It’s widely recognized that in the marquee 2010 Senate race, Majority Leader Harry Reid ran a nearly flawless, textbook campaign, an operation so extraordinary that it enabled him to defy an almost certain political death.
It turns out he got some inadvertent inside help. Interviews with Nevada and Washington Republicans familiar with the campaign of Reid’s GOP opponent, Sharron Angle, describe a not-ready-for-prime-time effort that was equally astonishing — a model of dysfunction that was as bad as Reid’s campaign was good.
At the center of it was Terry Campbell, Angle’s closest adviser, who held the title of campaign manager.
A longtime political ally to Angle, Campbell ran her campaigns for the state Legislature almost a decade ago before taking the reins of her long-shot Senate primary bid along with another veteran supporter, Jerry Stacy, and several tea party volunteers.
Running a primary campaign out of the candidate’s living room, Stacy and Campbell were the only two staffers on Angle’s payroll?— and the only two aides she thanked publicly in her June victory speech.
That proved to be the high point of the campaign.
In one occasion that was emblematic of the chaos that marked the fall effort, Campbell nearly scuttled an appearance by Sen. John McCain while the 2008 GOP presidential nominee was midair on the way to an Angle rally at The Orleans Hotel and Casino.
While McCain was en route to the event, held five days before Election Day, Angle was bombarded with calls from teary tea party activists who begged her not to campaign with the Arizona senator because they contended he was not conservative enough to appear on the same stage with her.
The source of the emotional appeals from some of Angle’s most loyal followers? Campbell himself did the urging, according to multiple sources with first-hand knowledge of the incident. Much to the relief of national Republicans, Angle ignored their pleas, and the McCain event went on without a hitch.
“In the 20 years that I’ve been involved politically, I’ve never had the misfortune of working with such sheer, utter incompetence. Too much is at stake in these political campaigns?— people like Campbell don’t need to be anywhere near them,” said Chris LaCivita, who served as political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee this fall and worked directly with the Angle campaign. “If they were filming a sequel to the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ Terry Campbell would have a feature role.”
After capturing the nomination, Campbell was consistently unaware of the daily metrics in the campaign, including the cash-on-hand situation and which advertisements were on the air, according to several Republican operatives who were frequently on conference calls with him.
Every Republican who worked with the campaign and was interviewed for this story recalled how both of Campbell’s voice mail boxes were consistently full and he would often not answer e-mails for days at a time?— no matter if he was in his self-described “Command Center” in his Missouri home or on the road with Angle in Nevada.
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