Politico: “Democrats sweat midterm fallout from Nevada party crack-up”
Washington, D.C. – Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto is in for the reelection fight of her life in 2022, and she can use all the help she can get. But the Silver State’s Democrats are in disarray – and the Democrat National Committee has no clue how to help one of its most vulnerable Senators.
Catherine Cortez Masto is in a bind: Side with the far-Left radicals leading the state party or continue her fake moderate charade.
READ MORE about the trouble ahead for Nevada Democrats and Catherine Cortez Masto.
Politico: Democrats sweat midterm fallout from Nevada party crack-up
A bitter feud has divided Dems in a key swing state — and dragged in the national party.
A war between Harry Reid’s political machine and pro-Bernie Sanders forces is dividing Democrats in a key swing state — and dragging in the Democratic National Committee on the eve of a critical midterm election year.
The Nevada feud, which erupted earlier this year when insurgent Sanders supporters took over the state party from allies of the former Senate majority leader, has spiraled into a flurry of resignations, embarrassing headlines and the creation of a fully operating shadow party.
The rift is threatening Democrats’ chances of defending a Senate seat in 2022 that they can’t afford to lose, in what’s already shaping up to be a back-breaking election cycle for the party. President Joe Biden won Nevada by only 2 percentage points — a far more narrow margin of victory than he enjoyed in Virginia, where Republicans romped in the gubernatorial race last week, and New Jersey, where the GOP came close to defeating the incumbent Democratic governor.
“So much time has been spent on this ongoing infighting. There’s not a lot of time until the election, and it’s really drawn resources and time and energy from recruiting a new slate of candidates and building those community bonds that you need,” said Shaun Navarro, former co-chair of the Las Vegas chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which helped elect the left-wing state party leadership. “These are the reasons people don’t like politics.”
The clash in Nevada has also left the coordinated campaign for top Democrats in the state without precious voter data, robbing Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Gov. Steve Sisolak of a key asset before they both face reelection next year.
The power struggle between Sanders’ backers and the nationally renowned political operation built by Reid, which installed Democrats at all levels of government in Nevada, dates back years. In the state’s 2016 presidential caucuses, Sanders narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton, and his campaign accused party honchos of rigging the state convention that finalized presidential delegates. Sanders forces, meanwhile, were accused of throwing chairs in a wild scene, and the state party filed a complaint to the DNC claiming that they engaged in “extra-parliamentary behavior — indeed, actual violence,” something the Sanders team strongly denied.
The Reid machine insists the new state party has no clue how to win a general election. Its solution was to bypass the state party by running the coordinated campaign in the midterms out of the local party in Nevada’s second-biggest county. Progressives see the organization behind that effort in Reno’s Washoe County — known as Nevada Democratic Victory — as an anti-democratic attempt to circumvent a leadership slate that won fair and square.
Shortly before progressives and socialists won control of the Nevada Democratic Party this year, the party staff transferred $450,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — and then quit. (The DSCC is now sending money to Nevada Democratic Victory.)
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