A wall of beautiful voters.

How the Harry Reid Machine May Have Killed Trump’s Chances

By bringing Hispanics out in droves in early voting, the Senate minority leader is trying to turn Nevada into a bellwether for a Clinton win.

By Jon Ralston

The line Friday evening stretched outside Cardenas Market in Las Vegas, teeming with Hispanic voters eager to cast ballots.

Many had to wait for hours on the last day of a fortnight of early voting in Nevada, plied by food and exhortations from activists who didn’t have to do much. Election officials had to keep the polling place open an extra three hours to accommodate the line, which was described thusly on Twitter by Yvanna Cancela, the political director for the majority Hispanic Culinary union:

“Looks like Trump got his wall after all. A wall of beautiful voters.”

By the time Donald Trump’s chief Nevada poll watcher arrived at the supermarket to complain about the late voting, apparently clued in by the massive amount of social media traffic about the historic, organic turnout, it was too late. Just under 2,000 voters had cast ballots at the market, adding to a record Democratic firewall (73,000 ballot lead in early voting) in the Las Vegas area and putting a fitting final nail in Trump’s Nevada coffin.

The next day, Trump arrived in Reno looking like a dead man walking, railing at the scene in Vegas the night before and blaming “crazy, broken Harry Reid and his corrupt political machine.” Trump’s key ally in Nevada, state Republican Chairman Michael McDonald, preceded Trump on the Reno stage and yelled about allowing “a certain group” to vote until the late hours.

They raged, raged against the dying of their chances. Yet about one thing Trump was right: Harry Reid built this. After two years of boosting voter registration among key Democratic demographics, the retiring Senate minority leader has brought turnout among Hispanics in the state to record levels. In doing so, he’s almost surely delivered the state for Hillary Clinton—and possibly with it the presidential race (Trump has only the narrowest path to 270 electoral votes without Nevada). The reality of this election is that if Clinton wins, especially if she ends up needing Nevada, it’s not a stretch to declare that Reid was the single most important person in her victory.

Of course, Harry Reid couldn’t have done this without Trump, who laid the foundation when he announced his candidacy talking about Mexican rapists and murderers, erected a wall around his primary foes with his hard-edged immigration positions and accused an American judge of bias because of his Latino heritage.

A microcosm of the country, with its melting pot population and growing Latino voting bloc, Nevada signaled with its early voting turnout and record Hispanic participation that Trump has proven a better turnout driver of that demographic than anyone could have imagined—and for all the wrong reasons. It is ironic now to recall the GOP strategists behind that Republican National Committee autopsy in 2012, whose main exhortation was to reach out to minority voters lest another election be lost. As if in answer to that, GOP primary voters nominated the antithesis of its prescription.

Reid’s ground operation exploited the fear and loathing of Trump to the max, and the early results bear it out: Whereas the Latino vote was 15 percent of the Nevada electorate in 2008 and 18 percent in 2012, data I have seen shows now it is up 30 percent from 2012 in early voting, meaning it could go above 20 percent of all voters by Tuesday evening.

“We’ve been focused on registering and building our Latino turnout from Day 1,” said one Democratic organizer. “That is paying dividends with Latino turnout up in the early vote and potentially up overall. In five out of the six highest Hispanic precincts, turnout in the early vote exceeded ’12.”

You can be sure one of those precincts included the Cardenas market.

Now, in virtually ensuring that Clinton has enough votes banked in early voting to take Nevada, Reid can ride off into the sunset knowing he has created perhaps the most fearsome political machine in history, one that will have delivered three successive victories to Democratic presidential nominees, saved himself in 2010 and probably filled his seat this cycle with his chosen successor. He might also have cemented Nevada’s bellwether status–only once in the last century (1976) has the state failed to vote for the eventual winner.

Yes, they still have to count the votes Tuesday. And I suppose a miracle could occur, all the data and history could be wrong and Trump could win Nevada.

But saying that almost certainly will not occur is not idle speculation, nor does it have anything to do with either campaign, even though Trump’s essentially is nonexistent here: It’s about math.

The Democrats have such a huge ballot lead in Clark County that Trump would have to win the rest of the state by unprecedented margins to win. Clark is about 70 percent of the vote, and if past is prologue, two-thirds of Nevadans voted before Election Day. There simply are not enough votes left for Trump to win unless something very, very strange is going on.

Here’s how Team Reid, fully integrated with a Clinton campaign that early on recognized the power of Hispanic voters here and elsewhere, did it:

After a disastrous 2014, in which a red wave swept the state and embarrassed the machine that Reid erected, his right-hand in Nevada and nonpareil operative, Rebecca Lambe, began preparing for 2016. The Reid folks knew two things: Clinton would not generate the enthusiasm Obama had, and they needed to beef up registration in the state.

They did not miss anything, even at the hidden, granular level. In the legislature of 2015—it only meets every two years—Lambe directed traffic to ensure early voting hours were not curtailed. (That paid off Friday night, although the general rule always has been if you are in line, you get to vote.)

A few weeks ago, they threatened to sue the Republican secretary of state if she didn’t extend registration deadlines to comply with federal law. She did.

And when the final registration figures came in, the Democrats had padded their lead to nearly 90,000 statewide, matching the 2012 numbers. All they had to do was overcome the enthusiasm gap by building up the raw vote totals, which is what they did.

But Team Reid did something else, too, which everyone has missed. Even though nonpartisan registration has grown faster than either major party, the Reid folks saw that happening and adjusted.

“Much of the nonpartisan registration that occurred this year was done by our side,” one Reidite told me. “Looking at the data, many of the nonpartisans who are voting are younger (20 percent), include people of color (11 percent Latino) and are new registrants (24 percent) as of yesterday.”

So the composition of the early vote, half of which was amassed before last week’s disastrous FBI letter, may be worse than it seems for Trump. And it seems devastating on its face.

Consider recent history. In both 2008 and 2012, the early vote numbers were predictive. The Democrats built up huge leads in Clark County and those banked votes translated into 13 and 7 point wins for Barack Obama, respectively.

The early vote totals, even though turnout is slightly down, are very close to 2012. So Team Trump must come up with fantasy scenarios— for instance, that he is winning independents, who will make up a fifth of turnout, by a landslide—to conjure a victory here. But no reliable polling data—and there is precious little of that—indicates Trump is doing that or that Clinton is hemorrhaging her base as much as Trump is.

The math simply does not work for Trump unless he gets an extraordinary Election Day turnout and wins Tuesday by double digits. That is about as likely as Chris Christie being named transportation secretary to help rebuild the country’s crumbling bridges.

It isn’t the first time Reid has come to Clinton’s rescue. When she was in trouble, having lost almost her entire lead over Bernie Sanders here and coming off a landslide loss in New Hampshire, Reid pretended to be neutral but put his finger on the scales for her by calling the Culinary to turn out Latino voters for her.

And now his formidable political organization has erected that wall of voters Cancela invoked, one that almost guarantees Clinton a Nevada win Tuesday and forecloses much of Trump’s paths to 270.

Ironically, this comes eight years after Reid posed as Switzerland in the Democratic primary after he had secretly urged Obama to get in against Clinton because he didn’t think she could win. I’d say the ledger is now balanced.

Sure, Trump could win Nevada on Tuesday. But it’s a long, long shot, and the Republicans would be better off here looking ahead to next cycle because after this final demonstration of Reid’s utter ruthlessness and organizing ability, the Democrats in Nevada know the truth:

Apres Harry, le deluge.