At the beginning of 2010, Reid was a dead man walking. His poll numbers were in the tank. The president’s approval rating also had fallen from the high of his inaugural to 50 percent and was on its way to the forties.

The Affordable Care Act, which Reid and Obama considered a spectacular legislative triumph, was not seen so favorably by the American public. Brandon Hall, who had been hired by Rebecca Lambe to manage the re-election campaign in early 2009 after he helped elect Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska, had spent the first six months of his tenure trying to keep people out of the race. A top-tier candidate would almost surely be a favorite, even a prohibitive one against a senator damaged from years on the legislative battlefield.

They were most worried about Dean Heller, who had replaced Jim Gibbons in Congress, so Hall and others put out the word that any money given to Heller would be considered a donation against Reid. They also made it clear, through Freedom of Information requests to Heller’s office, that they were going to play hardball. Ultimately, Heller would not run, perhaps partly because of a Republicans for Reid group that had marquee names from Wayne Newton to Republican kingmaker Sig Rogich to the first lady of Nevada, Dawn Gibbons.

Reid, though, had a likely foe in Sue Lowden, a former anchorwoman and state senator, who was ahead of Reid in some late 2009 polls and whose husband’s casino career Reid had made possible when he was a regulator. Rep. Mark Amodei also had announced; there was blood in the water, although the congressman would soon decide discretion was the better part of going up against the Reid buzzsaw. The senator’s campaign knew Lowden could be formidable; some Democrats even thought she would probably win.

What’s more, the state’s largest and theoretically most influential newspaper was on a mission to defeat Reid. The senator had, in his inimitable way, poked the bear in late August 2009 by saying to the Review-Journal’s advertising director, Bob Brown, at a public event: “I hope you go out of business.” That allowed publisher Sherman Frederick to ignore the obvious, albeit clumsy, Reid attempt at humor and put himself on the cross in one of his many anti-Reid columns, headlined “Enough Is Enough, Harry.”

Thus would begin a nonstop blizzard of columns, blog posts, and editorials from the Review-Journal, with the editor Tom Mitchell occasionally chiming in with his own anti-Reid screeds, as the newspaper further stacked the long odds against a Reid fifth term. Reid’s friend, fundraiser, and ally Brian Greenspun at the Sun intermittently defended the senator from the Review-Journal attacks, but his paper was not nearly as well read. The Great Las Vegas Newspaper War was not just a sidelight to the 2010 U.S. Senate race; it was in the foreground, constant.

If nothing else, Team Reid was going to be prepared. Greenspun had hosted a campaign meeting the previous August at his media group’s headquarters in Henderson, a four-hour conclave in which fundraisers, pollsters, opposition research experts, field operatives, and consultants weighed in. They had changed the registration dynamic with the early caucus in 2008 and an eye toward Reid’s re-election — the Democratic lead was above 80,000 at the end of 2009.

Also, Reid’s lieutenant Rebecca Lambe had overseen a move in the legislative session to push back the primary from September to June, so Reid’s team would have more time to improve their chances and try to destroy whomever the Republicans nominated. The Republicans for Reid group was also a useful hammer whose membership would continue to swell, a product of Reid’s decades of cultivating unlikely friendships and quietly accumulating due bills. He would eventually woo

arguably the most powerful Republican in Nevada, the state Senate majority leader, Bill Raggio, onto that list (and Raggio would lose his leadership position because of the endorsement). Reid also tried to get Paul Laxalt to join, but that was a nonstarter. The number, though, would move into the dozens and send a powerful message.

But all of this seemed to many observers in Nevada and in Washington as piling up sandbags against a midterm red wave that would surely wash over Nevada.

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One of the first things Hall had done when he came on board was to build a research team, one designed to not just delve into Lowden and any other possible opponent but also track their every public appearance for possible fodder. Heading it up was Matt Fuehrmeyer, who had worked for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Tom Daschle. Reid himself was a de facto member of the research team, whispering to the campaign, inveterate gossip that he was, every rumor he had heard about a potential foe. He wanted no stone left unturned, no blade of grass left uncut.

Reid’s aides knew the election had to be a choice between him and someone the campaign beat to a pulp, not a referendum on his record. That frustrated the senator to no end, bothered him to his core that voters did not give him credit for what he had done for Nevada. But he understood and accepted the political realities. The staff would show him polling that, even after voters were informed of all he had done, the numbers did not move.

Some inside the campaign wanted to use the slogan “Harry Reid, a powerful voice for Nevada,” but he nixed that, saying his soft-spoken demeanor would be dissonant with the idea.

Danny Tarkanian, the son of the legendary UNLV basketball coach

Jerry Tarkanian, Sharron Angle, an ultraconservative former assemblywoman, and Lowden, the state Republican Party chair, were all in by year’s end. Lowden was generally considered the best candidate on paper, and a Review-Journal poll in December 2009 showed her with a 10-percentage-point lead in the primary. There was possibly a clue she was better in theory when she went on a right-wing radio talk show in November and cavalierly implied, along with the host, that the attempt to rig Reid’s car with a bomb 30 years earlier had never occurred. The Reid campaign immediately released the police report from 1981. This was both a sign of Lowden’s potential weakness as a candidate and the smashmouth Reid rapid response campaign.

Going into 2010, Reid also had to deal with another albatross, which was that his son Rory had decided to run for governor.

Some of the senator’s political advisers thought this would be a large impediment to the majority leader’s re-election. Having two Reids on the ballot would spark talk of dynasties, another straw that could break the camel’s back. Rory Reid told people he believed that his father was not going to run again, perhaps hearing what he wanted to hear when his father and mother encouraged him to run for governor if he wanted to.

Landra Reid would later say her husband never considered not seeking a fifth term despite his approval ratings and what looked like a Sisyphean endeavor. Neither Reid nor Landra tried to dissuade Rory from running — “He would never tell him not to run,” Landra said — and later the senator would tell an aide he understood why his team tried (unsuccessfully) to nudge the younger Reid out of the race.

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Despite Reid raising more money than any candidate in Nevada history — $15 million pledged and $9 million on hand — most national oddsmakers rated the Nevada Senate seat as a toss-up.

The Reid campaign was almost singularly focused on Lowden. The Reidites saw on paper a nearly perfect candidate to end the senator’s career, so they began going after her and tracking her every public move. In early January 2010, at a campaign meeting, the message was clear, as Fuehrmeyer remembered it: “The general election starts today, we’re gonna open up the book on Sue Lowden, and we’re just gonna start unloading on her. And we did.”

The campaign dumped some opposition research to the media, including that Paul Lowden had taken a large bonus while laying off casino employees — but Reid’s numbers were not moving, even after President Obama came to visit. Soon afterward, the Review-Journal published a poll that showed Reid losing by 13 percentage points to Lowden and 11 percentage points to Tarkanian. No one was paying attention to Angle, who languished at 8 percent in the survey for the primary, with Lowden ahead of Tarkanian by 18 points, 47–29. The election in June was still months away, but it was difficult to see Lowden, who had begun buying TV time, as anything but a solid favorite to become a U.S. senator. The Republican establishment in Nevada and Washington, D.C., was giddy.

National and local Republicans, though, were concerned with a potential third-party candidate, Scott Ashjian, who was carrying the banner for the newly filed Tea Party of Nevada — they believed he was a Reid plant to siphon votes from the nominee, something Team Reid would never confirm nor deny.

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On April 6, a Reid campaign aide, Paul Smith, was sent to Mesquite, a small community about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, to tape a Lowden event with a group called Friends of the Founding Fathers. The gathering was relatively small, and Smith feared he might get booted by the Lowden campaign or the organizers. But no one approached him, and he captured the Republican front-runner’s interactions with the crowd without interruption.

Not surprisingly, Lowden had been using Obamacare, which was still unpopular a month after it was signed into law, as a bludgeon against Reid. (Reid, unlike most Democrats, was airing ads touting his support for the health care reform.)

After hyping health savings accounts as an alternative, Lowden raised another possibility if the Affordable Care Act were repealed: “Those doctors who you pay cash, you can barter, and that would get prices down in a hurry. And I would say go out, go ahead out and pay cash for whatever your medical needs are, and go ahead and barter with your doctor.”

Smith thought the snippet would make for a nice “out of touch” hit on the wealthy Lowden, and he called Reid’s research director, Fuehrmeyer, to tell him what he had. The research director thought it was worth transcribing — he wanted to see the video — but he didn’t think it was game-changing. 

“We knew we had something good when we got that; we didn’t realize how much better she was going to make it,” Fuehrmeyer recalled.

There wasn’t much local interest in the video, so on April 12, the campaign’s press secretary, Kelly Steele, reached out to Eric Kleefeld, a reporter with the liberal site Talking Points Memo, to gauge his interest in what he slugged his email as: “Nutty NV Sen clip.”

Kleefeld published the video and two days later, Jay Leno mocked the idea of bartering on The Tonight Show, mentioning (and misspelling) Lowden’s name but wondering how that would work “if your doctor is not Amish.” Still, though, there was not much pickup anywhere else; the story’s legs seemed broken.

Then, a week after Kleefeld first published the video, the entire campaign changed. The Republican front-runner went on a Reno-based television program called Nevada Newsmakers that was cohosted by Marlene Lockard, a lobbyist and former top aide to Reid’s old friend Richard Bryan. Lockard asked Lowden about the bartering comment, and the candidate not only reaffirmed her support for bartering but used an unfortunate analogy that would soon become known far and wide:

“You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I’ll paint your house. I mean, that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.”

A few feet away in the studio, a couple of Lowden campaign aides looked at the floor. They knew.

Meanwhile, Team Reid watched from campaign headquarters. “[We] were just dumbfounded, utterly dumbfounded,” Smith said. They also knew what they had, which was a chance to make Lowden the object of ridicule, which is often much worse for electoral prospects than being the object of criticism. “Seriously, Has Sue Lowden Lost Her Mind?” was the headline on a Reid campaign release the next morning.

If the issue had just been about bartering, which is not uncommon in rural America, Lowden might have survived it. Or if she had simply said she was using the chicken analogy as an example and it was not viable today, she might have survived. But out of stubbornness or arrogance, she refused to back down and the Reid campaign squeezed every ounce of free media they could get while a third-party group run by a former Reid aide, Patriot Majority, began running ads. National newspapers and cable shows ran pieces on “chickens for checkups.” The Nevada Democratic Party, controlled by Lambe, brought a goat to Lowden’s headquarters to trade — having tipped a TV station it was coming. The party also began having a person dressed as a chicken attend various events to keep the issue alive. The mockery was everywhere.

Later that year, when the staff celebrated campaign manager Brandon Hall’s birthday, they presented him a cake with icing decorated from a cartoon by the Review-Journal’s Jim Day that featured Sue Lowden with a thought bubble not emanating from her mouth but, like a knife, piercing her torso: “. . . bring a chicken to the doctor.”

Ralston's book is publishing Jan. 20 and is available for purchase.