Nevada Turning on Dingy Harry

When you align yourself and are beholden to the far-left fringe and nutroots bloggers, your popularity will eventually tumble.

And Dingy Harry Reid is now in a death spiral.

Let me spell out Harry's problem. No one can win a statewide race in Nevada on a platform that appears anti-military, anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-religion, anti-free speech, pro-illegal immigration, pro-abortion, and pro-taxation. While Harry isn't all of that personally, he clearly projects elements of them all when he's doing the bidding of his party on the national stage.

(It also doesn't help Harry's numbers when he foolishly attacks Rush Limbaugh, only to have the conservative radio talk show host lash back in a brutally effective rebuttal for the entire nation to hear.)

Tom Daschle knows what I'm talking about. He was Harry's predecessor in the Senate. He, like Reid does now, carried the liberal banner of his national party and slowly but surely his support eroded in his conservative home state of South Dakota. Then one day he woke up with big negatives and the next day he was unelected.

Whether you buy into the 51 percent number as the precise level of Nevada dissatisfaction with Reid or not, it's crystal clear the Daschle effect is in play with Reid. And that means his next race may be the political fight of his life.

My money says by the time 2010 rolls around, his popularity may well be in the single digits.

Nevertheless, you'd have to be the dumbest of all asses to close your eyes and pretend this is a sampling or methodology error. I promise you that's not how Reid's inner circle views it. They take it seriously because they know nobody carries a high unfavorable number into an election and reasonably expects to survive.

So I look for Harry to tone down the liberal rhetoric, shut up about Limbaugh, and do all he can locally to turn these negative numbers around. The Las Vegas Sun will do its part by providing glowing coverage of his exploits. Then, in about 12 to 18 months, he'll perform an internal re-election reality check.