's Races to Watch

Nevada U.S. Senate Race: Harry Reid and Sharron Angle

Spending
in the high-profile and bitterly fought contest between U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Tea Party–backed Republican challenger Sharron Angle in
Nevada could top more than $50 million, but that figure pales in
comparison to the psychic blow of an Angle triumph.


Reid, a
soft-spoken Mormon, received a score of 100 on Human Rights Campaign
scorecards for the 110th and 111th Congress. Reid, an early target of the Tea
Party, seemed to bounce back from the abyss, and his defeat would embolden
gay rights opponents and represent a significant symbolic loss for
Democrats.


A victory by Angle, who holds a four-point lead in a
new Rasmussen poll, would repudiate a recent spirit of progress in
Nevada, where last year state legislators overrode a veto by Gov.
Jim Gibbons and created same-sex domestic partnerships. A former state
assemblywoman, in the 1990s Angle was a member of the Independent American
Party, which placed a 16-page advertising insert in Nevada newspapers
calling for an amendment to the state constitution that would permit
discrimination against LGBT people. Angle supports a federal
constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality, and she has been
endorsed by Sarah Palin. 

Alaska U.S. Senate Race: Lisa Murkowski, Joe Miller, and Scott McAdams
It’s not every day that LGBT Americans can be reassured by the resurgent campaign of a Republican
write-in for Senate, but that just happens to be true with incumbent
senator Lisa Murkowski, who was defeated in the August GOP primary by
Sarah Palin’s Tea Party pick, Joe Miller. One of Miller’s chief advisers
is Terry Moffitt, who, according to Mother Jones magazine,
refers to himself as the “Christian Indiana Jones” and is chairman of
the Family Policy Network, which runs the website
www.hopeforhomosexuals.com. If you’re LGBT and looking for inspiration,
it’s not recommended reading — unless you enjoy being demonized and
denigrated. Here’s a taste: “While the homosexuals celebrate their
perversions, they are confronted with the truth that there is hope for
deliverance in Jesus Christ.”

So keep an eye on Murkowski, as she
has a better chance of edging out Miller than does Democratic nominee
Scott McAdams. No one has run a successful write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate
since Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in 1954, but the last thing the
nation needs is another Republican who’s in lockstep with the Palmetto State's present-day version of Thurmond, Sen. Jim DeMint.