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August 24, 2015 at 07:46 AM
(Bloomberg Politics) — After blowing an opportunity to unseat Harry Reid in 2010, Republicans covet the retiring Senate minority leader’s seat in 2016 as a nice consolation prize.
It didn’t take long after Reid’s retirement announcement in March for both parties to coalesce behind presumptive nominees. Democrats rallied behind Catherine Cortez Masto, a former state attorney general; Reid’s early and enthusiastic backing ensures that she’ll face an unobstructed path to the party nomination.
On the Republican side, party officials helped convince Rep. Joe Heck to enter the race after he initially demurred. The strongest Republican candidate would have been Gov. Brian Sandoval, who eschewed a Senate bid after winning a second four-year term in 2014 with 71 percent of the vote.
Cortez Masto checks off some key demographic boxes in a state that’s 28 percent Hispanic, the fifth-highest percentage among the 50 states in a 2014 Census Bureau estimate. The Senate has never had a Hispanic woman in its membership.
Unlike Democrat Shelley Berkley, a former representative who lost a 2012 Senate race to Republican Sen. Dean Heller, Cortez Masto doesn’t have a congressional voting record to exploit. She’s won two statewide elections as the state’s top legal official, winning easily in 2006 and 2010.
Heck’s strength as a statewide candidate stems in part from his ability to win three elections in a politically competitive district, encompassing part of Las Vegas and its suburbs, that voted for President Barack Obama in the 2012 election. Heck plays up his background as an osteopathic physician and Army reservist, two professions with much higher public approval ratings than Congress. He leads the Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee.
His voting record is in the Republican mainstream. He introduced his own legislation to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), which he’s called “the largest federal intrusion into the American health care system in history.”
