Charles and David Koch have ramped up operations in Reid's backyard. | AP Photos The Kochs' plan to beat Reid

LAS VEGAS — Harry Reid’s reelection is more than two years off, but the Koch brothers’ political machine is already methodically laying the groundwork that will be used to try to take him out.

The efforts in recent months have been largely subterranean, but they are unmistakable. A handful of nonprofit groups in the vast political network helmed by allies of the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch have established or expanded permanent ground operations in Reid’s backyard. Focused on wooing key demographics like Latinos and veterans, they’ve also paid for ads assailing the Senate Democratic leader.


Reid, meanwhile, is ramping up his home-state political operation, quietly moving to undercut Koch-backed operations here, as well as working to neutralize potential GOP opponents.

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Intensifying and complicating the competition is that allies of Reid and the Koch are assiduously courting the wild-card donor who could dictate the terms of his race, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He is a friend and constituent of Reid’s, but sources say Koch operatives raised more than $20 million from him in 2012, and they’re working to secure additional funding.

The high-level jockeying on both sides is particularly striking given that there is so little top-tier political activity in Nevada this fall. Both camps insist they’re focused entirely on the policy repercussions of 2014 midterm elections across the country. But it’s hard not to detect an intensely personal tension underlying the Koch-Reid dynamic.

While there’s been some speculation that Reid might retire rather than run for reelection if Democrats lose control of the Senate this fall, the 74-year-old, in interviews with POLITICO, seemed almost giddy about the prospects of facing down the Kochs in 2016. So fixated is Reid that for a time this summer he kept on his desk in the Capitol a cartoon clipped from the pages of a July issue of the New Yorker magazine depicting a Scout leader reading from a book to his troop sitting around a campfire. “Run everybody, run for your life,” the leader says. “It’s them, it’s the Koch brothers.”

Reid has used the Senate floor as a forum for a months-long anti-Koch campaign, during which he’s called the brothers everything from “ un-American” to “ radical” and has worked to turn them into national poster children for a Republican Party that caters to the interests of the very richest while ignoring those of the middle class.

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The attacks have motivated the very rich conservatives who help fund the Koch political operation. At the brothers’ annual summer donor seminar in June, organizers erected a life-sized cardboard cutout of Reid, his arms spread and his mouth agape as if in midspeech. Emanating from it was a cartoon-like quote bubble with the word “Un-American.”

Cardboard Harry was the object of derision, said attendees. “These donors are competitive, and competitive people like to see the competition,” said one. “They get fired up by competition.”

While Reid’s attacks don’t seem to be resonating deeply with the American public as a whole, they may help whip up Democratic donors and activists this fall. And, while Reid can be coy on the subject, he appears intent on using the tactic on his own base headed into 2016.

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As Reid last week ambled from an SUV to a side entrance of an MGM Grand here for a speech to the supportive United Steelworkers International Convention, he told POLITICO he wasn’t worried about the Koch forces’ buildup in his backyard. “I’ve always been targeted. … That’s not news,” he said, playfully dismissing a question about whether there was a personal element to the Koch effort. “I don’t see that they have any reason to come after me. Why would they?”

But a few minutes later, after taking the stage to Bob Marley’s “ Get Up, Stand Up,” Reid confided to 2,500 cheering union members that, in fact, he is trying to personally antagonize the Kochs.

“Ladies and gentlemen, when I was walking in here today, somebody grabbed me from one of the Washington publications and said ‘the Koch brothers say they’re here organizing in Nevada,’” Reid regaled the crowd. “I said ‘why would they be worried about me? What have I done to bother them?’”

After allowing a brief, dramatic pause, he answered his own question boastfully: “Only everything I can, right?”

The line sparked some of the lustier applause of a 20-minute speech that went on to include several swipes at the Kochs. They “have a fundamental belief that our government should have one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s to help the Kochs get richer. They don’t care about the middle class,” Reid charged.

Reid would be well-served to take seriously the prospect of a major Koch-funded challenge, asserted John Gopsill, a local Nevada leader in the steelworkers union, after Reid addressed the convention. “I don’t think he can raise the kind of money the Koch brothers can bring to this state, and, unfortunately, money talks,” Gopsill said. “That’s why we have to get out on the ground and knock on doors and make phone calls. I really and truly believe that’s how we’ll win it for him.”

KOCH-FRIENDLY TURF

The race for Reid’s seat is expected to be among the top 2016 priorities for Republicans, who are likely to be playing defense in most Senate races. Nevada could be a rare exception, owing partly to Reid’s less-than-stellar approval ratings, and it’s also primed to be a top swing state in the presidential campaign.

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Even before Reid picked his fight with the Kochs, their operation had been investing heavily in Nevada, which has a libertarian streak that comports well with the small-government, free-enterprise sensibility shared by most of the Koch-backed groups.

The most muscular of the groups, Americans for Prosperity, first established a presence here in 2009. It’s continually expanded since, opening a new office in April on the western edge of Vegas, out of which four full-time employees work. There’s also a full-time field director in Northern Nevada, and AFP is looking to hire two more executives in the state, where it has roughly 50,000 registered activists statewide.

The Koch-backed veterans outreach group Concerned Veterans for America has four employees in Nevada. While only one is full-time, it’s looking to hire a full-time local director “to oversee and execute the organization’s grass-roots efforts in Nevada.” CVA has more than 800 active volunteers, a handful of whom paid a visit to Reid’s Nevada office in May to pressure him to support reforms to the Department of Veterans Affairs. It followed up by spending $50,000 on a June digital campaign accusing Reid of “putting his loyalty to his party and the president ahead of America’s veterans.”

And the LIBRE Initiative, which seeks to spread fiscal conservatism among Hispanics, has also committed significant resources to Nevada since first setting up shop here in 2012. Back then, it shared space in AFP’s Vegas office, but this year it moved into a new office of its own across the street from a wedding venue called the “ Elvis Chapel.” An April ribbon-cutting was attended by at least one GOP congressional candidate, and the group now has two full-time staffers and a growing volunteer base in the state.

In addition to creating good will in the community by providing social services such as Spanish-language training for the state’s drivers exam, LIBRE has gotten some traction in Nevada’s Spanish-language media, where the group’s executive director, Daniel Garza, a former Bush administration official, and Southwest region press secretary Ronald Najarro, have appeared often promoting the group’s services or as conservative foils to liberals, including juxtaposed against Reid and his allies.

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A FIGHT FOR LATINO LOYALTY

While it appears to lack the budget of AFP, which plans to spend more than $125 million this year, LIBRE is the Koch-backed group that has attracted the most interest from Reid and his allies.

In a pair of meetings with Hispanic leaders in his Las Vegas office in May — one with liberal activists and faith leaders and the other with Democratic state lawmakers — Reid made the case that the Kochs’ political operation is working against the interests of the community. He singled out LIBRE, urging attendees to go back to their communities “to spread the word about the real identity of LIBRE,” according to an attendee, who said Reid highlighted the Koch network’s funding of the group.

Reid accused the Koch groups of making a misleading play for Latino voters’ affection, asserting LIBRE opposed President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order allowing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country without threat of deportation, and pointing out that AFP in 2010 gave its “ Legislator of the Year” award to Russell Pearce, who sponsored Arizona immigration restriction law SB 1070, which the U.S. Supreme Court later substantially upheld.

LIBRE, which is generally supportive of comprehensive immigration reform, has sought to distance itself from AFP and Pearce. It objected to the characterization that it opposed the deportation executive order, which was popular in the Hispanic community, though it did issue a statement criticizing Obama for signing the order, which it predicted would result in “ unintended consequences,” while Garza also called it “ not helpful” in an appearance on Fox News.

Still, Astrid Silva, a prominent liberal Hispanic immigration reform activist and close Reid ally who attended one of the Las Vegas meetings at which Reid singled out LIBRE, said it has led to widespread skepticism of the group in the Latino community.

“A lot of us were already asking questions, because we’re all out there in the community, and when a new group shows up and has a lot of money and passes out triple-color T-shirts and throws a grand opening, people start questioning where that money came from,” she said. “And Sen. Reid connected the dots. His comments drove it home for a lot of the people there.”

Jose Dante Parra, Reid’s former adviser for Hispanic media, said LIBRE’s messaging rings hollow in Latino communities that Reid has courted for years. But Parra, who now runs a PR firm that specializes in Latino media, said despite the prevalence and influence of left-leaning Hispanic groups, national Democrats risk being caught “flat-footed” by the rapid investments being made in LIBRE’s infrastructure and staffing.

“It’s unprecedented,” he said. “There isn’t an initiative that mirrors the LIBRE Initiative on the Democratic side.”

‘WE DON’T DIAL 911’

Nevada’s AFP chapter is encouraging activists to attend the group’s national organizing summit later this month in Dallas, boasting it’s “the last thing Sen. Reid wants you to do,” while predicting the skills volunteers will learn will allow them to more “ effectively anger” Reid.

But there was little sign of Reid-targeting on a recent Monday at the months-old offices of Americans for Prosperity in a low-slung building on the sparse western edge of town. A half-dozen young staffers and volunteers wearing sleek technical golf shirts and vintage-looking v-neck tees emblazoned with AFP’s stylized torch logo were lugging coolers out to their cars for an afternoon of door-knocking in the 100-degree heat. Each was equipped with an iPad featuring an app called “i360 Walk” that created efficient walk routes between households deemed to have persuadable voters and provided an interactive script asking questions about Obamacare, taxation, spending and partisan affiliation.

While there were no scripted questions about Reid, the answers would be fed back into a master national database maintained by the Koch operation and used by its groups for political organizing in the midterms, during which the Koch network aims to spend $290 million, and 2016, when that figure is expected to be even larger.

The libertarian sensibility of AFP is evident in the door hangers stacked in its Vegas office, as well as on the wooden plaque reading “ We Don’t Dial 911” and featuring a cutout of a handgun. But, like all groups in the Koch network, it also shows signs of rigorous analytical assessment, where every call from a high-tech phone-banking operation set up in a converted garage and every door knock is tracked for effectiveness.

Nevada performs well in those metrics, AFP’s chief technology officer Adam Stryker said after the canvassers hit the road. A dapper 34-year old Nevada resident — and former Adelson employee — who ran AFP’s operations in the state during Reid’s last reelection race, Stryker said the senator has let down his constituents. “Look at everything he promised in 2010. He said we’re going to fix housing and unemployment and health care, and yet here we are, ranked in the top 10 in foreclosures and unemployment, and the drastic effects of the health care law are just starting to be felt here.”

Stryker stressed that the build-out has little to do with Reid or any other specific politician. “Nevada has always been a long-term commitment for us. Our message of economic freedom resonates here better than maybe anywhere in the country.”

The growing Koch presence in Nevada is all the more notable because the state Republican Party has fallen on hard times, which has led some of the state’s most active volunteers and biggest donors to turn to AFP.

“Americans for Prosperity’s Nevada chapter has really been filling a void in terms of conservative grass-roots activism in Nevada,” said Grant Hewitt, a Nevada GOP consultant. Hewitt in 2010 ran the campaign of Rep. Joe Heck (R-Nev.), who has benefited from AFP ads this year and is considered among the Koch favorites to challenge Reid in 2016. AFP, according to Hewitt, has “made an incredible effort at volunteer recruitment and voter contact. … it sure looks like they’re building for something bigger, and you have to figure Reid is high on their list.”

‘THEY’RE VERY BUSINESSLIKE’

Nevada’s junior senator, Dean Heller, one of the few Senate Republicans who has a close relationship with Reid, said “I don’t think it’s any secret” that the Kochs are going to come after Reid in two years. “They see him as vulnerable,” said Heller, though he added a note of caution: “If we nominate a weak candidate, he’s going to get reelected.”

An automated poll released last month showed Reid trailing by double digits in a hypothetical matchup against the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Sandoval. While he’s widely regarded as the strongest possible 2016 Senate candidate in Nevada for the GOP, Sandoval is no darling of Koch World, in part because he supported a Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

Reid and his allies, who helped save him in 2010 by helping set a matchup with tea party-backed Sharron Angle, are working overtime to elect Democrat Lucy Flores as the state’s lieutenant governor. If she wins, the thinking goes, Sandoval would be less likely to challenge Reid in 2016, because if he won, it would mean that Flores would become governor.

Billionaire Minnesota media mogul Stan Hubbard, a top donor to the Koch political operation, said the brothers and their operatives won’t invest heavily against Reid unless they have good odds. “They’re very businesslike. They’re not going to waste money because they’re ticked off at some guy like Harry Reid.”

Hubbard said he recently penned a note advising Charles Koch to shrug off Reid’s attacks. “This should be a badge of honor that he’s going after you. It means you must be doing the right thing,” Hubbard said he wrote.

Yet, it’s not hard to detect within the Koch operation some personal animus towards Reid, and even hints of the themes of a potential campaign against him.

AFP President Tim Phillips, in an appearance this month on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program, called Reid’s attacks on his group and the Koch brothers “disappointing,” but then he added a personal jab of his own. “It’s also ironic to see him go on the floor and decry the 1 percent, and to do that, he actually comes down from the penthouse of the Ritz Carlton here in D.C.,” Phillips said, referencing Reid’s one-bedroom condo on the second floor of the hotel’s residences. He and his wife bought the unit for $750,000 in 2001, and his opponents have periodically cited it and his other finances to allege he’s lost touch with his roots in the hardscrabble mining town of Searchlight, Nevada. Reid recently sold his house and property in Searchlight to a mining company for $1.7 million and decamped to the Las Vegas area.

“And by the way,” Phillips continued on C-SPAN, “we’re for penthouses and for folks getting in them, although interesting how he pays for it on a government salary, but that’s a different story — we won’t go into that.”

THE ADELSON CONNECTION

While Reid is focusing on the Kochs, it’s another billionaire — Adelson — whose financial loyalties in a Reid reelection are more difficult to decipher, but potentially just as significant.

In GOP finance circles, some wonder if Adelson, who spent as much as $150 million trying to elect Republicans in 2012, will support a challenge to Reid, either through the Koch network or otherwise. Adelson attended his first Koch donor seminar in 2012. And in March, Phillips made his first foray to an annual Republican Jewish Coalition conference at Adelson’s Venetian Resort Hotel Casino on the Vegas Strip, where all manner of leading GOP operatives and politicians clamored to butter up Adelson.

Neither AFP nor Adelson’s political shop would discuss whether Adelson has given to AFP in 2014 or was predisposed to funding a 2016 challenge to Reid.

Adelson political lieutenant Andy Abboud did say that his boss “has become friends with Harry Reid, and they have a close working relationship. But it’s based on two things — the importance of the industry to Nevada and the importance of defending Israel.”

The political world took notice this spring when Reid declined to lump Adelson in with the Kochs, casting the casino mogul’s political giving as more idealistic in an interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC. “So, Sheldon Adelson, don’t pick on him,” Reid said. “He’s not in it to make money.”