Searchlight, Nevada, population 200, birthplace of the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: a thriving mining town turned Western ghost town, inhabited by stubborn residents like the Reids who wouldn’t or couldn’t leave. Searchlight boasted no paved roads, no hospitals, no grocery stores, no churches, no high school; just a few remaining dangerous, poor-yielding mines, and brothels. Reid, who lived with his parents and three brothers in a one-room shack, learned to swim in an upscale brothel–it had a pool–and his mother earned money by doing the laundry of the ladies who worked there and in other local bordellos. His alcoholic father, a hard-rock miner who almost perished in a mining accident when Reid was just days old, died of suicide at 58, when Reid was 32.

Respected Nevada journalist Jon Ralston brings Searchlight, along with Reid’s family and early years, movingly to life in his new biography, The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight. He shows the gritty town’s lifelong imprint on the feisty, working-class Reid. Former Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski told Ralston that when Reid got to the Senate, he bonded with longtime Senate leader Robert Byrd of West Virginia (whom he had declined to endorse as caucus leader before his election) because the two men with hardscrabble backgrounds favored “the night school kids over the prep school kids.” Ralston’s book is full of fascinating reported nuggets like that, highlighting the role that Searchlight, along with his family, his Mormon faith, his loving wife, and his class loyalties, played in Reid’s titanic career.

Unfortunately, Reid and his political evolution from centrist red-state Democrat to liberal machine boss who turned Nevada (mostly) blue are not as vividly drawn as his portrait of Searchlight. While he admires and respects his subject, whom he’d covered as a reporter for almost 40 years, Ralston is a centrist who’s a little bit too committed to a “both sides” approach to the polarization that’s crippled the country and the Senate. He seems to blame Reid as much as amoral, cutthroat GOP opponents like former Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, along with supporting cast members Senator Lindsey Graham and former House Speaker John Boehner, not to mention Donald Trump, largely because Reid did away with the 60-vote Senate filibuster for Barack Obama’s Cabinet nominees and lower court picks in 2013, after McConnell had insisted his GOP minions bottle most of them up for years.

I would argue, with evidence, that there was no contest between Reid and those forces of reaction. The admittedly hard-fighting Democratic Senate Leader was mainly playing defense against a GOP that was determined to, in McConnell’s words, make Obama a “one-term president.” Obviously, they failed, but they made our first Black President a far less successful leader than he would have been if he’d reached the White House in an age when bipartisanship was more the norm in Congress. Harry Reid did his best to fight back, arguably harder than Obama did. His political legacy is less tainted than Ralston’s false-equivalence narrative would have us believe.

Early chapters show Reid as rough boy, tough teen, star athlete, and loyal friend, who developed a circle of folks who’d have his back his whole life. He wound up lucky that hardluck Searchlight didn’t have a high school; he enrolled in Henderson’s Basic High School, 45 miles north, living with relatives or the families of classmates, often traveling home on the weekend. A high school teacher there, Mike O’Callaghan, became his boxing coach and a political mentor; young Reid’s first bid for office was sophomore class president, which he won. (Reid would win every political office he sought for almost 20 years.)

Much later, O’Callaghan was elected Nevada governor, with Reid, only 33, lieutenant governor beside him. A Basic School classmate, Richard Bryan, was a Reid friend and occasional rival who also became governor. (He also met friends there who turned him into a devout practicing Mormon; his parents were not.) How a town like Henderson, then a tiny suburb of Las Vegas, produced such towering state leaders might make for its own book.

The most definitive development for Reid in Henderson was meeting his wife, Landra Joy Gould, a sophomore when he was a junior (and arguably another towering state leader who’s never gotten her due). Landra’s father, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, opposed her marrying outside of her religion and obstructed their relationship energetically, even once coming to blows with Reid, according to Ralston, when he came to pick Landra up for a date. Reid’s departure for college in Utah didn’t dim the couple’s fervor; in his sophomore year they quietly got married, in secret but surrounded by friends and Reid’s supportive mother Inez (but not his father), in a Mormon chapel. Up to the moment of the ceremony, everyone worried that Landra’s father would learn about the plan and disrupt it. But he didn’t. When Landra called to give him the news as the couple left for a brief honeymoon, he said he had been honor-bound to try to prevent the marriage, but now he was obliged to accept it. The families spent the couple’s first Thanksgiving together and remained close. Gould would do what he could to advance his son-in-law’s political career.

Throughout their 62-year marriage, Landra was Reid’s first love, best friend, family protector, political advisor, and strategist. Ralston provides insight into pivotal ways she changed Reid’s political views (she was more liberal; he was a red-state centrist and social conservative who nonetheless mostly had a good heart).

The Nevada native went to George Washington University Law School in Washington D.C., and worked briefly as a Capitol police officer (that fact would show up in his many campaigns as an example of his law enforcement background). He returned to Las Vegas to practice law, mostly working for corporate clients, while also taking on “down-and-outers,” cases known at the firm as “Reid specials.” But the politics itch he’d discovered in high school needed scratching again. Friends urged him to run for a seat on a local hospital board, after he’d gotten a sense of the institution’s problems as he worked medical insurance cases. He ran and won with the backing of local pawnbrokers, most of them Jewish, who in providing cash to gamblers on a bad streak were an integral part of the gaming industry. Later, in the state assembly, Reid sponsored legislation to let the pawnbrokers raise their interest rates.

In an interview with Ralston not long before his death, he marveled, “Can you imagine me? First of all, trying to help pawnbrokers, and secondly, making it so glaringly wrong by asking that they could charge more in terms of interest rates.” It wasn’t clear if Reid was chagrined at his values compromise or boasting about it (that happens several times in the book).

Ralston lays out the usually (but not always) fairly simple set of priorities that guided Reid’s political career. He was unapologetically loyal to the mining and gaming industries (including pawnbrokers), defending tax advantages and even blocking needed reforms to both. because they were the state’s top two employers. Yet as long as they didn’t clash with mining interests, some of his proudest achievements were on the environmental front: expanding public lands, creating new national parks in his state, and blocking the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal plan. And he was committed to working people, whether in unions or not.

For a man who ended his career a hero of the Democratic left, early on he was a social-issues conservative. He was anti-abortion, though not quite as draconian as other conservative legislators. At one point he backed a version of a fetal personhood bill. He was just as right wing on immigration. Ralston uncovers evidence that in one campaign, Reid came out against birthright citizenship (yes, the 14th Amendment). He opposed President Ronald Reagan’s landmark 1986 immigration reform, which created more opportunities for those here without papers. The latter is an issue where he credits Landra with eventually opening his eyes, Ralston reports, reminding him that both her parents escaped pogroms in Ukraine, while Reid’s maternal grandmother came from England seeking opportunity. But that came after 1986.

He would go on to champion the DREAM Act (activist Astrid Silva called him her “abuelo”), and the 2013 bipartisan Senate compromise that would have both strengthened border security, implemented employer guardrails like E-Verify, and provided a pathway to citizenship for law-abiding migrants here without documentation. It passed the Senate with a now-amazing 14 GOP votes, but House Speaker John Boehner never let it come to the floor–because he knew a combination of Democrats and moderate Republicans would pass it, which would probably cost him his job. As much as any move by Congress, that set the scene for immigrant-demonizing Trumpism, but Ralston lets the charming, formerly centrist Boehner off the hook. This is just one example where the Nevada journalist fails to identify the poison corroding the GOP; Reid and Boehner were doing their jobs, until the Republican shut down the process entirely. The effects of the defeat of that bill still echo today, in Trump and Stephen Miller’s America.

But that Senate history would be way ahead of Reid. After a successful state assembly career, Reid chose to challenge incumbent GOP Senator Paul Laxalt in 1974, the year of the great post-Watergate Democratic revival. Partly because of that partisan momentum and his own political and fundraising prowess, Reid, only 34, was given a chance against the legendary Laxalt, and in the early fall, polls showed him ahead.

But he overreached with a nasty campaign smearing not only Laxalt for possible financial improprieties, involving a family-owned casino. His demand that the family release each member’s financial statements related to the business let Laxalt claim that Reid was attacking his sister, a Carmelite nun who had taken a vow of poverty. Most Nevada papers turned against Reid, and it was over. He lost to Laxalt. The next year, he lost an ill-advised race for Las Vegas mayor. Just before he died, he told Ralston that running for mayor had been “a terrible, terrible mistake.”

With those two humiliating losses, Harry Reid looked politically dead.

His high school mentor Mike O’Callaghan, at that point Nevada governor, had another idea, which could have entombed any future political career as easily as advanced it. He asked Reid to chair the state’s Gaming Commission Board. Nevada’s similarly named Gaming Control Board is the real power, okaying or nixing new casinos or new players in the mix. But the commission board had the power, rarely used, to overrule the control board. Both entities were trying, with varying degrees of determination and success, to get organized crime out of Las Vegas.

Reid occasionally seemed soft on the mob and had his critics on the board (who would later become admirers). But he sealed his reputation for toughness by blocking casino operator Frank Rosenthal’s bid to run the Stardust Hotel. For those who need a little Hollywood with their political biographies: In the movie Casino, Reid is the gaming regulator played by Dick Smothers, up against Rosenthal, played by Robert DeNiro. Reid knew how to get along with Mafia factotums (DeNiro’s character was mobbed up but not a made man), and how to vanquish them, too. Some of the movie’s dialogue comes practically verbatim from transcripts of the Reid-Rosenthal showdown. After he denied Rosenthal’s bid to control the Stardust, Reid and his wife both found explosive devices in their car engines, and for years, they started their cars only with remote controls. Reid, a movie buff, would later tell Ralston he never saw Casino.

But only a few months after that victory came news that the FBI was investigating Reid, after catching some mobsters bragging on a wiretap they had a board member they called “Mr. Clean” in their pocket (that was Reid’s nickname, coined by supporters). They claimed they’d illegally funneled him money disguised as legal fees in exchange for mob-favorable commission rulings. The FBI began an investigation; it took several state and federal probes over five years, but Reid was fully exonerated.

After exoneration, Reid’s career took off again. He won a newly created U.S. House seat in 1982 and right away grabbed a coveted place on the House Appropriations Committee, beginning a 34-year congressional career directing millions of dollars to Nevada – to its mines, its casinos, its public lands, its Indian tribes, its non-profits, and its poor people, putting the Silver State on the map. Four years later, he ran for Senate when his friend and nemesis Paul Laxalt retired. This time, he won.

Reid quickly bonded with Byrd, the Democratic majority leader, and studied the leader’s moves. Again, he won a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, not always easy for a freshman. Mikulski would tell Ralston it was partly because the two men had come from “not only poverty, but from desperate poverty.” Reid also deferred to Byrd and considered him teacher and mentor (and told him so.) The Nevadan with an unreliable father made political fathers out of men like Mike O’Callaghan and Byrd, and it served him well.

Almost immediately, though, he was having to balance his home state priorities against one another. Reid had to live with a bill that made Yucca Mountain a nuclear waste site, against the wishes of Nevada’s Democratic representatives. (Eventually, he killed the plan.) Then he worked to slow down the inevitable development of Indian gaming, despite his other efforts on behalf of tribal Nevadans, as he did the business of the state’s established gaming interests, who opposed the (ultimately inevitable) Indian incursion into their territory.

Reid began to edge leftward in 1987, as Senate Democrats rejected Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. He had repeatedly pledged to support a President’s choice, from whichever party, but Bork’s extremism plus Democrats’ determination led him to vote him down. He continued in that direction. In 1992, he prepared a speech explaining why he would vote for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas while sympathizing with Anita Hill. But within a day he voted against him. Why? It seems Landra Reid had watched the full Thomas hearings, including Hill’s and others’ testimony, and husband Harry had not. She believed Hill, not Thomas, she told him. He switched his vote before most of his staff knew.

In 1994, a bad year for Democrats (the first Bill Clinton midterm), he faced a tough challenger and almost lost. He would never have a tough race again until the Tea Party year of 2010, but he hung on then, too.

Reid got along well enough with Clinton, although he stopped him from raising public land fees on Nevada’s mines in a deficit-reduction deal, and from taxing casinos to pay for welfare reform. As an Al Gore supporter since the 1988 primary, he went all out for the vice president and took his loss hard. He never warmed to George W. Bush, a classic prep-school-not- night-school kid. He declares the Iraq war “lost” even as members of both parties supported the 2006 last-ditch “surge” of troops. Though he was believed to back Obama while officially staying neutral, he told journalists, for a book that came out in 2009, that he marveled at how this smooth Black guy who could shift into “Negro dialect” got elected.

He wondered aloud how anyone Hispanic could ever vote for a Republican. He called the newly elected New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand the caucus’s “hottest senator.” He told an Asian group that “I don’t think you’re smarter than any of us, but you’ve convinced a lot of us that you are.” He apologized for most of those statements. There would be others.

Fighting Bush gave Reid new purpose. In May 2001, he convinced Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords to become an independent and caucus with the Democrats, at least partly by promising he could chair the Environmental Regulations subcommittee, which came with 18 staff members and a beautiful suite of offices, he told Ralston. That gave his party the majority and his friend South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle top leadership. When Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004, an election that saw Daschle lose his seat, Reid became Senate Minority Leader. Teaming with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, he began a period of Democratic revival.

Reid hired activist Ari Rabin-Havt to create a Democratic war room and focus on quick, consistent party messaging. Rabin-Havt connected Reid with folks at MoveOn, plus Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, and other bloggers. That network was critical to Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s first task in Bush’s second term: Stopping his plan to privatize Social Security. It also helped turn his Iraq war into a political albatross and led to the 2006 midterms that won Democrats the House and Senate and put Reid and Pelosi on top.

Here, Reid’s power expands exponentially. He is credited with helping Obama, a first-term senator, decide to run for President. He maneuvers to get Nevada a new, important early slot in the 2008 Democratic primaries—it becomes the third state to vote, behind Iowa and New Hampshire, and the second caucus state, positioned just in front of Representative Jim Clyburn’s newly important South Carolina primary. That sequence would shake up American and Nevada politics for several crucial cycles.

Despite his influential conversation with Obama, Reid would stay neutral in the 2008 primary; his son Rory ran Hillary Clinton’s Nevada campaign. Clinton won the popular vote on Caucus Day, but because of the vagaries of caucus rules, Obama won the most delegates. No matter the victor, the day was a boon for Reid because the invigorated process turned out an astonishing 114,000 Nevada Democrats to participate. The November election would do even more to build the famed Reid machine. Both contests validated Reid’s instinct in targeting Latinos, young people, and labor. The Reid machine meticulously expanded outreach in Clark County, dominated by Las Vegas, but expanded in once-red Washoe County around Reno. It never made inroads into the so-called cow counties—desolate rural places like Searchlight that voted against him no matter how much largesse Reid directed their way. A rural Nevada voter once told a Reid rival he only hated two men: “the man who shot my dog, and Harry Reid.”

Obama and Joe Biden would suffer similar fates, loathed by red state and county voters who nonetheless benefited from various stimulus plans, auto bailouts, green energy investments, Medicaid expansion, and other programs too many to itemize. It remains a vexation to liberal Democrats, and it’s sad to me that Harry Reid isn’t around to help us figure it out.

Reid was nonetheless invaluable to Obama in both terms. Although he personally favored a larger stimulus, closer to the $1 trillion the liberals in the administration pushed as crucial (and they were right economically), he could count votes. He knew his caucus, and the handful of Republicans whose respect he retained, and he wheeled and dealt and ultimately kept the number below the $800 billion that seemed a deal breaker. He was always a realist.

When it came to the Affordable Care Act, Reid favored a robust bill with a public option, but over the months he would trade away much of what he wanted for what he knew was more important: Senate votes. He made one big mistake, most admirers agree: Letting ACA skeptic Max Baucus of Montana waste months trying to craft a version of the bill that would bring Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, once a straight-shooting supporter of some kind of health care reform, who turned into a Mitch McConnell no-compromise extremist, on board. The bill had a last-minute, near-death experience in the House as Pelosi was forced to placate a handful of anti-choice Democrats, and Reid had to deal with constant nattering from Democratic senators like Ben Nelson and the untimely death of Ted Kennedy. But the pair of them got Obama, and the country, the biggest social welfare victory, for all its flaws, since Medicare.

2010 brought Reid his biggest GOP threat since 1994. It was the midterm in which Democrats got “shellacked,” in Obama’s words, largely because of the ACA and still sluggish economy. Reid faced a seemingly strong GOP challenger in television anchor Sue Lowdon. National oddsmakers called it a draw. But Lowdon, in that Tea Party year, lost the primary to far-right Sharron Angle, who came apart on her own racism, telling a local Hispanic student group that she kind of apologized for a scary ad showing dark illegal immigrants coming up from Mexico, but allowing that many in the group actually looked Asian. Meanwhile, Reid made one of the bravest moves of his career, introducing the DREAM Act on the Senate floor, even as pollster Mark Mellman told him it would cost him white independents and conservative Democrats, and could doom his reelection. Reid won.

Two years later, Reid would hit another one of his so-called low points, alleging that wealthy GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney–yes, another prep school kid–hadn’t paid taxes for 10 years. He had no evidence, but then again, Romney wouldn’t produce evidence that he had paid them. I remember thinking it was classic Reid, cagey, maybe not entirely kosher, but not necessarily wrong either. Reid would change his approach several times but always harp on the lack of evidence that Romney had paid anything. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gave him four Pinnochios for what he considered a “lie.” Eventually Romney said he’d paid an average rate of 14 percent–roughly half the rate average Americans paid, largely because so much of his income came from his investments and could be sheltered.

But the well-to-do Reid himself only paid in the realm of 17-19 percent. Reid would never apologize for his gambit, telling CNN’s Dana Bash in 2015 “Romney didn’t win, did he?” He told Ralston shortly before he died: “But for me, I’m sure Romney would have been elected.” I’m not sure, but I chuckled nonetheless.

Ralston saves his most extreme opprobrium for two late Reid moves. As minority leader in 2005, he worked a compromise to stop Republicans from doing away with the filibuster in order to approve George W. Bush’s cabinet and judicial appointees with only 51 votes, and instead agreed to usher some appointees through. But in 2013 he himself invoked the “nuclear option” to pass the same appointments for President Obama with only 51 Senate votes (but preserving the 60-vote rule for Supreme Court nominees.) Obama, Reid argued correctly, had more appointments blocked than Bush. Ralston also blames Reid for the fact that Mitch McConnell would in 2017 eliminate the filibuster even for Supreme Court nominees, as though the scheming McConnell would have never considered that option.

Ralston clearly thinks that Reid was a hypocrite in opposing the nuclear option in 2005 but using it in 2013. He refuses to take in how badly Republicans misused their power, how determined they were to block Obama’s presidency. You could maybe forgive that if he was writing in 2014, but we saw Mitch McConnell block Merrick Garland, Obama’s choice to succeed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, without even a hearing (ostensibly because it was 11 months before the 2016 election), then rush to put Amy Coney Barrett on the bench to follow the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg only weeks before the 2020 election.

Ralston, unbelievably, mentions neither.

But before that last supposed “gaffe” came Reid’s political and health debacle: while exercising on New Year’s Day 2015, he took a bad fall, and broke bones, including an eye socket. I remember seeing him when he finally emerged. His large sunglasses and cane made him seem frail; it also made him look dangerous, like a mobster, or a crusading mob victim. It was clear pretty quickly that he would retire, and indeed, he announced in March 2015 that he would not seek reelection the following year (the old pugilist stayed in the ring, though, fighting to ensure that Clinton carried Nevada).

It is hard not to wonder how Harry Reid would have fought Trump as a Senate leader in 2017, or in 2021 (he died on December 28, 2021, but he had been absent from political life for a while.)  His hand-picked successor, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, is a letdown to most of us. Reid’s occasional gaffes, or smashmouth political maneuvers, seem more fit for this horrible age than Schumer’s regular composition of stern letters to Trump, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s version of the same.

Democrats would do well to have a leader who came of age fighting the Mafia, even if he didn’t do it all perfectly. This is a book worth reading, even if Ralston gets the ratio of partisan warfare wrong. It’s worth understanding the man from Searchlight. We owe him a great deal.