Nevada's Angle May Emerge As Biggest Dragon Slayer In New Senate

The stakes are high on Nov. 2 for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But for his GOP challenger, Sharron Angle, the stakes might actually be higher.

If she defeats Reid on Nov. 2, Angle will become more than the junior senator from Nevada. She'll be widely embraced by Republicans as a folk hero who rose from obscurity to topple one of the most powerful, and partisan, Democrats in Washington.

“It’s a whole range of things,” said Jon Ralston, a top expert in Nevada politics. “Familiarity breeds contempt. He’s (Reid) not charismatic. He’s said all kinds of things over the years that have come back to haunt him. The Democratic agenda is unpopular in this state, and he is the face of that. You put it all together and you have a guy who would be dead in re-election if not for one, his own money and machine and two, the candidate who has been nominated to face him.”

Ralston also believes that Angle won the debate last week that pitted a seeming political novice against one of the most powerful politicians in the United States.

“Angle won because she looked relatively credible, appearing not to be the Wicked Witch of the West (Christine O'Donnell is the good witch of the tea party) and scoring many more rhetorical points,” he wrote Sunday in The Reno Gazette-Journal. “And she won because U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., looked as if he could barely stay on a linear argument, abruptly switching gears and failing to effectively parry or thrust.”

But the paper Sunday endorsed Reid over Angle.

And so it has gone for Angle, 61, a one-time longshot who has, more than most candidates this year, benefited from the anti-establishment wave coursing through the electorate. She catapulted past two prominent and well-funded opponents in the GOP primary by positioning herself as a conservative die-hard who would not carry water in Washington for party insiders.More on this>>