Dean Heller is dead, one in a series:

It’s a long four months until the election, yet the scent is in the air. You can sniff it in every move the senator and his campaign make. It’s unmistakable: The pungent smell of desperation.

Consider:

Rep. Jacky Rosen hates veterans because she campaigns with one of the greatest actresses of all time, ridiculed by Team Heller as “Hanoi Jane,” they aver. Maybe this hearkening back to the Vietnam Era will rile up some veterans, but it is remarkably condescending to think so.

Rosen is a puppet of ReidPelosiSchumer who votes 90 percent with leadership and does not speak for Nevadans, they fulminate. Ah, that old chestnut: Politician votes a lot with leaders of politician’s party.

And then there was the attempt to create out of whole cloth an issue about Rosen’s background that I will not dignify by repeating here but tell you that only one “journalist” picked it up, then criticized his own “newspaper” and other media for not making more of it. When you can only get a GOP operative masquerading as a journalist and hired by the state’s largest Republican donor to bite on your spoon-fed garbage, your straw-grasping game needs work.

It’s not just the flailing about this early that strikes me, but the lack of originality, the absence of cleverness. I wrote awhile ago that Heller’s only chance with his Harry Reid-like approval numbers (circa 2010 ) would be to destroy Rosen after the primary. It was and is, if you will permit me, his only Angle to win.

Instead, he’s all inane gimmicks and hoary wedge issues, making his campaign wear a label that is the worst insult I can find for any effort: It’s boring. If you are going to try to scorch the earth, at least bring a blowtorch, not a BIC.

Yes, I know: This is the first quarter. Maybe this is the summer doldrums, not a harbinger.

And, yes, Rosen is hard to hit. No one except the congregation at Ner Tamid knew who she was until recently, Reid’s 17^th choice or so to run for Congress in 2016, someone who would have lost to any Republican last cycle who wasn’t named Tarkanian.

But even Heller’s new best friend, the man he hugged twice and looked upon with reverence last week, President Donald Trump, seemed to sense the most vulnerable Republican senator in the country needed a jolt. Amid the boilerplate raise taxes, open borders, blah blah blah stuff in his Teleprompter, the president informed the crowd in Vegas last weekend that he had a nickname for Rosen: “Wacky Jacky.”

On the cleverness scale, this ranked somewhere below “Lyin’ Ted” and “Little Marco.” But it rhymed and the crowd loved it, even though Rosen is about as wacky as an episode of “Dragnet.”

Stranger, though, is the literal and figurative hug Heller has given Trump, especially since the president nudged prospective primary foe Danny Tarkanian out of the Senate contest. Heller, from Almost-Never-Trumper to Trumplove, had been struggling to contort himself when Tarkanian was in the race – and we are talking about a man who, as I have said, should have his own Cirque show.

So why now?

Heller’s seemingly unnecessary acting comes as Trump’s numbers are about the same as his – slightly upside down – and provide no added value. And his recent performance means Heller simply cannot credibly try to distance himself from Trump as November nears, nor can he stop running so hard on a tax plan he risibly claimed to help write and later said he wrote the whole enchilada -- and one that remains quite unpopular with the public.

So my only conclusion is he is doing something fitting for the state he represents, and a practice that has high risk and high rewards: He is gambling.

Gambling that Trump’s numbers have stabilized and that while the president may not bring Heller new voters, at this point it won’t cost him any.

Gambling that the tax plan he supposedly wrote (Do his Senate GOP colleagues know this?) will gain in popularity and draw independent voters.

Gambling that Rosen, who will keep having to take positions this summer and fall, will make a less-elusive target.

Gambling that the Democrats, overconfident of a blue wave, will overplay their hand and Heller will seem safer in comparison to what he surely will label their “radical agenda.”

Gambling that the “Nevada is becoming California with sanctuary cities,” as inane and disingenuous as it is, will drive up the rural and white vote enough to make a difference in a relatively low turnout, off-presidential year.

And, thanks to the stunning development of last week, that a Supreme Court opening (which Heller predicted), will drive GOP turnout (although I can see how it might energize Democrats if Anthony Kennedy is replaced before the election).

Of course, the focus on Roe v. Wade and Heller’s inconstancy on abortion (he used to be pro-choice) could prove to be a negative in the end. But one thing you can say about Dean Heller 7.0 that is the same as the earlier versions who were against The DREAM Act and “anchor babies” before he was for them and who were against Obamacare repeal before he was for it, is the ineluctable truth that drives Democrats batty: He has never lost a race.

But never, in all of his iterations, has Dean Heller had such a thin margin for error as he gambles on his political life.

Jon Ralston is the editor of The Nevada Independent. He has been covering Nevada politics for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. On Twitter: @ralstonreports