think he can push that message, and he's going to have so much money that he can make sure the voters hear it."
The campaign has put together a web ad that describes the senator as "the man who killed Yucca." The campaign has highlighted recent developments that have further sealed Yucca's fate -- such as its exclusion from the fiscal 2011 budget. And in letters to the editor in local newspapers, Reid's supporters have repeatedly pointed to Yucca as a prime example of his ability to work on Nevada's behalf.
Additionally, both the Reid campaign and Nevada Democrats have attempted to link Reid's potential general election opponents to national Republican figures that have endorsed the construction of Yucca.
When former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) earlier this month criticized the Obama administration for abandoning Yucca, the Reid campaign fired off a press release that accused the Republican candidates of "standing with Palin" on bringing nuclear waste to Nevada. The Nevada Democratic Party had issued similar messages in connection to a visit to the state by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), describing him as a "pro-Yucca, anti-gaming hypocrite."
Because Reid's approval ratings have been stuck in the 40-percent range, pundits note that his survival rests on his ability to convince voters that he is indispensible.
"That's something that he's going to argue that he's invaluable and he's going to claim credit for Yucca and the jobs bill and some of that sort of stuff," Damore said.
At the same time, the Nevada race is taking place in the context of a state where unemployment is among the highest in the country and where voters remain generally pessimistic about the economic outlook.
"Reid will maybe get some mileage out of it, but Reid's election has a big national component to it, and Yucca pales in comparison to 13 percent unemployment," Herzik said.
With more than a dozen candidates vying to be on the ballot, it is still not clear who will emerge as Reid's challenger in the general election. Former state Republican Chairwoman Sue Lowden is viewed as the front-runner in the primary field, with businessman Danny Tarkanian and former state Assemblywoman Sharron Angle running behind.
Besides propping up his own credentials, Reid's campaign has spent much of its energy going after Lowden, who according to recent polls leads Reid by about 10 percentage points.Where the Republicans stand
Reluctant to concede the political high ground on Yucca, Republicans instead are arguing that Reid has done little to help Nevada's economy.
Both Lowden and Tarkanian have said that while they oppose the Yucca facility as it was originally envisioned, the state should not completely turn its back to the nuclear industry and the potential economic benefits that it can provide.
In Lowden's case, that means the construction of a "major nuclear laboratory" that she has pitched as paving the way for a wave of job creation and economic development. Tarkanian, meanwhile, has called for the transitioning of Yucca into a reprocessing facility for spent nuclear fuel, a project that he too argues would bring federal revenues and jobs into the state.
Those themes also dovetail with another message that Republicans have been trying to push against Reid. Namely, that for all of Reid's talk about being an advocate for Nevada business, the state is dealing with historically tough economic conditions.
"Republicans have now embraced Yucca more publicly, saying you killed a project that had a lot of federal money and a chance for economic diversification," Herzik said.
On her campaign page, for example, Lowden states, "all we have now -- after three decades of Harry Reid in Washington -- is a multibillion dollar hole in a mountain with no new industry and no new jobs for Nevadans."
The Reid campaign has gone after Lowden for "flip-flopping" on the issue, arguing that she favored the construction of Yucca during her tenure as GOP chairwoman.Pundits do note that while the Republican message plays well particularly among GOP primary voters, the candidates still need to be careful about embracing what could be viewed as a pro-Yucca position when the general election rolls around. But in many respects, they say, the Yucca debate is not so much about the policy itself but about whether voters buy into the broader Reid message of the senator being an advocate for Nevada in a way that no freshman Republican would be able to match.
"Reid knows that 40 percent of the electorate just will not vote for him. He's not going get crossover voters," Herzik said. "What he has to do is make sure his base shows up and that the people in the center ... come back enough to say Harry Reid can do more for Nevada than a new Republican."
Herzik added, "Harry Reid just has to be seen as a better choice, not the best choice."