Poll: Reid's numbers still low in Nevada

LAS VEGAS, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- An early advertising blitz by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has done little to make more Nevada voters like him, a poll released Friday indicated.

Almost half, 49 percent, of those surveyed for the Las Vegas Review-Journal said they have an unfavorable opinion of Reid and 38 percent viewed him favorably. The poll was done six weeks after Reid launched an advertising campaign.

Those numbers mirror those of a mid-August poll done for the Review-Journal that showed him with a 37 percent approval rating and 50 percent unfavorable rating. In July, his numbers were 34 percent favorable and 47 percent unfavorable.

The senator won a fourth term five years ago with 61 percent of the vote.

"I'd be worried," Michael Franz, an expert on political advertising at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, told the newspaper. "I'd stop if I had aired ads for two or three weeks and it wasn't moving the needle."

Reid is seeking a fifth term in November 2010. He has been majority leader since Democrats took control of the Senate in 2006.

Brandon Hall, Reid's campaign manager, said he was confident in spite of the senator's poor numbers.

Nine Republicans are fighting for the party's nomination. Only three have double-digit support among members of their own party -- Sue Lowden, a businesswoman and former Republican official, with 25 percent; lawyer Danny Tarkanian, 24 percent; and former state Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, 13 percent.

The most recent Mason-Dixon Polling & Research surveyed 625 registered voters. The margin of error is 4 percentage points either way.