Have Democrats Learned Anything?

Was Nevada Democrat Harry Reid truly a master of the Senate, or at least a game changer, as Jon Ralston’s new biography argues?

By Jon ChristensenJanuary 30, 2026

• Politics

• Biography & Autobiography

WHEN IT COMES to political biographies, I think I was spoiled by Master of the Senate, Robert Caro’s magisterial 2002 account of Lyndon Johnson’s tenure in the US Senate and his reign as Senate majority leader—just one of four books in Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982– ), with a fifth and final volume eagerly awaited by devotees like me. Caro’s biography is incredibly grand and compelling, with settings ranging from the Texas Hill Country to the US Capitol, and drama from small-town politics to World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam War. Master of the Senate is my favorite because, in my view, it most fully lives up to what Caro once said about his project. “I was never interested in writing biography just to show the life of a great man,” he remarked in an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. Instead, he wants “to use biography as a means of illuminating the times and the great forces that shape the times—particularly political power.”

Master of the Senate tells the story of LBJ at the peak of his power, and the dramatic turn he took from deploying that power to thwart civil rights to using it to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, setting the stage for the passage of the even more important and encompassing Civil Rights Act of 1964 once he had become president, which is covered in Caro’s fourth volume, The Passage of Power (2012). “History is a narrative. History is a story,” Caro told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “If you’re not telling a story, you’re not being faithful to history.”

It’s probably unfair to compare Jon Ralston’s new book The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight to Caro’s opus, or even to just one volume in the series. Plus, the late Harry Reid (1939–2021), who was most definitely a master of the Senate in his own way and served as majority leader as well, apparently hated being compared to LBJ.

Reid claimed—in interviews I conducted with him for a public television documentary about his monumental and surprising environmental achievements in Nevada—that he didn’t have any grand vision or plan. He just did what was in front of him, what needed to be done, and then he moved on. I’m still not sure I believe him—what must be done does depend on underlying principles—though there is pretty good evidence that this was how he worked. Each episode in his political career is, of course, its own story, but they make finding an overarching narrative arc a bit difficult.

Something Reid said in a 1982 speech to the state Democratic convention when he was first running for Congress could perhaps serve as the theme of his life: “Government is good. Government is necessary.” But Ralston’s portrait of a politician who had a “Machiavellian streak that might have made Machiavelli blush” makes one question the first part of Reid’s declaration—which he, by the way, apparently rarely, if ever, used again. Instead, throughout his career, Reid favored a wartime saying from Franklin Delano Roosevelt that was embroidered on a pillowcase in his childhood home: “We can. We will. We must.”

Ralston is the uncontested contemporary dean of Nevada journalism, having covered politics—and thus Harry Reid—for decades at the state’s major newspapers and on TV, before founding The Nevada Independent, the go-to online source for Nevada news these days. He is regularly called on to interpret the Silver State for national newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and online outlets. And his goal of writing the “definitive biography” of Harry Reid is unlikely to be challenged.

Ralston also has the bona fides to be an unbiased chronicler. He was once fired from a TV station at the behest of Reid, who didn’t like his critical commentaries. The Game Changer is no hagiography, despite its glowing title. Ralston is evenhanded in his assessment of his subject. He severely criticizes some of the ways that Reid threw his weight around, threatening companies that were doing things he didn’t like or engaging in what Ralston elsewhere calls “legalized bribery” (and others call “logrolling” or “horse-trading”) in Congress. As Ralston shows, the senator brought the copious “pork” back home to Nevada—even though Reid disliked the word “pork.”

Ralston does the required job of tracing Reid’s life, from his birth in the busted-down mining town of Searchlight to his death at home in Henderson at the age of 82, five years after suffering a devastating eye injury, leaving office, and then succumbing to a fatal bout of pancreatic cancer. A lot happened across those eight decades, to Harry Reid, his family, Nevada, the country, and the world. The Game Changer is brisk, covering the territory in under 400 pages. Compare that to the more than 3,000 pages so far in The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Caro has spent 50 years and counting on that series; Ralston began working on his biography when Reid was fatally ill and not long for this world.

Both Johnson and Reid left extensive archives. Reid’s consists of the usual memos, policy briefs, speeches, clippings, photographs, reports, and the like, but also something Johnson’s archive does not contain: millions of digital files, including internal office emails and meeting notes. Ralston has taken advantage of this wealth of material to craft something of an insider’s view of many of the key events in Reid’s career in Congress, including his work to protect the mining industry from reforms (a strategy that bedeviled many of his environmental supporters), his last-minute turn against appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the stimulus package he helped craft during the Great Recession, his shepherding of the Affordable Care Act through the chamber, and each and every campaign Reid ran.

A few members of “Team Reid,” the senator’s loyal staff, emerge as memorable minor characters, though most are just names and titles providing useful quotations. Mike O’Callaghan, Reid’s mentor from high school through his many years in politics, and his wife and high school sweetheart Landra come closest to resembling fully realized characters. Reid depended on both of them for counsel. But aside from Landra, we don’t get to see much of Reid’s personal life. The focus is on his work.

This is a “great man” story. It is not about “the times and the great forces that shape the times,” which is Caro’s guiding credo. We know that Reid changed his stance on many important issues relating to the environment, energy policy, gun control, abortion, gay rights, immigration, and the role of the filibuster, to name a few. But we don’t really see what forces shaped his evolution, aside from political expediency—or “flipping,” as Ralston calls it. At one point, Ralston writes about “how little self-reflection” Reid did throughout his career—which could make it hard to understand what shaped his thinking.

Now about that glowing title. What game did Reid change? Well, several actually, according to Ralston. First, he changed the Democratic political game. After nearly losing his 1996 campaign for reelection, Reid rebuilt the Nevada Democratic Party from the ground up. It became known as the “Reid Machine,” and it turned a mostly red state mostly blue. Second, he changed the presidential election game by maneuvering Nevada to become the third state to vote in the Democratic Party primaries, which served to make Las Vegas a national campaign stage. Third, he ended the filibuster for judicial nominees in order to push through President Barack Obama’s picks, which were being held up by Republicans. This move had even more important—unintended—game-changing ramifications when Senator Mitch McConnell used the same so-called “nuclear option” to get President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees through the Senate.

I would add that Reid changed the environmental game in Nevada. Reid was very proud of his work on bills relating to wilderness areas, national monuments, water settlements, and the transition to renewable energy. Ralston touches lightly on some of these accomplishments, but they remain a small part of his narrative.

And how did Reid show Democrats how to fight, as Ralston’s subtitle boasts? Well, he was a fighter, to be sure. Ralston provides plenty of stories to show that, from Reid’s days as a young boxer to his efforts to take on the mob in Las Vegas, from bullying companies to sometimes punching below the belt politically if he thought it was necessary. (For example, he spread the lie that Mitt Romney had not paid any taxes when he was running for president. His justification: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”) But if Reid showed Democrats how to fight, are there any examples of Democrats who learned from his example?

I put this question to Ralston in a recent Zoom chat convened by climate journalist Sammy Roth to discuss The Game Changer. Ralston said he thinks Harry Reid was “sui generis—I don’t think there’s anyone like him there now.” But he went on to mention “AOC”—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and also said, “Ro Khanna is kind of an interesting guy. He’s willing to say things that his colleagues get upset about but he thinks are the right things to say and do.” I might add Eric Swalwell, Gavin Newsom, and, in her own unique way, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez to this list of Democratic fighters. But that’s still a pretty short list. I’m not sure, given the angst among Democrats right now about how to fight back against a dominant Republican Party, not to mention the lack of effective party organizations in most states, whether the Democratic Party can be said to have learned a thing.

The Reid Machine itself is not what it used to be when Harry Reid was alive. As Ralston acerbically comments, “It is missing … something.” I suspect Reid might not have had a good answer as to what comes next and who is best suited to meet the challenges we face today. But I’m sure he would have made the best bets he could and fought hard to win. And that’s an example worth following.