Post-Mortem On The Nevada Senate Race

Preparation!:

But the plan worked. The Reid organization’s Terminator-like single-mindedness, relentlessness and discipline turned preparation into the most satisfying victory of Reid’s career, a resurrection unthinkable most of the year by the Beltway cognoscenti.

...In 2009, the team dedicated itself to one goal — raising enough money to scare off Rep. Dean Heller or Porter, considered their most formidable opponents. June 16, 2009, helped — the day Sen. John Ensign cast a pall over the Nevada GOP with his stunning revelation of an affair, which left him crippled and Heller frozen in place, perhaps seeing an easier path to a Senate seat in 2012 or if Ensign resigned. Porter received a cushy offer from a lobbying firm; Reid’s letter of recommendation will never be found.

...With the team assembled, the campaign began to prepare at the beginning of 2010 to face Sue Lowden, the deep-pocketed, telegenic former anchorwoman and state senator. She was the person, as one insider put it via e-mail, “we were least interested in facing so we set out to make sure that she either 1) came out of the primary bruised and battered or 2) didn’t come out of the primary at all so we would face Sharron Angle or Danny Tarkanian.”

...(One other preparation note: Democrats had lobbied for the primary to be moved back to June from August, thus giving Reid more time to pound whoever won and Republicans less time to rally behind one person. Thus, a dozen candidates caused the entropy that helped Angle emerge.)

As Republicans raised each other’s negatives, the Reid folks weren’t napping. They were hiring more staff, honing the turnout model that would prove the only accurate one this cycle (kudos to pollster Mark Mellman) and targeting Hispanics. “We knew that increasing the share of the electorate who were Hispanic was a key to winning so we invested heavily and ran an aggressive Hispanic program,” a Reid operative told me.

...In the end, Team Angle didn’t know what hit it. Despite the internal tension between the local yokels and the political pros, despite a campaign manager (Terry Campbell) who chose elective knee surgery during the middle of the biggest race in the country and despite having a thrown-together get-out-the-vote operation, they thought they were crushing Reid among independents. They thought they had the race won, as one insider informed me after I predicted Reid would win the Sunday before the balloting. They believed the public polls that drove the “Angle will win” narrative; they believed their own surveys.

They had no idea.