WEEKLY EDITORIAL RECAP

TUESDAY

BY THE NUMBERS

More evidence surfaced over the holiday weekend that Democratic Sen. Harry Reid’s dalliance with the MoveOn.org crowd is costing him support in the state he was elected to represent.

Sen. Reid has never been Nevada’s most popular politician. … As majority leader, he has exhibited a degree of liberal partisanship that is clearly not going over well with many Nevada voters.

A poll released last week by the Reno Gazette-Journal found that 49 percent of those asked disapprove of the job Harry Reid is doing as a U.S. senator.

That tracks well with a Review-Journal survey conducted in October that put Sen. Reid’s unfavorable rating at 51 percent.

The Reno paper’s poll also found that 39 percent of those asked approve of how Sen. Reid is performing. That’s slightly higher than the 32 percent favorable rating he garnered in the Review-Journal survey.

Still, those unfavorable and disapproval numbers are extremely high — and should they stay even remotely in the same range over the next year, it would call into question whether Sen. Reid could beat a viable GOP candidate should he decide to seek re-election in 2010. Remember Tom Daschle?

“He’s got to turn the numbers around,” Democratic strategist Dan Hart of Las Vegas told the Gazette-Journal.

No kidding. But that’s going to be hard to do as long as Sen. Reid insists on being a mouthpiece for his party’s hyperleftist wing.