'Tea Party' Favorite Surges In Nevada

The Nevada Republican primary battle to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has morphed from a two-candidate race to a three-candidate race with the stunning recent surge of "tea party" favorite Sharron Angle.

Early voting began Saturday in the race to take on Mr. Reid, and Mrs. Angle, a former four-term Assembly member, has momentum on her side after winning the Tea Party Express endorsement in April. Since then, her poll numbers have jumped by double digits, placing her in a virtual dead heat with front-runner Sue Lowden.

"I think a lot of people thought that by the end of May there would be a much clearer front-runner, but that hasn't been the case," said Kenneth Fernandez, a political scientist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

The race has attracted outsized attention as early polls showed Mr. Reid, one of the most powerful Democrats in the country, facing double-digit deficits against his leading Republican opponents in his bid for a fifth term in the Senate. The polls have been so negative that speculation is already rampant on Capitol Hill over who might succeed Mr. Reid if he is ousted.

A Mason-Dixon Research poll commissioned by the Las Vegas Review Journal showed Mrs. Lowden with 30 percent of the vote to Mrs. Angle's 25 percent. The margin of error on the survey, released May 13, was 4.5 percentage points.

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