Desert Firestorm: The Nevada Senate Race Heats Up

MINDEN, Nev., Sept. 7, 2010 -- After a disastrous start as the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada, Sharron Angle has begun to turn her campaign around and is once again raising Republican hopes of defeating the Senate's most powerful Democrat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

It's a dramatic change. For more than two months, Angle was pummeled by Reid and his allies without offering much of a response to his attacks. The most memorable images from the first weeks of the general election campaign were video clips of Angle running away from reporters trying to ask her questions while Reid relentlessly hammered her in television ads as a dangerous extremist.

Angle is still taking a pummeling from Reid, but she is finally responding. Last week, she put out her first television commercial answering Reid's attacks, and she no longer seems to shy away from answering questions -- either from voters in public forums or from reporters. Angle has become more accessible to Nevada voters and answers more questions than Reid, who does most of his campaign work through television commercials that attack Angle.

But even as she retools her campaign, Angle has not backed down from some her most controversial comments, as when she agreed with conservative talk show host Bill Manders that there are "homegrown enemies" within "the walls of the Senate and the Congress." In an interview conducted after a campaign event in Minden, Nev., ABC News asked Angle about that:

ABC News: Do we have enemies of the country inside the walls of Congress?ANGLE: Certainly people who pass these kinds of policies -- Obamacare, cap and trade, stimulus, bailout -- they're certainly not friends to the free market system.ABC News: So, what are they?ANGLE: They're not friends.

Angle also spent about an hour taking town-hall style questions from voters outside the 88 Cups Coffee Shop in Minden. Several of the voters wanted Angle to respond to what they've heard about her in Reid's campaign ads, including a recent commercial that accuses Angle of wanting to "wipe out Social Security." Like almost all of Reid's ads, it includes Angle's own words, in this case a video clip of her saying, "We need to phase Medicare and Social Security out."