Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has looked vulnerable in the polls for months. Now a new Mason-Dixon poll shows him trailing two Republican challengers. Danny Tarkanian, a former basketball player at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, would beat Reid by 11 points and is just shy of the 50 percent mark. The race is closer against state GOP chairwoman Sue Lowden, who leads Reid by 45 percent to 40 percent.
John Ensign, Nevada’s Republican junior senator and the man who nearly unseated Reid in 1998, doesn’t fare much better in the poll. Thirty-seven percent of voters said they planned to vote against him and 23 percent said they’d consider backing a challenger, compared to 30 percent who intend to vote for him in 2012. Ensign has recently admitted to an extramarital affair with a former staffer, but these numbers also suggest that Republicans are benefiting from an anti-incumbent mood rather than a sustained revival of their own party brand.
