Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Shelley Berkley Loses Narrowly in Nevada

Nevada Republican Dean Heller narrowly held on to his U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday in a closely watched race against Democratic Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, who became the target of a U.S. House of Representatives ethics probe earlier this year.

Heller, 52, himself a former House member, was appointed last April by Nevada’s governor to fill out the nearly two years then remaining in the Senate term of fellow Republican John Ensign, who resigned following a sex scandal.

A Carson City native, Heller is both well-known and well-liked in northern Nevada and among Tea Party activists across the state. Final returns showed him fending off Berkley’s challenge by a thin 1 percent margin, or 12,100 votes.

In a statement, Heller thanked his supporters and said he looked forward to returning to the nation’s capital.

“We need to put a stop to out-of-control spending in Washington,” he said. “Washington must stop rewarding bad decisions with bailouts, and we must pass policies that encourage entrepreneurship and allow the middle class to thrive.”

In a concession statement, Berkley wished Heller well, adding, “He’s got an enormous task ahead of him.”

Berkley, 61, a seven-term congresswoman from Las Vegas, had been expected to easily carry the downstate vote, but struggled in northern Nevada where she is less well-known. She managed to carry only southern Nevada’s Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

Polling data since early September had consistently shown Berkley trailing Heller, a former three-term congressman. She failed to catch up to her opponent, despite help from a powerful Democratic ground network built by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and enhanced by President Barack Obama’s campaign infrastructure.

Berkley’s campaign was likely hampered by a House Ethics Committee investigation over efforts to preserve Medicare payments for a Las Vegas kidney transplant center that benefited her husband, a physician who owns a string of dialysis facilities. She has denied any wrongdoing.

Democrats hold a 90,000 registered-voter lead over Republicans in Nevada statewide. But Nevada also has more than 100,000 registered independents, according to University of Nevada Las Vegas political science professor David Damore.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.