One evening in Las Vegas, I dropped in on a bimonthly meeting of the Clark County Republican Party at which Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for the United States Senate, was scheduled as the last speaker on a long program. The meeting was in a function room somewhere within the vastness of the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a coach-class establishment a couple of miles from the Strip. Several of the folding tables set up around the perimeter of the room had a martial air; at one, the Republican nominee for Congress in Nevada’s First District, Kenneth Wegner, a retired career Army man who looks like central casting’s idea of a nineteen-fifties F.B.I. agent, had an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle on display.

Reid “is truly hard as a diamond, and tough,” an associate says. “Nobody pushes him around.” Photograph by Jeff Riedel / Contour by Getty Images

Three groups were given time at the podium. Gun Owners of America broke off from the National Rifle Association in the nineteen-seventies; many of its members considered the N.R.A. too soft in its defense of the Second Amendment. Among its causes is making sure that military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder are not denied access to guns. Oath Keepers is a new organization, chartered in Las Vegas, made up of current and former police, military, and firefighters who have promised not to carry out orders that violate the U.S. Constitution, if such orders are given (from the organization’s declaration: “We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps”). The third group was the American Family Business Institute, which is dedicated to abolishing the inheritance tax.

Dick Patten, the head of the American Family Business Institute, spoke first. Like many of the people in the room, he trafficked in an amiably expressed hatred of Harry Reid, Nevada’s senior senator, the Senate Majority Leader, and Sharron Angle’s opponent. (“DUMP REID” T-shirts were the unifying fashion motif of the audience.) Patten described a day during the George W. Bush Administration when he was sitting in the Senate visitors’ gallery thinking he would finally witness the permanent abolition of the inheritance tax. He had met with several wavering Democratic senators, and he was confident they’d be with him.

Then he watched Harry Reid buttonhole the waverers on the floor: Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana; Maria Cantwell, of Washington; and Mark Pryor, of Arkansas. Reid, a slight, bland-looking man, the furthest thing from one’s picture of Lyndon Johnson enacting the same scene, approached the Senators, one after the other, leaned in close, and began arguing. As Patten perceived the scene (the Senators themselves perceived it differently), each of the three recoiled slightly, and then, as Reid spoke on and on, yielded with a visible sag. The Senate allowed only a temporary cessation of the tax, and Patten vowed to work hard to help get rid of Harry Reid and everything he represented: insiderism, vote trading, big government.

Someone got up and announced that Sharron Angle would speak next, because she had a plane to catch. Angle is a small woman, a sixty-one-year-old grandmother with a broad, open face, a toothy smile, and red hair worn in a pageboy. She has a friendly manner and a firm handshake, along with a set of basic political skills that Harry Reid lacks. These include the ability to chat pleasantly for a minute or two and then tactfully extract herself, and to say what she stands for quickly, with real passion but usually without seeming odd or threatening.

Since June, when she won the Republican nomination, Angle has spent much of her time raising money from national conservative organizations and trying to present herself as a reasonable member of the Party. This entails, among other things, avoiding the press. A famous YouTube video shows her running across a parking lot, pursued by a television crew. You can’t blame her. Back in the summer, a reporter from Talking Points Memo called her at home and succeeded in getting her husband, Ted, who once worked for the federal Bureau of Land Management, to indicate that the couple supports the Oath Keepers. There are no longer any such encounters.

That evening at the Orleans Hotel, she offered the expected set of scripted lines, but she made them sound genuine: “Our Contract with America is the Constitution”; “I want Harry Reid to stop doing more for Nevada—we can’t afford it!” She went on to offer a number of policy positions: repeal the health-care-reform bill; liquidate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal home-mortgage agencies; oppose the Administration’s lawsuit aimed at overturning Arizona’s immigration law. And then she bustled out, spared by the change in her schedule from having to share the podium with the evening’s more controversial speakers.

Nevada in 2010 is a kind of pilgrims’ shrine for people who don’t like the direction the American government has taken since 2008, when Democrats had control of both houses of Congress and won the White House. Harry Reid is the highest-ranking member of Congress whose seat is vulnerable, and Sharron Angle has been able to draw support both from small donors and from national organizations like the anti-tax Club for Growth, the Tea Party Express, and American Crossroads, the new conservative organization co-founded by Karl Rove. Her fund-raising trips have borne fruit. During July, August, and September, she raised fourteen million dollars.

One of the political pilgrims is Eric Odom, a thirty-one-year-old career conservative in a baseball cap, a soul patch, and beach sandals, who works as an online organizer and claims to have started the very first Tea Party group, just days after Rick Santelli’s famous rant in February of 2009 on CNBC from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. I met Odom one day in Las Vegas, not long after he had moved back from Chicago just to help take down Reid. He and a few other young men rented a modest suite in an office park and prepared for months of Internet fund-raising, video production, and takeout pizza. As their Web site puts it, “We are dedicated to doing our part to help by letting every single Nevadan know what damage Harry has done to our State and our Country.”

“Sharron Angle (center), at a Tea Party rally. She is in a dead heat with Senator Reid in Nevada.” Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux

This jaunty hyper-confidence is the essence of the conservative mood right now—a sense that the tide is antigovernment, and sweeping everything along with it. Nevada is in such bad shape that comparisons to the Great Depression are justified. It has the highest foreclosure rate, the highest bankruptcy rate, proportionally the highest state budget deficit, and the highest state unemployment rate in the country. In Las Vegas, everywhere you look are empty buildings, abandoned construction sites, unkempt houses with for-sale signs in their yards, and apartment complexes offering spectacular deals.

When Barack Obama came into office, the country seemed to be adhering to a familiar script: economic catastrophe followed by a turn toward liberalism. Congress passed more major pieces of progressive legislation in one session than it has in decades. Now Nevada, which in 2008 voted Democrats into office at all levels, may be about to toss out the most nationally powerful politician in its history. And Republicans are making a new argument. They are saying that the country needs to reduce radically the activities of the government, just when you’d expect people to be looking to the government for help.

In Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Address, in 1981, he memorably declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” But for three decades most people in Washington have taken that as an inspired piece of rhetoric, not as a serious policy. None of the three Republican Presidents during that time—Reagan and the two Bushes—actually reduced the size or the scope of the federal government. George W. Bush started the most expensive new social program in years—the prescription-drug benefit for senior citizens—and enormously increased the government’s power over local schools through the No Child Left Behind law.

Meanwhile, Democratic Presidents have cautiously chipped away at Reagan’s slogan. Bill Clinton, in his second Inaugural Address, knowing he’d never run for office again, dared to go only this far: “Government is not the problem, and government is not the solution.” Barack Obama offered a stronger defense of government, earlier in his Presidency. In a commencement address at the University of Michigan, in May, he said, “When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.” And, “The ability for us to adapt our government to the needs of the age has helped make our democracy work since its inception.”

Sharron Angle, more than most other Republicans, has been willing to oppose government not just in general but in particular. Over the years, she has called for abolishing the Departments of Energy and Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and for privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration. In her one debate with Reid, last week, Angle displayed again her uncanny ability to come across as a plainspoken, unpolished political amateur who believes that American politics is run by terribly misguided people. She said that she would have voted against the confirmation of Obama’s two appointees to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, because “neither one of them understand the Constitution.” (Angle talks about the Constitution constantly.) What can she mean by that? Or by “Man up, Harry Reid!” But nobody seemed to care—not even her opponent. Reid kept saying that government should provide something that he knows is popular (like mandated insurance coverage of mammograms), and Angle kept saying that it shouldn’t. Reid plainly had gone into the debate with the idea that he could demonstrate that Angle is “extreme,” but nothing seemed to stick.