Overheard with Evan Smith

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard With Evan Smith" comes from: HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy; Claire and Carl Stuart; Christine and Philip Dial; Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com; Diane Land and Steve Adler; and Karey and Chris Oddo.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's a best-in-class political journalist whose nonprofit news startup, "The Nevada Independent," turns nine this year.

His long-awaited biography of the late US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, "The Game Changer," has just been published.

He's Jon Ralston.

This is "Overheard."

(audience applauding) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard."

(audience applauding) Jon, old friend, welcome.

- Thanks for having me, Evan.

- It's so good to be with you.

Look, congratulations on this book.

I know how important this book is to you, how hard you've worked on it, how long you've worked on it.

It must be a relief and a joy for you to see it in print.

- I'm waiting for the joy part to come.

I'm sure it will.

It's just surreal to me that it's out there in the world, finally.

I've been working on this for almost five years.

And unfortunately, the senator passed away six months into the beginning of the project.

But it's nice to have it out there, and it's been pretty well received so far.

- Yeah, and you've been working on the book for five years, but you worked on Harry Reid, going all the way back to 1986 when you became a political reporter at the "Las Vegas Review-Journal" when he ran for the Senate that year.

You've really been reporting on him in one fashion or another for 40 years.

- Yes, I was only three years old when I started (laughs).

- Let me say, you're Benjamin Buttoning.

You look great.

- Yes.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, listen, Harry Reid first ran, well, his second time around running for the Senate.

- He lost the first time.

- And lost.

But then he got elected to Congress in the early '80s and ran for the Senate again in '86.

And I was thrown into that race very late in that race.

And I was thoroughly unimpressed with Harry Reid when I first met him.

- To show us all how much you ultimately knew about.

- I was a very insightful cub reporter.

No way this guy can win the race.

- Can't win, possibly.

- He can't.

He has no charisma.

He doesn't speak very well.

And he won that race, despite Ronald Reagan coming to Nevada three times to try to help the Republican nominee.

And he served until 2016.

A very long career.

And he was a fascinating guy, because that public persona, not being very impressive, belied a very private, ruthless, effective master strategist.

- Yeah, and he ended up being the most consequential politician from Nevada ever, and one of the most powerful figures in Congress, in politics, of the modern era.

All of our lives were impacted every day by work that Harry Reid led, by decisions he made, by things he did or things he prevented.

There's no way that history will not regard him that way.

- No, I think it's not that controversial to say he's the most powerful guy in the history of Nevada politics.

Some people might say another guy way back when, named Pat McCarran, might have been.

He was one of the first political bosses.

- Yeah, his name was on the airport until Harry Reid's name displaced it.

- Exactly, which is very ironic.

And by the way, they rushed that naming ceremony to get it done right before he died.

He died 10 days after they named the airport for him.

And so, yeah, I don't think there's much argument about that, Evan.

How consequential was he nationally?

I think, for a quarter century, he was very, very important, both in good and bad ways, perhaps.

- He helped get legislation passed that wouldn't have passed without his leadership and vision.

Whether you like Obamacare or not, he got that done.

- Without Harry Reid, let's just say this outright, without Harry Reid, the Affordable Care Act would not have become law.

- And President Obama, who did an interview with the book said that.

- Acknowledges it.

- Acknowledges that much.

He also got the stimulus bill passed before Obamacare, which a lot of people think saved the economy after the Big Recession.

But, you know, and he was a very self-aware guy, in many ways.

Many politicians are not.

But there was no masks to Harry Reid, as I said, no self-editing mechanism at all.

But I don't think he really acknowledged how much he contributed to the coarsening of the discourse in DC, the polarization that now everyone is familiar with.

- Say more about that.

- He said things that that were very intemperate publicly, whether it was in a stakeout on the Capitol or even on the Senate floor, saying Mitt Romney hadn't paid his taxes when he had no evidence of it, and it turned out not to be true.

He attacked the Koch brothers, 'cause he thought it was good politically, on the Senate floor.

He called the President of the United States, George W. Bush, who I think was from this state- - Possibly.

- He called him a loser and a liar.

I mean, things that just were not said in, not just polite society- - Of course, by the standards of today, that's like child's play.

- Right, in fact, I have said, if I may, I don't think Harry Reid and Donald Trump are very much alike in many ways, but they're similar in that they have no self-editing mechanism.

And they'll just say, whatever is in their inside voice becomes their outside voice.

And to some extent, that helped Reid because he seemed more authentic.

And I think he was, in many ways, than others.

On the other hand, I used to see his staff getting on their BlackBerries, you know, probably saying to each other: "How are we gonna fix this one?"

- Right.

The fact that you said BlackBerries dates you a little bit.

But anyway, okay.

So let's go back, actually, to the origins of this book.

So you became interested in writing a biography of Harry Reid, 25, 26 years ago, kind of turn of this century.

And not a lot of interest from Harry Reid, as you could tell, in letting you write that book.

- I was not Harry Reid's favorite journalist ever.

He got mad at me for a column I wrote in the 1990s.

Wouldn't talk to me for a couple of years.

And then he got mad at me for some other columns that I wrote in the early 2000s, and then didn't talk to me for quite some time, would not come on my program.

I had a program on PBS.

Can I promote PBS here?

- You can promote PBS.

Yes, that's okay.

- And, so I wanted to write a book about him, nevertheless, even though he tried to get me, eventually, successfully fired from my last TV job, just because he was so fascinating in the ways that I've already alluded to.

And he was so effective.

And I could see how powerful he'd become, which no one would believe.

But I got stiff-armed by him and his staff, either directly stiff-armed, or they'd say, "Yeah, we're thinking about it."

And I knew what that meant, as well.

And then in the late 2000s, I think it was 2008, an autobiography came out that he wrote with a writer from "Esquire."

And it did not tell the story.

It was like the rock skimming across the water.

- But you thought, at that point: "Well, there goes my chance of writing a book about Harry Reid," because he's put his own book out.

- Started thinking about children's books, other things.

But no, seriously, (audience laughing) I decided that I would still keep trying, because I thought that the real story needed to be told, of just how ruthless this guy was in achieving what he did.

And he had a great story to tell.

He came from nothing, and this speck on the map called Searchlight, and became the most powerful guy on Capitol Hill.

And eventually, Evan, after he left office in 2016, a little less than five years later, he called me and had me summoned into his office, which of course was then on the Las Vegas Strip, 'cause that's where senators go afterwards, they go have an office in the Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip.

- He literally had an office, after he retired, this is the most powerful guy, he had an office in the Bellagio.

- Is that the most Nevada thing you've ever heard?

- It's so Nevada.

- Yes.

- That is so Nevada.

Okay.

- And so I went up to this office, and he said to me, "Jon, you and I have something in common.

We're both survivors."

I had survived in spite of him, which I did not say to him, because I knew he had gotten me fired.

And he said, "I want you to do the book.

I know I'm not gonna like everything you write, but you know me better than anybody else in the media.

You can do this justice.

Let's get started."

- And so this is in 2021.

- Right.

- 2021.

And then six months go by, you do a whole bunch of interviews on Zoom, which I'm assuming was, at least partly, because if I'm remembering, like, the timeframe is aligned with the pandemic, right?

- Exactly.

- And then he dies.

He dies six months into the reporting on this book, right after Christmas in 2021.

So you got an enormous amount of time with him, on the one hand, but then there's all this reporting that happens after he's gone.

You can't ask him about stuff you want to know, that you find, gave you access to his archive at the University of Nevada, Reno.

You go through the archive.

There were all these things you would like to ask him about.

He's not a participant in this book, at that point.

- Yeah.

That was very, very frustrating.

And I'm still so much saddened by the fact that he wasn't alive to, because I would've loved to have gotten his reaction to the book.

I wanted him to read the book.

And so, but the archive proved to be invaluable.

The archive that he has, as you said, at the University of Nevada, Reno, it's huge.

- And it was critical to this book, right?

- Critical to the book.

It helped me flesh out so many things.

I knew more about Harry Reid than anybody else in the Nevada media or the national media.

And I learned more about him after he died from that archive, I think, than I knew.

So many different things.

These handwritten notes that he had copied and put into his archive, Evan, some of them very tender and kind.

And you don't see those adjectives used with Harry Reid- - About Harry Reid, right, yeah.

- very often.

But that's how he helped make connections with people.

I found the most startling find, and maybe the most valuable find, the biggest news maybe in the book, is I found a bunch of FBI files on him that he had clearly requested.

He was investigated by the FBI when he was the head of the Gaming Regulatory Board in Nevada, and even well into his terms in Congress in the early '80s.

And for some serious kinds of things.

I would've loved to have asked him about that.

- Yeah, the FBI investigated him for allegedly being mobbed up.

That's the most Nevada thing ever, actually.

- It is.

The guy who's supposedly keeping the mob out- - Head of the gaming commission.

- Head of the gaming commission being mobbed up.

- Amazing.

- And they investigated him for taking payoffs, for concealing campaign contributions, for doing all kinds of things.

The state also investigated him, because there were a couple of Kansas City mobsters, overheard on a FBI wiretap, talking about how they have a clean face in their pocket, or words to that effect.

- Clean face.

- Clean face, which had been a nickname that had been given to him by one of his allies, ironically enough, in the media, 'cause he had such a pristine reputation when he was in the legislature.

and as lieutenant governor.

And so this became a big deal, a sensation in Nevada when this came out.

The state embarked on an investigation.

They hired two former Texas Rangers to come to Nevada and investigate everything.

Reid said they came to his house and looked at receipts for all kinds of stuff, because they thought he was taking money.

- But they never found anything.

- They never found anything.

He was exonerated by the state.

The FBI never found anything.

And they investigated him even after he left Nevada.

- But the fact of the investigation was not known until... - The investigation was known, but not as long as it went on or the breadth of what they were looking at.

- You definitely broke news in this, as it relates to the specifics of it.

- Yes, absolutely.

- For sure.

So it's a wonderful book.

And I think anybody who wants to understand the way the modern era of politics played out, it's an essential read.

I'm interested to know what you think he would have thought of it.

I mean, you said he wasn't alive long enough to read it, obviously.

What would he have said about this book?

- I don't know.

Maybe I'm just being Pollyanna about this.

But I think he would've thought it painted an accurate picture.

- [Evan] Accurate.

- I think he might have quibbled with a few things.

- But warts and all.

- Yes, but I think he knew those warts were gonna be in there.

He knew I would raise questions about him saying that Mitt Romney didn't pay his taxes when he had no proof of that.

One great thing I found that I haven't talked about much, it makes news, I think, in the book, although of a different kind, is after he made that allegation, which his staff did not want him to make 'cause they knew he couldn't back it up- - Back it up.

Yeah.

- some smart researcher in his office said, "You know what?

We ought to see what Harry Reid's tax rate is," because he was very wealthy by this time.

And so they went through all of his tax returns, and there's memos I found on this, and found, much to their surprise, that he was paying a much lower tax rate than someone of his wealth should be paying.

And so they were afraid, Reid's people were afraid that Romney was gonna demand Reid release his tax returns.

- Be careful what you wish, right?

- And so Reid saw what they found, and they said, "You might have to release this."

And he looked at them and said, "I'm not doing that."

- Amazing.

- Yeah.

- I wonder what Reid would think about, if not the book, the politics of this moment, 2026.

Like, we don't have the benefit of him experiencing what we've all experienced over the last year: the chaos, the abnormality of it all, or the new abnormal of it all, the complete breakdown of norms, institutions, guardrails, you know, presidential power unchecked.

I just think about what someone like Harry Reid might have made of this moment.

- Can I talk about Trump and Reid for just a second to lead into this discussion?

- Yeah.

- When Reid was first in Congress, Donald Trump held a fundraiser for Reid in his palatial New York apartment.

- Right, well, there were two casino, or, you know, people who came from a world in which casinos were a thing, right?

- And of course, as it's described to me, what Trump did at this fundraiser was take Reid out of the main room and yell at him about what a terrible guy Steve Wynn, who was competing with him, Atlantic City, at the time was, and they later became friends, just like everything changes.

Later, of course, Reid became a very harsh critic of Trump, even after he was out of office.

In fact, since we're in Texas, he replaced George W. Bush as the worst president in history, in Reid's mind, with Donald Trump.

And he said that: "I used to think it was Bush, now it's Trump."

But one thing I think Reid just did not come to terms with, Evan, was that he was part of the reason that Washington is so broken, - Yeah.

- because the dialogue became so crass.

And he was really expert in that.

And because he was willing to push the envelope.

Despite being a Senate institutionalist and a guy who believed in decorum in the Senate, he broke it many, many times.

But I think he would be very distressed by and agree with a lot of the criticism that Democrats are getting for, you know, not fighting the way that they should be, for being so compliant or not having any coherent message.

Reid and the people around him, frankly, were really experts at crafting adversarial messages.

That's how they stopped Bush from privatizing Social Security.

They ran a campaign to the point where Bush had to give up.

I think Reid would've wanted to have a war room to go after Trump and the Republicans.

And he said a lot of intemperate things in his life.

I can't imagine what he would have said during the last five years.

I really can't imagine.

- Oh, I suspect that's true.

Let's back off of Reid and talk about Nevada.

So this is a state that over time has been disrespected, discounted, to the point that you have a hashtag on social media, when you post stuff about politics in Nevada, it's always #WeMatter.

It's like you have to say it, right?

But there is this idea that Nevada has been overlooked, or, you know, hasn't been given enough significance.

And of late, actually, Nevada has come on as a very important state electorally.

It's one of only seven states that's contested in every presidential election.

So you don't have to say it: it does matter.

But clearly, culturally, there's something going on there where Nevada feels like it's not given nearly enough attention or credit.

- If I may, Evan, when I first came to Las Vegas in 1984, I didn't think I'd be there very long.

I didn't think the city had a soul.

I didn't like being in- - Grew up in Buffalo, went to college back east, and then in the upper Midwest.

- Yeah, my dad read "The New York Times" every day.

And I think I had it in my mind I was gonna go back east and work for "The New York Times" at some point.

But I fell in love with the state.

And I had a lot of opportunities presented to myself.

And I became the biggest Nevada partisan of anyone there.

And it bothered me that you use some verbs.

I don't think you really got to the heart of it, not overlooked.

We were ridiculed and mocked, right?

And we were seen in this very cliche way as just, you know, glitz, and there's prostitutes on every corner and slot machines in every 7-Eleven... Oh, wait a second.

That part's true.

- Yeah, I'm waiting for the part that's been exaggerated.

Wait a minute.

- And so when we finally got into the early state mix in 2008, we were kind of the ugly stepchild, right?

I mean, New Hampshire was well known and Iowa was well known.

And the national media, they had their routine of going to those places.

They had their favorite bars and restaurants.

Nobody knew anything about Nevada.

And they didn't want to come all the way out to Nevada.

So I started this kind of plaintiff cry: We matter too!

And so then eventually I created a hashtag out of it.

And we have mattered.

We have mattered.

But I still say it just in case people forget.

- I mean, it's definitely the case that at presidential election time, we are nail biting, right?

It's like down to the wire with Nevada.

The last presidential election, 2024, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by a very small margin.

- Just under three points.

Yeah.

- Right.

In Nevada.

The previous elections, Nevada had gone for the Democrats.

Like, I think it's a state that is up for grabs at a time when so many, including the one that we're sitting in today, are not contested.

- And the reason that the presidential candidates won in Nevada four successive cycles, after essentially Republican domination, can be solely traced to Harry Reid building a Democratic machine there that turned out voters up and down the ticket; until one election, shockingly, Obama won the second time by I think 13 points, something like that.

- And just to be clear, he marshaled the power of the unions, right?

We've all heard about the Culinary Workers Union on cable television every four years.

Like, "Oh, what happens with the culinary workers?"

That's gonna make a big difference.

He also recognized the importance of the Hispanic vote, maybe earlier than some other people did.

- And now those two were related, because the union is about half Hispanic, a little bit more, that represents the casino workers.

And so there was no such thing as the Hispanic vote when I first started covering politics in Nevada 40 years ago.

But it gradually became sizable.

And Reid saw it coming.

And I found, by the way, in that archive, all kinds of memos talking about how we have to start marshaling the Hispanic vote, the Hispanic voter project outreach that was done.

And so he was able to do that.

And he created this machine that not only registered voters, but turned them out.

- Yeah.

- And they essentially demolished the Republican bench, in so doing, by winning all of the elections.

And even now, even now you see that still is there.

There's three Democratic Congress representatives who are not gonna lose because there's no good Republicans to run against them.

- So that makes me want to ask you about this election cycle.

You're gonna be back on cable TV, I know, as we get closer to November talking about the election from your perspective in Nevada.

This is of course a midterm election, not a presidential, but the midterm is gonna be instructive in terms of how to think about the next couple of years.

Do you have a sense that something is going on electorally?

You know, here in Texas, we're in the early vote period heading into the primary, and everybody's going gaga over these early vote numbers.

No one really knows what's going on.

People are making assumptions that something's going on.

May be, it may not be.

But across the country, if you look at all these special election results, there does seem to be something going on.

Is that your perspective, an expert commentator on politics?

- Oh, thanks for putting the pressure on.

- Yeah.

(audience laughing) - Listen, there's no doubt that there's something going on in the country, and there's no doubt that there's something going on in Nevada.

And not just from data that I've seen from polls, public and private, but behavior.

Joe Lombardo, who is the Republican governor, who ran a very close race four years ago, is going to be running probably against the attorney general, a Democrat.

But they're not that worried about him.

He has a bunch of baggage, the Democratic candidate.

And they're worried about their own guy at 1600 Pennsylvania and what his numbers are.

- Lombardo's real opponent in this race- - Is Trump.

- is Donald Trump.

- And they know that.

They know that.

In fact, one of his people, I'll disclose something I probably shouldn't here, but told me over lunch the other day that this would be a 15-point race if the guy's name in the White House was Joe Smith.

This is a Republican operative telling me this.

I think 15 is an exaggeration, but probably would be an eight to 10 point race.

Now it looks like it could be close.

And they're worried about the Trump effect.

Trump's numbers in Nevada are not great.

They're not as bad as they are in some other states, but they're not great.

And Lombardo's numbers are decent, but he's not invincible.

So that's the challenge for the next few months, is to not get the base upset by distancing yourself from Trump too much, but not lose the moderates and the independent vote, which Trump has already lost.

He's underwater there.

- And you say that the nonpartisan, you've said to me that, it's not called independent, it's called nonpartisan, that the nonpartisan registration, a state like Nevada, you have to register by party: Democrat, Republican, Nonpartisan.

That nonpartisan registration number is going up and up and up in Nevada.

- It's skyrocketed because the legislature passed automatic voter registration, which means that the DMV, when you go get your license or any other transaction there, you can register to vote.

And if you don't, you get defaulted to nonpartisan.

And so that has skyrocketed.

You know, the late pollster, Mark Mellman, who I'm sure you knew, once said to me: "There's no such thing as a nonpartisan or independent voter.

They're actually Democrats or Republicans for whatever reason.

But it's harder to find them now in Nevada.

And so the campaigns that are skillful enough in doing that, and by the way, I believe that's one of the reasons Joe Lombardo was able to beat the only governor, the incumbent governor who lost in 2022, they understood that.

- It was the nonpartisan voters.

- [Jon] It was the nonpartisan voters.

- But this time the nonpartisan voters might cut, as they have seemed to in other places in the country, the other way.

- And I think that's what Lombardo's worried about.

- He's worried about that.

- So we have about three minutes left.

I want to ask you about "The Nevada Independent."

I am so proud of what you have built there.

- Thank you.

- I think that you have solved, in a place that desperately needs it, the news desert problem, by providing good, credible, reliable, "down the middle solves a riddle" news and information to a state that wants to participate in its democracy.

These people want to be thoughtful and productive citizens, and the legacy media have failed them.

And you've given them something that they otherwise wouldn't have.

I want you to reflect on what nine years of this has been for you, because you really are a force for good in that state.

- Well, I really appreciate everything you just said.

And you know that you helped me a lot in the beginning get on the right track.

And I've stayed on it.

And we're still alive after nine years, and you know what an accomplishment that is.

Listen, I started "The Nevada Independent" in 2017, because I believe that there was a yearning out there for... The media had gone, you know, from being liked okay to being disdained by a vast swath of Americans.

But I believe people wanted to find a place that they could trust.

Amid, you know, the advent of the internet, so many news sources.

And people can't really make sense of things.

So I wanted people to come to a place where you'd have in-depth, nonpartisan, fact-based reporting where they could help, we could help them make sense of an increasingly chaotic world.

And so that's what I think we have done.

Is it a success?

I think success, and you know this better than anybody, is still being alive.

We're also, we've quadrupled in size and staff, and we are now the only statewide news organization in Nevada.

So I feel gratified by that.

But I've just worked with fantastic people.

- You're covering issues.

You're covering elections.

I mean, that to me, you know, people can't participate in our democracy if they don't know what they're being asked to do.

And often that begins at election time with knowing there's an election, knowing the candidates on the ballot, and being motivated by the way that decisions being made affect them, being motivated to turn out to vote.

And like a good news organization has that, I think, very positive effect on democracy, if it's done in the right way.

And I know that you've done this absolutely the right way.

What is the last thing that we should say about this book?

What do you want people really to take away from this book?

- Harry Reid has a fascinating political story, life story, going from really nothing to really being at the pinnacle.

But this is also the story of the evolution of Nevada, I think.

And it's also the story of what's happened to politics.

- It's really a story about all of us.

- I hope so.

I hope so.

And I hope that comes across.

- Yeah, it does.

Okay, well, Jon, it's always good to see you.

Congratulations on the book, and continued success with "The Independent" and everything else.

- Thanks for having me.

- Jon Ralston.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) - [Evan] We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- People just can't get out of their own silos, their confirmation bias, the validation culture that exists.

They don't want to listen to other points of view.

They don't want to even consider other points of view have any validity whatsoever.

And that's why, and you used the right word, that's part of the reason social media has become a cancer in society, and it's affected our business too.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard With Evan Smith" comes from: HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy; Claire and Carl Stuart; Christine and Philip Dial; Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com; Diane Land and Steve Adler; and Karey and Chris Oddo.

(bright flute music)