Harry Reid’s Tea Party Dreams

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Thanks to a series of missteps by Sue Lowden, the top GOP candidate in Nevada’s 2010 senate race, it’s beginning to look like Nevada senator Harry Reid could square off against the Tea Party come November. That’s a battle Reid would love, and one that political experts in Nevada say largely favors the Senate majority leader.

As both Politico and I reported today, Reid’s main challenger, Lowden, a former chair of the Nevada GOP, has stumbled in the final weeks before Nevada’s June 8 primary. (Reid has no Democratic primary opponent.) She blundered when she implicitly suggested that patients barter with doctors for care and even trade chickens. And now one of her primary opponents, Danny Tarkanian, says Lowden broke campaign finance law by accepting an RV from a donor that she’s used to travel the state. (Lowden’s campaign says she in compliance with the law.) Nonetheless, Lowden has slipped in the polls, with a Democratic-funded poll showing Sharron Angle, the Tea Party-backed underdog on the GOP side, just beating Lowden and Tarkanian, Politico reported.

All of this bodes well for Reid, who, as I reported today, also has the passage of financial reform to bolster his record on the campaign trail. From the sounds of it, his campaign couldn’t be happier if it faced the Tea Party candidate, Angle, in November and not Lowden, the more established, traditional GOPer. Indeed, Reid’s campaign has highlighted Lowden’s gaffes as often as it can in an effort to knock her out of contention for the fall. And if Angle does win on June 8, there’s no doubting Reid’s people will do everything they can to paint the Tea Party Express darling as cut from the Rand-Paul-Civil-Rights-Act cloth.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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