Dilly, dilly.
Via Fox News:
Harry Reid, the longtime Democrat who represented Nevada in the Senate for three decades and served as the Senate majority leader for eight years, on Sunday declined to endorse Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s nascent presidential run.
Although he called the 69-year-old Warren a “good person” in an interview with the Boston Globe, Reid, 79, asserted that “my Nevada politics keep me from publicly endorsing her.”
He added that “anything I can do to help Elizabeth Warren short of the endorsement, I will do.”
Reid, who said he “didn’t discourage” Warren from seeking the White House, helped catapult Warren into the national spotlight by appointing her in November 2008 to the Congressional Oversight Panel, a five-member committee responsible for overseeing the federal bailout provided by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.
Nevada, which Hillary Clinton narrowly won in the 2016 presidential race, will assume an unprecedented level of importance in the upcoming 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, because a change in the primary calendar will put Nevada’s primaries just prior to the key primaries in California.
Prospective Democratic presidential hopefuls seeking to secure the momentum heading into the California races have flocked to Nevada in recent months. Additonally, Nevada is seen as a potential 2020 battleground state in the general election, and Reid’s endorsement carries significant sway among residents.
“With California coming on early, I think the West is more important than ever,” Reid told the Globe.
Warren’s candidacy has had a rocky start in the days and weeks since she announced that she had formed an exploratory committee for a White House bid on Dec. 31. That evening, Warren was widely mocked for appearing in an Instagram live feed and awkwardly telling the audience, “Hold on a second — I’m gonna get me a beer.”